Gold Coast B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record · Gold Coast · QLD

Rankins Falls

Track to the waterfall a published way, with steps to follow

Gazetted name A Difficulty: 4 of 5 -28.18750, 153.26694 Springbrook National Park · National Park waterfall

A Gazetted / register — The fact is itself a statutory record.
B Official spatial record — Read from a maintained government layer.
C Statutory inference — Law applied to B-grade records; not ground-truthed.
D Community record — Community sources; labelled, never blended into A–C.

Access verdict · tier 1 of 4 · confidence B (official spatial record, the weakest grade in the chain)

Public land — inside Springbrook National Park. A published track reaches it.

Being at this point is lawful on the records below. Getting there is a separate question, answered route by route — and each route carries its own tier and its own caveats.

1 · Lawful, nothing to flag Every leg is ground the public may cross, and nothing about the chain needs a warning. Whether a built track runs along it is said separately. This page is here.
2 · Lawful, with caveats A lawful chain with at least one thing about it that has to be said first.
3 · Unconfirmed No lawful chain could be established from the public record. No route published.
4 · No lawful route Enclosed by land the public has no right to cross. No route published.

On-ground signage and temporary closures override this page. Always.

What this place is A definition, then the record

A waterfall — a step in a watercourse steep enough that the water falls clear of the bed rather than running down it. The step is usually a band of harder rock the creek has been unable to cut through as fast as the softer rock below, so the drop moves slowly upstream over time and leaves a gorge behind it.

Rankins Falls sits on Kuralboo Creek. The surveyed centreline of that watercourse runs 5.1 m from the recorded point, which is the whole evidence for saying it is this one. B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record

The point falls inside Springbrook National Park, designated National Park. B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record

No register records how far the water falls. What the contours record is this: the terrain rule fired here because the bed loses 15.0 m within 7.7 m along the watercourse — the test the rule applies, not the height of the fall. Its steepest single stretch drops 5.0 m over 1.8 m of ground — 2.7 m down for every metre along the bed. That is a floor and not a total: the contour interval is the smallest drop this layer can show, so the face is at least this steep and may be far more. C — provenance grade C: Statutory inference

On the record — what the registers actually say Dataset versions in the footer

What each register holds about this place
Claim	What the record says	Evidence
Name	"Rankins Falls" is a gazetted register entry.	A — provenance grade A: Gazetted / register
Tenure	Resolved to Protected estate, recorded as "National Park".	B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
Parcel	5AP19371	B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
Council area	This place sits inside Gold Coast, tested against the boundary that council area publishes.	B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
Estate	Springbrook National Park , designated National Park. Declared under the Nature Conservation Act 1992; IUCN category II; 6,554 ha as gazetted; current gazettal 26 Mar 2020; first gazetted 3 Nov 1960; no encumbrance recorded.	B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
Watercourse	Kuralboo Creek, whose surveyed centreline runs 5.1 m away.	B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record
Feature	Found by the terrain rule falls-rule/1, which fired because the bed loses 15.0 m within 7.7 m — the threshold it tests, not the height of the fall. Steepest stretch measured: 5.0 m over 1.8 m. A rule fired — nobody surveyed it.	C — provenance grade C: Statutory inference

Where it is

Map

Context map for Rankins Falls: parcels, corridors, estate and tracks around the point.

Every figure the map would draw — parcel references, distances, bearings and the crossing gap — is written out in full on this page, so nothing is only visible on the map. If the map does not load, nothing has been lost.

Is there a track to it Measured in plan and in section

The way reaches this place B — provenance grade B: Official spatial record

Purling Brook Falls Circuit (Great Walk) passes 3 m from the recorded point. The gap crosses no contour, which is as level as this layer can evidence — not a survey saying the ground is flat.

Both gaps are small enough that the way is a way to this place, not merely one near it.

Approaches — one page each 8 published of 51 computed

51 ways in were computed and 8 are published here. The rest either reach the same ground from a few hundred metres away — the same drive and the same walk — or reach no lawful chain at all, which is only worth saying when nothing else does.