The ten km gravel track into the campground is quite good, mostly hard bush gravel, and only lightly corrugated on corners. Smooth journey in with some narrow sections.

Big camping sites equiped with a fire place, table and non potable water on tap. The campground is a short distance uphill from Little Dandahra Creek, populated by platypus. They are very shy creatures and we didn’t see any on a late afternoon stroll.

Allthego headed off on the 6 km return walk to the Needles, these are a peculiar rock formation on the cliff edge overlooking a valley in the NP. Homealone remained in camp to catch up on some craft, keep track of the time and send out a search party if needed.

The walk is fairly gentle, mostly an uphill stroll on a wide path with a couple of dips along the way before rising again.

The vegetation varies along the way from open woodlands to some rainforest areas in the gullies. Plenty of wildflowers were out, particularly wattles.

The track narrows about two thirds of the way along and there is a short rocky decent before reaching the viewing platform.

It is a great view out over the landscape with the granite spires in the foreground. Our indigenous people believe them to be the six metamorphosed wives of the warrior Balugan. Here is the story:

Getting back to camp was a little quicker as it was basically a gentle downhill walk to Little Dandahra Creek. Beside the creek is the restored Mulligans Hut .

This was where an engineer lived in the 1920s while working on a scheme to dam the creek as part of a hydro electricity scheme. It never materialised.

However, there remains in the creek a small concrete weir he built to measure water flows. The water endlessly bubbles over the lip and runs down into a large pond.

I will finish now with something I have learnt today (re learnt) about the use of apostrophes. It explains why Mulligans campground doesn’t have an apostrophe. Apparently, geographical place names don’t use them because they connate ‘possession’ by someone and that is just a no no for place names. So there, maybe you knew that. I should have but had forgotten it, getting old!