Torndirrup National Park

Torndirrup National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Torndirrup is a park of granite sea cliffs, wind-swept heath and white beaches on the peninsula that shelters the harbour of Albany, the oldest town in Western Australia, on the state's south coast, about four hundred kilometres, four and a half hours by road, south-east of Perth, or an hour by air. It begins only ten kilometres, a quarter of an hour's drive, from the centre of the town, along Frenchman Bay Road, and it is the most visited national park in the south of the state, since its chief sights can be seen in an hour or two with almost no walking. There is no public transport, and a day entry fee per vehicle is paid at a machine in the main car park. The essential stop is the Gap and the Natural Bridge, which share a car park at the end of a short side road. At the Gap, a rectangular chasm in the cliffs into which the Southern Ocean surges, a steel viewing platform, opened in 2016, reaches out ten metres beyond the cliff edge, nearly forty metres above the water, with a mesh floor through which one looks straight down into the boiling sea;

a level, surfaced path suitable for wheelchairs leads to it, and on to a lookout over the Natural Bridge, a massive span of granite under which the waves break. A few minutes' drive further on, a path of about eight hundred metres each way leads down to the Blowholes, cracks in the rock through which, in a heavy swell, air and spray are forced with a roar. Other side roads lead to Stony Hill, the highest point, with a short circuit walk and a view over the whole coast and the harbour, to the sheltered swimming beaches of Misery Beach and Frenchman Bay, to Salmon Holes, a beach popular with fishermen, and to Jimmy Newells harbour. For walkers, the Bald Head trail, twelve and a half kilometres return along the narrow spine of the Flinders peninsula, takes six to seven hours.

Visiting Torndirrup National Park: what you will see

The national park was set aside in 1918, among the first in Western Australia, and covers about 39 square kilometres, the date of 1991 found in some lists being a later gazettal; it takes its name from the Aboriginal clan of the Minang Noongar people who lived on the peninsula. Its cliffs tell the story of the break-up of a continent. The pale gneisses and granites of which they are made were formed some twelve to thirteen hundred million years ago, when the land mass that became Australia collided with the one that became Antarctica, and the two remained joined until about forty-five million years ago, when the last link between them, here, parted, and Antarctica drifted south; rocks of exactly the same age and kind are found today on the coast of Wilkes Land, directly opposite, across three thousand kilometres of ocean. At the Gap and the Natural Bridge the sea has worked along the natural joints of the granite, plucking out the great rectangular blocks, to leave a sheer-sided slot twenty-four metres deep and a bridge whose roof will one day fall. The Southern Ocean arrives here with nothing to break its force since South America, and the swells, which are biggest in winter, send spray over the cliff tops.

This is the reason for the warnings posted everywhere in the park: waves much larger than those preceding them, called king waves, sweep without notice across rock platforms that look safe and dry, and more than a dozen people, most of them anglers fishing from the rocks at Salmon Holes and elsewhere, have been washed off and drowned, so that the authorities have bolted anchor points into the rock to which fishermen are urged to tie themselves. The vegetation is low coastal heath, shaped by salt wind and poor soil, which belongs to the floristic province of south-western Australia and is extremely rich, with banksias, among them a species found only round Albany, hakeas, dryandras, peppermint trees in the sheltered hollows, and in spring a great show of wild flowers and orchids; it shelters the honey possum, the quenda, the western ringtail possum, the bush rat, the carpet python and the dugite, a venomous snake, and New Holland honeyeaters, white-bellied sea eagles, ospreys and rock parrots. Below the cliffs, humpback and southern right whales pass from June to October, the right whales coming into King George Sound to calve, and it was whales that made Albany: the last shore whaling station in Australia, at Cheynes Beach on the far side of the peninsula, just outside the park, which hunted sperm whales with aircraft and steam chasers, closed only in November 1978, and is now an excellent museum, with a whale chaser on the slip. From the waters below Stony Hill, on 1 November 1914, the first convoy of Australian and New Zealand troops sailed for the First World War, for many of them the last sight of their country.

Torndirrup National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year. Summer, from December to March, is mild by Australian standards, 22 to 26 degrees, often breezy, and the season for the beaches; spring, from September to November, is the time of the wild flowers and of the whales, with changeable weather; winter, from June to August, is cool, 10 to 16 degrees, wet and windy, and it is then, in a big swell, that the Gap and the Blowholes are at their most tremendous, though the blowholes do nothing at all in a calm sea.

The platform at the Gap is busiest in the middle of the day and quietest early and late, and is best in the morning light. Keep to the paths and behind the barriers, keep well back from the water on any rock platform, and watch children closely. The Bald Head walk is exposed, without water or shade, and should not be attempted in strong wind or heat. Allow half a day. The historic whaling station is five minutes from the park, the national Anzac centre in Albany fifteen, and the Porongurup and Stirling ranges forty minutes and an hour inland.