Tooloom picnic area

The rainforests of Tooloom Scrub are part of Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area, which used to be known as Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves. Tooloom is one of the few areas on Earth in which plants and animals have remained relatively unchanged from their ancestors.

Feast your eyes on Tooloom’s magnificent forest communities. Subtropical rainforest, with vines stretching from the soft forest floor to the towering green canopy, are dominated by black booyong. Bird’s nest and staghorn ferns decorate broad trunks, live and dead. Hoop pines break through the canopy of dry rainforest on the upper western slopes. In the wet sclerophyll forests old tallowwood and Sydney blue gums grow. Other forest types include forest red gum, New England blackbutt, grey gum and grey iron bark.

Although there are as many as 13 species of snake, 10 species of macropod (things that hop) and three other species of mammals in Tooloom, they’ve got nothing on the birds. So far, 214 species of bird have been recorded, including paradise riflebirds, wompoo fuit-doves, regent bowerbirds, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, scarlet honeyeaters, endangered black-breasted button quail, and Coxen’s fig-parrot. Endangered animals inhabiting Tooloom are Fleay’s barred frog, and black-striped wallaby.

Tooloom National Park is an Aboriginal place and the traditional land of the Githabul people. For thousands of years, these forests provided shelter, food, medicine and tools. Certain features in and around Tooloom remain deeply significant, such as Bandahngan Aboriginal Area (Tooloom Falls), which is 13km east of the park. The Aboriginal word for ‘Tooloom’ is ‘Dooloomi’, which means ‘head lice’ and relates to the story of these falls.