Long before any map named this place, the Aboriginal peoples of the region understood the gorge as something made, not merely found. In their telling, the Rainbow Serpent carved this chasm in the Dreaming, then travelled on underground, slipping beneath the country to surface again twenty kilometres upstream at the Mill Hole on the Apsley River in Walcha. The falls and the high tablelands around them were a meeting place, ground that held meaning and gathering long before the first stockmen arrived. That older knowledge has not been left in the past: today a Rainbow Serpent mosaic marks the Mill Hole, made with the help of the local Aboriginal community, so that the story of how the river and its gorge came to be is told again where the Serpent is said to rise.

On 13 September 1818, the explorer John Oxley came upon the falls during his long trek across the tablelands and was stopped in his tracks. He called them "one of the most magnificent waterfalls we have seen," named them the Bathurst Falls, and gave the river its present name, Apsley. In his journal he confessed to being "lost in astonishment at the sight of this wonderful natural sublimity." It is easy to imagine why. A traveller who had spent weeks crossing rolling, open highland would have had no reason to expect the earth to drop away into a gorge of this depth. The plateau hides the chasm until the last moment, so that the falls arrive not as a gradual reveal but as a shock, the same surprise that visitors feel walking out to the lookout today.

Reaching the foot of such a gorge was once a feat in itself. In 1902 three men, Ted Baker, Jim McMillan and "Wattie" Joiner, built a wooden stairway that zigzagged from the clifftop all the way down to the water's edge, every timber of it dressed by hand with axe and adze. That original stairway carried visitors until 1932, when it was condemned as unsafe and partly pulled down; the last of it was finally removed in 2020. The job of replacing it fell to the Walcha Lions Club, and in a fitting twist the steel staircase and viewing platform they built in 1961 were designed by Lindsay McMillan, son of the Jim McMillan who had helped build the first. The club's members poured 1,745 hours into the work, and the new lookout opened that October.

Today the falls anchor the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, and the gorge teems with life that suits its scale. Wedge-tailed eagles, Australia's largest birds of prey, ride the thermals that rise off the warming cliffs, wheeling at eye level above the chasm. Kangaroos and wallabies move through the surrounding bush, echidnas shuffle along the tracks, and crimson rosellas flash through the trees in bursts of red and blue. A network of lookouts and walkways now traces the rim, including the sealed Oxley Walk, which crosses the river by footbridge, a bridge once washed away by flood and rebuilt, and leads past viewpoints that reveal the second, fifty-eight-metre fall and the sheer walls of the chasm beyond. Two centuries after Oxley stood speechless, the view still does most of the talking.