The rainforest here is old in a way that is hard to grasp. Its plant lineages descend from the forests that once blanketed Gondwana, the southern supercontinent that began breaking apart more than 150 million years ago. As Australia drifted north and dried out, those forests retreated to a handful of wet refuges along the eastern escarpment. Dorrigo is one of them. In 1986 the park was inscribed as part of the World Heritage Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, the most extensive stretch of this kind of forest left on Earth, and in 2007 it was added to the Australian National Heritage List. To walk the Wonga Walk beneath trees six centuries old is to move through a landscape that remembers a different planet.

Long before the park existed, this was, and remains, Gumbaynggirr country, a place of deep significance to the people whose land it is. They knew the escarpment forests intimately, the seasons of fruit and bird, the ways through the wet slopes. The name Dorrigo itself comes from their language. When you stand on the plateau and look down the same drop the Gumbaynggirr have looked down for thousands of generations, the forest stops being scenery and becomes something held in trust, a country with custodians, not simply a park with visitors.

A plateau soaked by some of the heaviest rainfall in New South Wales has to shed its water somewhere, and at Dorrigo it does so spectacularly. Creeks gather on the tableland and pour over the escarpment edge in a chain of falls. The Wonga Walk threads past Crystal Shower Falls, where the track ducks behind the curtain of water, and Tristania Falls, where the cascade slides over dark rock between tree ferns. After rain the whole forest drips and runs, and the air turns cool and green and faintly mineral. The waterfalls gave the road that climbs to the plateau, the Waterfall Way, its name.

Stand still on a track and the rainforest fills with sound. Around 128 bird species live here, and Dorrigo is one of the great birdwatching forests of eastern Australia. The superb lyrebird performs from the leaf litter, mimicking every other call in the forest and a few sounds that were never meant to be birdsong. Overhead the wompoo fruit dove gives its deep, bottle-blowing wom-poo, and the male regent bowerbird flashes black and gold through the canopy. Among the ferns a red-necked pademelon, a small forest wallaby, freezes, watches, and bounds away. The Skywalk and the canopy tracks were built to put you among all this, at the height where the forest actually lives.