Point Lookout, the heart of the park, rises to 1,564 metres, among the highest ground anywhere north of the Snowy Mountains, and the second highest peak in this region. To the Aboriginal peoples whose country meets here, it is far more than a viewpoint. The park straddles the traditional boundaries of the Dunghutti, Anaiwan, and Gumbaynggirr peoples, and the high country holds great spiritual and cultural significance. Point Lookout itself is a sacred place, known by a name that translates roughly as a prohibited area, country to be approached with respect rather than treated as a mere belvedere. To visit is to stand on a meeting point of nations, on ground that carried meaning long before it carried a viewing platform and a name on a map.

The reason this park wears a World Heritage badge is written in its trees. The Antarctic beech, Nothofagus moorei, clings to cool, high, mist-fed ridges in eastern Australia, a relic of the forests that once blanketed Gondwana. Its scattered cousins ring the southern Pacific, from South America to New Zealand, a botanical map of continents that have since drifted apart. On these ridgelines the beeches grow squat and ancient, their trunks shaggy with moss, their canopies often lost in cloud. Inscribed in 1986 as part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia and added to the National Heritage List in 2007, the park protects one of the planet's most significant strips of this rainforest, a place where evolution's long memory is still readable in living wood.

The park drapes itself across the precipitous edge of the tableland, where the rolling plateau breaks into cliffs, ridges, spurs, and plunging streams. That sharp change in altitude and exposure packs an extraordinary range of habitats into a small space. Climbing the slopes, the vegetation shifts from subtropical through warm temperate to cool temperate rainforest, with stands of eucalypt forest, sub-alpine woodland, heath, and swamp filling out the mosaic. More than a thousand plant species have been recorded here, and the birdlife is abundant to match. Eastern whipbirds crack their whip-like calls through the understorey; eastern bristlebirds, crimson rosellas, Australian king parrots, and a chorus of honeyeaters work the canopy and heath. Few mountainsides anywhere hold so many distinct worlds stacked one above the other.

The park exists because people fought for it. In the 1920s, Phillip Wright of nearby Wollomombi led the push to have this wilderness protected; most of the area was reserved in 1931, dedicated for public recreation in 1935, and formally opened by the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, in 1937. Protection has never been a finished job. Mining leases for antimony were granted across two decades from the 1930s, and as recently as the 1990s the Mount Killiekrankie area was the scene of anti-logging blockades before being added to the park in 1999. Each chapter reflects a hard-won decision to leave this country standing rather than cut it down or dig it up, a choice that handed down to us a rainforest essentially unchanged since the deep past.

This is high, wet, changeable country, and it asks something of its visitors. An extensive network of walking tracks traverses the upper park, from the short Lyrebird Walk threading through ferns and beech to longer routes along the escarpment rim. Limited accommodation waits at Banksia Point for those who want to wake inside the forest. But the standing advice for the place is blunt and practical: even in summer the altitude can turn cold fast, and in winter the ridges see frequent snow and hard frost. Cloud rolls in without warning, swallowing the famous view in minutes, then parts again to reveal the ocean far below. Patience is rewarded here. The mountain shows itself on its own schedule, not yours.