Wave Rock

At the edge of the Western Australian wheatbelt, a granite cliff curls over at the top like a breaker frozen a moment before it falls. Wave Rock is about 15 m high and more than 100 m long, one face of a granite inselberg made of three domes. The rock itself is extraordinarily old — a monzogranite of the Yilgarn Craton dated to about 2.63 billion years — and its surface is streaked in vertical bands of ochre, rust, grey and black, colours much richer than the pale cream described by early visitors.

The overhang is a textbook "flared slope". Geologists read it as a shape made underground: the curve was weathered into the granite while it was still buried beneath a laterite-capped land surface, a process that began in the Cretaceous, more than 100 million years ago. When the land later lifted and tilted after Australia separated from Antarctica, erosion stripped the soft cover away and exposed the undercut face as a clean concave curve.

Along the crest runs a low retaining wall, built in December 1928 by the state's Public Works Department to steer rainfall into a dam for the settlement of Hyden, and raised again in 1951 — a reminder that in this dry country a big bare rock was first of all a water catchment. Nearby are two more granite oddities: Hippos Yawn, a hollowed boulder shaped like a gaping mouth, and Mulka's Cave in The Humps, part of an Aboriginal Dreaming trail that runs across the south-west. The rock and its surroundings form a reserve of about 160 ha, and in spring the bush around it fills with Western Australian wildflowers.

Getting there

Wave Rock is about 3 km east of the small town of Hyden, roughly 300 km east-southeast of Perth in a straight line and about four hours' drive by road through farmland. The nearest larger town by distance is Albany, about 300 km to the south-west, with Albany Airport (ALH); most visitors come instead from Perth Airport (PER). Day coach tours run from Perth, and there is accommodation, a caravan park and camping at the rock.