Qualla: Tweed River (New South Wales)

Tweed River (New South Wales): Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GrieSeb, Public domain. A homesick explorer named this river after one a world away. In October 1823 John Oxley's party sheltered behind a small island near Point Danger, feasted on the turtles they caught there, and christened both the island and the stream that emptied beside it - the latter for the River Tweed that runs along the border of Scotland and England. The name has stuck for two centuries, and it suits a river that is itself a kind of border. For much of its lower course the Tweed traces the line between New South Wales and Queensland, gathering the runoff of a vanished volcano and carrying it down to a coast where two states, and two towns, meet at the same beach.

Image: GrieSeb | Public domain

Tweed River (New South Wales): The River the Volcano Made

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The Tweed is the drowned heart of a giant. It rises on the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range, inside a vast amphitheatre of mountains - the McPherson, Tweed, Burringbar and Condong ranges - that are the eroded rim of the ancient Tweed Volcano. Twenty-three million years ...

Image: Public domain

Tweed River (New South Wales): First Names, First People

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Oxley was not the first to know this country, only the first to write English onto it. The valley and the coast around the river mouth are the lands of Aboriginal people whose languages - recorded under names such as Yugambeh and Bundjalung - reach across the Tweed Valley and nor...

Image: Public domain

Tweed River (New South Wales): Murwillumbah and the Flood Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Advanstra, CC BY-SA 4.0. Downstream, the Tweed becomes a working river. It slides past Byangum, takes in the Oxley, and curves through Murwillumbah, the valley's main town, before braiding toward the sea. This is fertile, sub-tropical land - sugarcane, bananas, tropical fruit - but the same rainfall that...

Image: Advanstra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tweed River (New South Wales): Where Two States Share a Beach

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The river meets the ocean in one of the most engineered river mouths in Australia. The entrance sits at the doorstep of Tweed Heads and its Queensland twin Coolangatta, where the state line runs through the streets and, effectively, through the surf. The first training walls went...

Image: Public domain