Kevin Explores

05/08/2026

I've started something new alongside the Field Notes here on Facebook — a regular wrap-up on Substack pulling together what's happening across Kevin Explores in one place.

This week's edition covers the rebuilt Torres Strait and Millaa Millaa Falls pages, the mapping and geology tools I use, five books to recommend and a podcast worth your time, and where the guest contributions are heading.

It's shorter than the website, more frequent than Facebook, and free straight to your inbox.

Substack link in the comments.

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04/08/2026

Break from volcanoes and web edits well spent. A couple of hours at Hastie's Swamp Sunday morning turned up a terrific mix — Victoria's Riflebirds working the bark for insects, a family of Magpie Geese loafing on a log with a cormorant drying off beside them, an Australasian Grebe cruising the lily pads, Eastern Yellow Robins and Pale-yellow Robins lighting up the understorey, and a couple of Macleay's and Yellow-spotted Honeyeaters keeping busy in the canopy. Brown Cuckoo-Doves rounded it out. Sometimes the best editing happens after you've stood at the edge of the swamp for an hour.

02/08/2026

From the air, you can trace a line from Millaa Millaa Falls back to a low green hill on the skyline — and that hill is a volcano.

I've gone back and deepened the Millaa Millaa Falls webpage, and looking closer turned up more than I expected. The dark wall behind the water is two stacked lava flows. The creek that flows over the falls starts on the flank of an old shield volcano, sitting right there in the paddocks west of town. And the rolling green country all around is that same basalt — long since rotted to the red soil that supports the dairy farms. The falls are one of the few windows where the rock is still bare.

What I like most about this one is what I still can't answer. Did that volcano's lava make the flows in the face of the falls? Why does the waterfall sit at exactly this spot? How does such a small catchment keep it running through the dry? I've put my best reading on the page — and been honest about where the rock hasn't revealed to me yet.

That's the thing about looking closely at a place: the better you understand it, the more questions it hands you.

Millaa Millaa Falls sits on Mamu Country.

Full story — link in comments.
Country from above.

28/07/2026

Eight thousand years ago, none of this was sea.

The Torres Strait — Zenadh Kes — is one of the youngest bodies of water on Earth. The continental shelf between Cape York and New Guinea was dry land until rising seas at the end of the last ice age drowned it. What you see from the air today is that drowned landscape made visible: cobalt blue over the deep former valleys, turquoise over the shallows where the old surface sits just beneath the water.

The islands are simply the parts that didn't go under.

What makes this place extraordinary — from altitude, at least — is that within 150 kilometres of water, five completely different kinds of island exist. Ancient granite peaks, the same rock that underlies Cape York Peninsula, rising steeply from the shallows. A volcanic island rising 230 metres from the reef, formed from a basaltic eruption centre millions of years ago — the very rock that Eddie Mabo fought for in the High Court of Australia. Coral cays built from reef-derived sand, only a few thousand years old, their Pisonia forest canopy visible as a dark green dome from altitude. Flat sediment islands barely above sea level, built from New Guinea river mud, sitting four kilometres from the Papua New Guinea coast.

And over all of it, the tidal engine — the Coral Sea and the Arafura Sea forcing their competing tides through a 12-metre-deep channel, driving currents strong enough to scour bedrock, shaping every reef, every sand spit, every island margin in the strait.

This is a place with more geological variety per square kilometre than almost anywhere in Australia. It is also the home of the Zenadh Kes people — sea navigators whose knowledge of these tides, currents, and reefs represents thousands of years of accumulated understanding.

The full story — geology, ecology, history, and what to look for from the air — via a link in the comments.

New field notes delivered to your inbox — subscribe on Substack, link in bio.

Country from above.
Cheers, Kevin

25/07/2026

There's a story written into every landscape — in rock, river, and ancient seabed — that most of us walk straight past. Not because we don't care, but because nobody's shown us how to read it.

I've just published the first proper Field Note for Kevin Explores: who I am, why I fly, and what this whole project is actually building toward. If you've ever looked at Far North Queensland from above and wondered what you were really looking at, this one's for you.

Learning and Sharing

22/07/2026

The response to Windin Falls surprised me a bit — how many of you sat with those fracture lines, asked questions about the escarpment, wanted to know more about rock that's been there since before there was anything alive to see it.

That's the whole reason this page exists. Not to show you pretty drone shots of waterfalls (though I hope they're that too), but because there's a story written into this country — in ancient seabeds and rifts and a hundred million years of slow retreat — that most of us walk past without anyone ever pointing it out. I'm not an expert telling you what I already know. I'm someone who lives here, genuinely working it out, and sharing that as it happens.

If that's been landing for you, there's more of it waiting. I write a longer Field Note on Substack each time — the full unfolding of a place, not just the caption version — and I share word on useful resources and updates from the website collections too. First proper one is going out shortly, and it's the best starting point if you want to go deeper than the feed allows. It's free, delivered straight to your email, and you'll never miss one.

Link's in the comments — come along.

Cheers, K.

19/07/2026

Sunday at Windin Falls.

Full field note posted earlier.

19/07/2026

I've walked in to Windin Falls before, the way most people do — through the rainforest to that lookout at the edge, where the ground just stops and the valley opens up in front of you. Years ago I also flew past it in a light aircraft, camera out the window, and came away with a handful of frames looking up the valley at the falls from a distance. They sat in a folder and stayed there.
Going back through those old shots recently, something in the rock face caught my eye — diagonal fracture lines in the rock. That was reason enough to go back with the drone and get close. Today I did.

This story is told on the country of the Dulabed and Malanbarra Yidinji people, whose native title covers the upper Mulgrave catchment where Windin Creek makes its drop, and of the Ngadjon-jii, whose country lies across the neighbouring tableland to the west.

Windin Creek runs unhurried through rainforest on the Atherton Tablelands, the kind of stream you could wade across without much thought. Then the forest floor simply stops. The Great Escarpment marks the point where the tableland breaks away toward the coast, and Windin Creek meets that break head-on, dropping in a single unbroken column into the gorge that feeds the Mulgrave Valley far below. There is no rapids, no staged descent — just still water, then a hundred and more metres of air.

What the drone exposes here is the escarpment's own construction. This landscape began taking shape around a hundred million years ago, when the eastern edge of the Australian continent rifted and fell away, leaving the tableland standing high while the coastal strip sank and eroded back beneath it. Everything since has been slow retreat — rain, gravity and gullies eating westward into that uplifted edge.

The rock the creek is cutting through is older still. Mapping shows this cliff as Hodgkinson Formation — dark, thin-bedded mudstone with subordinate sandstone, minor chert and basalt, laid down as marine sediment during the Devonian, somewhere between 420 and 360 million years ago. Long after burial, the same forces that raised this coastline folded and faulted the sequence, tilting the bedding onto its edge. That's the diagonal fracture lines visible in the rock face beside the main drop — not decoration, but the old seafloor standing on end.

A few kilometres east, Mt Bartle Frere and the Bellenden Ker Range rise as granite, intruded into country like this one long after the Hodgkinson sediments had already been folded and lithified. Windin sits outside that intrusion, in the older basement rock the granite pushed into — a waterfall that has, quite by accident, cut a clean cross-section through hundreds million years of seafloor history and visible to a drone.

Video in the following post

Cheers K.

18/07/2026

Standing on Top of It

Today at Crawfords Lookout, the Palmerston Highway runs within a few hundred metres of where Douglas Creek joins the North Johnstone River. The geology beneath this stretch of road is Atherton Basalt — lava from the Malanda Volcano, which three million years ago poured down the ancient Johnstone valley and buried it under a flow up to 300 metres thick. The river was forced to cut a new channel around the edge of that flow. The highway now follows its flat crown down to the coast. To drive this road is to travel the length of an ancient river of stone.

None of that is visible from the lookout. The gorge below presents itself simply as forest: a green wall folding down to a thread of water, the basalt implied but unseen, buried beneath canopy and its own scale.

A drone launched from the lookout and flown down toward the junction of the creek and the river found what the ground could not show. Cut into the hillside above the confluence is a clean band of columnar basalt — dozens of hexagonal columns standing in close formation, a weathered pale cap over rock the colour of dark honey, the river running turquoise at its foot. It is the kind of formation that draws travellers across continents. It sat perhaps a few hundred metres from the lookout rail, entirely hidden from anyone standing there.

The columns had been there the whole time, unseen not for any lack of proximity but for lack of a vantage point. A map can name the rock underfoot. A lookout can frame the scale of a gorge. Neither can show what only altitude reveals. It is a small case study in how easily the spectacular hides in plain sight — folded into a hillside, a few hundred metres and one change of perspective away from anyone who happens to be standing nearby.

If you're interested in posts of this nature, follow and subscribe on my webpage so you never miss one.

Cheers,
K

18/07/2026

Difficult to access sections of Barron Gorge