Tianjara Falls

Welcome to Waterfall Wednesday, where I feature wonderful waterfalls while we all watch and wonder. (Sorry, blame Sesame Street and Wanda the witch’s wiry wig for my whimsy.)

Today’s waterfall is Tianjara Falls, roughly two-thirds of the way to Nowra from Canberra on the scenic but underused Nerriga Road. Originally built as the major connector between the ACT and Jervis Bay – supposedly intended as ACT’s port – the road never really saw much traffic and parts of it remain unsealed. The falls tumble over an escarpment, a ubiquitous feature of Australia’s east coast responsible for many spectacular waterfalls.

I’ve chosen Tianjara Falls so as to illustrate one of the main issues in landscape photography: when to take a photo. Sometimes we turn up at a wonderful location but the light is all wrong, or it’s raining, and the shot is ruined. Nothing you can do about it if the visit is a one-off, but if you have regular access to a place, try to plan your visit.

The waterfall photographer keeps an eye on weather and climate to estimate the amount of water likely to be in the fall. A careful read of a good map is also helpful (Google Earth will do) so as to get a sense of how large the headwaters are. The other eye is firmly focused on the time of day and the aspect of the waterfall, to ensure the shot isn’t compromised by shadows.

Tianjara Falls has a very small catchment area, so while average annual rainfall is reasonable by Australian standards, there are going to be large parts of the year when the fall is either dry or barely flowing. The ideal would be to visit after a few days of rain, which I did in December 2014, yielding the shot at the beginning of this post. The volume of water compares favourably to the photo accompanying the Wikipedia entry for Tianjara.

The escarpment area is, however, subject to occasional ferocious storms, and one such storm dumped 250mm of rain in the area in one day. I arrived at Tianjara Falls at the tail end of the storm and joined astonished locals on the viewing platform, one of whom said there hadn’t been this much water in the fall in the 25 years he’d been visiting it. Lucky? I find the more carefully I prepare, the luckier I get.

I am a weasel.