Great Dividing Range
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40 free Great Dividing Range trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Great Dividing Range runs down the whole eastern side of Australia, a long spine of plateaus, tablelands and worn-down peaks that decides where the continent's water goes. It is old, low and easy to underestimate, and it shapes almost everything about life on the east coast. This quiz turns the best Great Dividing Range fun facts into questions: how the highlands formed and where they begin and end, the snow country and its odd records, the animals and trees found nowhere else, and the explorers, poets and outlaws who made the high country part of the national story. It suits students working on Australian geography, travelers planning a trip into the mountains, and anyone who enjoys a surprising fact about a famous landscape. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing the range far better than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Norwegian miners at Kiandra, on the Great Dividing Range, brought which sport to Australia in 1861?
Skiing
Skiing took off at Kiandra after the miners carved more than forty pairs of skis, and the town's Snow Shoe Club is reportedly the longest continuously running club of its kind in the world.
Q 02The Blue Mountains are thought to owe their blue haze to oily vapour from which abundant trees?
Eucalypts
Eucalypts cover the sandstone plateau so thickly that the oily vapour they release is thought to scatter blue light across the valleys.
Q 03Which sandstone rock formation in the Blue Mountains towers above the Jamison Valley?
The Three Sisters
The Three Sisters are said to have been turned to stone, though the tale as commonly told may trace back to a 16-year-old schoolgirl rather than to Aboriginal tradition.
Q 04Which Snowy Mountains peak is the highest point on the Great Dividing Range and mainland Australia?
Mount Kosciuszko
Mount Kosciuszko stands just 2,228 metres high, and like nearly every peak on the range it can be climbed without mountaineering equipment.
Q 05The Great Dividing Range lies in one country; which chain, the world's longest on land, spans seven?
The Andes
The Andes pass through seven South American countries, while the Great Dividing Range is the longest mountain chain lying inside a single country.
Q 06The Snowy Mountains Scheme, tunnelled through the Great Dividing Range from 1949 to 1974, generates which kind of power?
Hydroelectricity
Hydroelectricity comes from nine power stations fed through 225 kilometres of tunnels and pipes, and the diverted water then irrigates farms inland.
Q 07Which river, Australia's longest, rises in the Australian Alps on the Great Dividing Range?
The Murray
The Murray drains the western side of Australia's highest mountains, then wanders 2,508 kilometres across the inland plains to South Australia.
Q 08Which planned Australian capital, founded in 1913, stands on the uplands of the Great Dividing Range?
Canberra
Canberra is Australia's largest inland city, set about 150 kilometres from the east coast beside the Brindabella Ranges.
Q 09Which bush poet set the horseback ballad 'The Man from Snowy River' in Australia's high country?
Banjo Paterson
Banjo Paterson had helped round up wild horses as a child, and his ballad first appeared in The Bulletin magazine in 1890.
Q 10Which bird of the Great Dividing Range's tropical rainforests is outweighed only by the ostrich?
Southern cassowary
Southern cassowary females are the larger sex and can stand two metres tall, with a horn-like casque rising from the top of the head.
Q 11Which songbird of the Dandenong Ranges, a branch of the Great Dividing Range, is renowned for mimicking other birds?
Superb lyrebird
Superb lyrebird males build up to 80 percent of their song from imitations of other species, and the bird struts across the back of Australia's 10-cent coin.
Q 12What name do Australians give the feral horses whose best-known herds roam the Australian Alps?
Brumbies
Brumbies are treasured by some as colonial heritage and counted by researchers as a threat to alpine ecosystems, so every plan to cull them stirs a fight.
Q 13Which river runs from the southern slopes of the Great Dividing Range through the centre of Melbourne?
The Yarra
Q 21Which insect flies to the Australian Alps each spring to rest in cool caves, once drawing Aboriginal peoples to feast?
Bogong moth
Bogong moth swarms lie dormant in the high caves all summer, and the feasts they supplied doubled as gatherings between different Aboriginal groups.
Q 22Which marsupial was known only from fossils until a live one turned up in Victoria's high country in 1966?
Mountain pygmy possum
Mountain pygmy possums are the only Australian mammals restricted to alpine habitat, and they hibernate for long stretches of the year.
Q 23Which critically endangered amphibian of the Snowy Mountains is striped in vivid yellow and black?
Corroboree frog
The Yarra is known to the Wurundjeri people as Birrarung, and Melbourne was founded on its lower reaches in 1835.
Q 14What is the dry zone called that forms where air sinks and warms on the sheltered side of the Great Dividing Range?
A rain shadow
A rain shadow forms because the range wrings moisture from the air as it climbs, and the dry wind that pours down the far side raises fire danger in the warm months.
Q 15Australia's highest peak, on the Great Dividing Range, is the lowest climb on which mountaineers' list?
The Seven Summits
The Seven Summits are the highest peaks of the seven continents, first completed by Richard Bass in 1985, though a rival list swaps the Australian peak for New Guinea's Puncak Jaya.
Q 16Which ancient supercontinent names the World Heritage rainforests of the New South Wales–Queensland border ranges?
Gondwana
Gondwana broke apart long ago, yet these reserves still shelter plants and animals whose lineages date from before Australia split away.
Q 17Which Queensland rainforest, running from the coast west to the Great Dividing Range, is far older than the Amazon?
The Daintree
The Daintree's forests are put at around 180 million years old, and they shelter rarities such as Bennett's tree-kangaroo.
Q 18The rise of Australia's Eastern Highlands lifted the edge of which groundwater store, the world's largest of its kind?
Great Artesian Basin
The Great Artesian Basin is the only source of fresh water across much of inland Australia, and some of its water has been underground for nearly two million years.
Q 19Which former volcano near Victoria's Mount Macedon is the setting of a famous novel about vanished schoolgirls?
Hanging Rock
Hanging Rock formed about six million years ago from stiff magma that congealed over its vent, and Joan Lindsay's novel and Peter Weir's 1975 film made it widely known.
Q 20Which 'living fossil' conifer was found in 1994 in a remote national park canyon on the Great Dividing Range?
Wollemi pine
Wollemi pine survives in the wild as fewer than 100 adult trees, found because a group of explorers was systematically hunting for new canyons.
Corroboree frog adults grow to only about three centimetres long, and zoos now breed them in captivity because the species ranks among Australia's most endangered.
Q 24Which tree of the Dandenong Ranges, on the Great Dividing Range, is the tallest of all flowering plants?
Mountain ash
Mountain ash can top 100 metres, and loggers felled some of the tallest specimens ever known.
Q 25Which explorer climbed and named Australia's highest peak in 1840 on an expedition with James Macarthur?
Paweł Strzelecki
Paweł Strzelecki thought the peak resembled a memorial mound in Kraków raised to a Polish national hero, so he named the mountain in the same man's honour.
Q 26Which explorer of the 1813 Blue Mountains crossing later co-founded Australia's first independent newspaper?
William Wentworth
William Wentworth's party got through by keeping to the ridges instead of following the creeks, the mistaken idea that had made the crossing so hard.
Q 27Which city, Australia's oldest inland settlement, stood at the end of the convict-built road over the Blue Mountains?
Bathurst
Bathurst was founded in 1815, the year a road of more than 160 kilometres reached it after just six months of work by 30 convict labourers.
Q 28The Great Dividing Range begins on Dauan Island, in Australia's far north, in which waterway?
Torres Strait
Torres Strait holds the range's northern tip, a granite island peak, and from there the highlands run more than 3,500 kilometres to western Victoria.
Q 29Which sandstone ranges, named after Scottish mountains, stand near the Great Dividing Range's far western end?
The Grampians
The Grampians were first labelled the Coast Mountains and then named for the reigning king before surveyor Thomas Mitchell settled on a reminder of his native Scotland.
Q 30Which Queensland 'Garden City' sits on the crest of the Great Dividing Range, about 700 metres above sea level?
Toowoomba
Toowoomba is high and exposed enough that snow has been reported on its upper streets, a rarity among Queensland cities.