Ellinjaa Falls

Ellinjaa Falls was one of the three waterfalls as part of the 17km Waterfall Circuit along Theresa Creek Road. Viewing this waterfall required us to go on a walk that took us 20 minutes away from the car. The walk was downhill as we ultimately were led to a small lagoon right in front of the diminutive 10-15m waterfall. During our morning visit at around 9:15am in mid-May 2008, some of the sun’s rays started to penetrate the forest cover thereby creating little light spots on the otherwise shadowy waterfall. It seemed like we missed the window for the best long exposure lighting conditions by about 15-30 minutes. Either that or we would have to wait until the very late afternoon when the falls would once again be completely in shadow (thereby be conducive to long exposure photographs again).

According to my Natmap Raster map of Australia, they spelled this waterfall as Elinjaa Falls where they only spelled it with one “l”. I’m not sure if this spelling was correct or if the double-“l” version was correct. Regardless of what its true spelling was supposed to be, I don’t know the meaning of the word and I couldn’t find anything on it in the literature. Finally, even though we had no intention of doing this, we read that the plunge pool beneath the falls was conducive for swimming, which would be great for cooling off from the heat and humidity of tropical north Queensland.

Route to this Waterfall

Ellinjaa Falls was about 3.3km along the looping Theresa Creek Rd from the Palmerston Hwy (Hwy 25) going in the counterclockwise (anticlockwise) direction. The turnoff for Theresa Creek Rd going in this direction was about 53km west of the start of the Palmerston Hwy in Innisfail.

Going in the other direction, the other end of Theresa Creek Rd started from the far northeast corner of the Millaa Millaa town (about 1km west of the other end of the Theresa Creek Rd entrance mentioned above). It was about 12km going in the clockwise direction along Theresa Creek Rd to the car park for Ellinjaa Falls.

For geographical context, Innisfail was 88km (over an hour drive) south of Cairns and 260km (3 hours drive) north of Townsville.