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The indigenous people of south western Australia are the Ballardong people. In their Dreamtime, the rock was created by the Rainbow Serpent after she drank all of the water in the land. She became bloated and dragged her swollen body over the land, leaving Wave Rock in her wake. The dreaming trail of this story extends from the south coast near Augusta to the northeast to the Great Victoria Desert.
Wave Rock is part of Hyden Rock, a 2.63 billion year-old monzogranite (reference from Wiki). The inselberg consists of three domes, two of which are separated by a valley now filled with a reservoir. Between 100-130 million years ago, granite bedrock was fractured and altered by weathering to varying depths by a process known as lateritisation (a process that occurs in hot wet climates and produces a weathered product rich in iron and aluminum). This process formed
underground pods or domes of solid unweathered granite separated by deeply weathered fragments of granite. Erosion then exposed these domes to become what is now Hayden Rock. Geomorphologists call features like Wave Rock a "flared slope,"a bedrock surface that is concave-upward. Chemical weathering around the base of an inselberg preferentially develops at the base, producing a weathered and disaggregated zone. When the land surface around the buried inselberg is then exposed as the land surface is lowered, this disaggregated zone is easily eroded, leaving the flared slope of Wave Rock.A wall on top was built in the 1920's to guide rainwater (in this very arid area) toward the Hyden Humps Dam (image on the lower right).
