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This page links to a list of New Zealand waterfalls. It is probably the most extensive available, but by no means complete.
There are over 300 waterfalls in the list, which is here. These are the falls
named on the 1:50,000 Topo50 map series. It's sorted by map number, hence roughly north to south and west to east. (It actually
lists all the falls named on the old NZMS260 series, but the data in the new series is 99.99% the same).
NOTE: The Grid Reference (GR) column consists of 6-digit numbers, some of which start with '0'. To prevent your spreadsheet from
losing the leading 0's, you need to format this column (at least) as Text. In Open Office Calc you can do this by clicking on the
column header in the 'Text Import' dialogue box and selecting it as 'Text'.
A limitation is that only falls named on the map have been included (except for a few that I've added). So such waterfalls as Piroa Falls (not shown on the map) and Waitakere Falls (shown, with 95m height, but no name) were omitted. Also, heights are rarely and erratically shown, so falls such as Wairere Falls (highest in North Island) has no height on the map. (For this reason, sorting the spreadsheet by height is pointless).
I compiled it from the 2008 list of place names on the Land Information NZ site (linz.govt.nz). Since it's been officially superseded
and is hard to find on the site, I've put a copy here. The file namedata.txt in it
contains 56000 lines, being every name on the 1:50,000 NZMS260 map series.
(There is also a current 'Gazetteer of Official Names' on the LINZ site, which contains just 7500 names and 66 waterfalls. I haven't yet
checked to see if it includes any that aren't in the previous list.)
Starting with the 2008 list, I wrote a little Basic program to extract every line with 'fall' in the name, and put the result into a spreadsheet. Then I manually
removed all the entries for 'Glenfalloch', 'Waterfall Hut' and the like. 'Waterfall Creek' I left in as a possible indicator where falls
might be found, though I regretted it later, there are (together with 'Waterfall Stream') no less than 50 of them. Such originality!
This left me with a mere 368 names.
A minor snag was that the list related to the old NZMS260 map series, which has been superseded by the new Topo50 series on completely
different sheet boundaries. The grid reference co-ordinates are entirely different origin, and even the latitude and longitude has changed
slightly. However, the geographical data has remained 99.99% the same. Since I couldn't be bothered typing every co-ordinate into LINZ's
on-line convertor, and I was in any case curious to 'see' all these waterfalls, I located them on the new (downloaded) Topo50 maps from their
approximate latitude and longitude and wrote down the grid references myself. All errors are thus mine.
As a result of this, the complete table has a major anomaly in that the first nine columns (as far as 'Longitude') refer to the old
maps and the columns I've added from 'Map No' on refer to the new ones.
This is the list with all the old data left in.
Note the comment above re formatting the 'GR' column as 'Text' in order not to lose leading zeroes.
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