Hugging the Shore: The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland
Ruth Blair
Abstract: Extrapolating from their observations of the relationship between the Blue Mountains and the New South Wales coastline, David Foster and Martin Thomas have concluded that the sea and the mountains represent a “fundamental divide in the mental geography of Australia” (Thomas 2004: 36). The south-east Queensland coast presents a different experience of the relationship between sea and mountains. Here, from northern New South Wales to Noosa, north of Brisbane, the mountains, clearly visible from ocean, bay, and shore, are an intrinsic part of the coastal experience. This chapter looks at some writing about two of the coastal mountains with substantial national park areas: Lamington and Tamborine. It considers how writing about these areas reflects on the process of engagement with the natural world, the process by which settlers become dwellers, and the particular understanding of our place in the world that can evolve out of the experience of “the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated” (Schama 1995: 574).
Below the mountain the coast was still beautiful, with no more than a few patches of buildings, low and unpretentious. From the mountain the ocean was limitlessly blue. (Wright 1999: 248)
In south-east Queensland and the far north of New South Wales, the mountains come down to the sea — or close to it. The painter William Robinson captures this proximity in ‘Creation Landscape — the dome of space and time’, where the forests of the border ranges swirl with glimpses of sky and sea.1 The coast, from just below the Queensland- New South Wales border to Noosa, north of Brisbane, has major off- shore islands2 and a hilly, occasionally mountainous, hinterland that, for residents and visitors, is part of what ‘the coast’ means. To the north are the peaks of the Glasshouse Mountains, then the Blackall 178 Blair
Range. Further north, Noosa has its own hilly hinterland. To the south, the border ranges with their plateaus and spurs, and finally Mount Warning, form the coastal backdrop. Cook described them on his voyage up the east coast in 1770, beginning with Mount Warning:
A high point of land, which I named Cape Byron, bore N.W. by W. at the distance of three miles. It […] may be known by a remarkable sharp peaked mountain, which lies inland, and bears from it N.W. by W. From this point, the land trends N.13 W.: inland it is high and hilly, but low and level near the shore; to the southward of the point it is also low and level. […] [A little further north, the lo- cation of dangerous breakers] may always be known by the peaked mountain which has just been mentioned, and which bears from them S.W. by W. for this reason I have named it MOUNT WARNING. […] The land about it is high and hilly, but it is of itself sufficiently conspicuous to be at once distinguished from every other object. (qtd. in Groom 1949: 12)
A century and a half later, Arthur Groom surveyed the coastal moun- tains from that “high and hilly” country:
We sat on the point of Binna Burra. It was a clear summer day. Eighteen miles eastward the Pacific breakers rolled along the visible coastline from Southport to Cook’s Point Lookout on Stradbroke Island. Northward on the horizon Cook’s Glass House Mountains jutted up […] ninety-two miles by air line; and beyond [them] the Blackall Range joined the Conondale Range well over one hundred miles from Binna Burra. (p. 144)
Binna Burra, on the Lamington Plateau of the McPherson (border) range, was in the process of becoming a tourist site, with a ‘guest house’ like that established by the O’Reilly family on another part of the plateau. Most of these mountainous areas today include substantial areas of national parkland. They are an inseparable part of what ‘the coast’ means in this area, part of the tourist experience, where a holi- day stay, even on the Gold Coast, along with trips to ‘Sea World’ or ‘Movie World’, includes a day trip to “the green behind the gold”, as a study of land use in the Border Ranges puts it (Monroe and Stevens 1976: 52).3 And all have been written about, painted, photographed, and, indeed, sung or had music made about them. These are not distant mountains, not the far horizon of the Blue Mountains, west of the Sydney coastline, that prompted David Foster in The Glade Within the Grove (1996) and, taking up his point, Martin Thomas in The Artificial Horizon (2004), to extrapolate that the sea