A Star Trek
Sun Herald
Sunday July 13, 2008
Susan Gough Henly takes on the Gold Coast Great Walk and is blown away by its beauty.
Talk to most people about walking in the hinterland of the Gold Coast and they will give you a blank stare while trying to figure out why anybody would want to meander away from the area's beautiful beaches. But, to most people's surprise, there is an ancient jungle on the rim of a prehistoric volcano just an hour from the sheen of Surfers Paradise. It's place where you can wander on a sunlight-dappled forest floor carpeted with russet and golden leaves and every now and then come across a colony of moss-covered trunks of Antarctic beech intertwined like tango dancers. This is just one of the landscapes you walk through on the 54-kilometre Gold Coast Great Walk, the last walking track to open in a $10 million Queensland Government initiative that is making some of the state's most beautiful natural areas accessible to walkers. The Gold Coast Great Walk links the ancient Gondwana Rainforests of World Heritage-listed Lamington and Springbrook national parks via the scenic Numinbah Valley. It traverses the largest subtropical rainforest in the world and Australia's northernmost Antarctic Beech rainforest, which together are home to 300 tree species, 175 types of vines and ferns, 90 orchid species, and hundreds of mosses, lichen and fungi types not to mention waterfalls, stunning viewpoints and large caves. This remarkable region is home to more marsupial, frog, reptile, and bird species than anywhere else in Australia, including four extremely rare bird species, 150 different types of butterflies, endangered quolls, a giant king cricket species, Australia's largest skink breed, a giant earthworm found nowhere else in the world and a blue spiny crayfish that can even be found clamouring the trails. My teenage daughter and I recently walked the 21-kilometre Border Track between O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat and Binna Burra Mountain Lodge in Lamington National Park. This is the first leg of the Gold Coast Great Walk. It is particularly appealing because you can stay at delightful, historic accommodation at each end. The remaining two days of the walk require an overnight in a walker's camp ground.The road up to O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat may be as convoluted as a corkscrew but there was no road at all when the O'Reilly family started a dairy farm here in 1911 in the Green Mountains section of the McPherson Ranges. With the creation of Lamington National Park in 1915, visitors began to make the arduous two-day trip from Brisbane on horseback to enjoy the remarkable scenery. The family ditched the dairy business and built their first guest house in 1926. Eleven years later, Bernard O'Reilly became a national hero when he trekked for two days through the jungle to rescue two survivors of a plane crash. Pictures and relics from the crash adorn the wood-panelled library where a roaring fire warms us the night we arrive. Early next morning we enter another world. For eight magical hours we walk through a rich tapestry of greens along the ridge line of the McPherson Ranges, which are actually the northern rim of the ancient Tweed Volcano. First we come upon Bithongabel, the aforementioned ethereal mossy fairy land of the cool temperate rainforest. It's name means "place of flowers" in the local Yugambeh language. A little while later, at several lookouts, we marvel over the verdant Tweed Valley, the largest erosion caldera, or volcanic depression, of its age in the world. Much of the border track follows the route of the survey team that marked the border between NSW and Queensland in 1865. As the trail descends to a lower elevation we end up in the lush subtropical rainforest at Binna Burra, surrounded by strangler figs, wait-a-while vines and booyong trees, their greedy buttress roots stretching out across the forest floor. Now and again, we are serenaded by songbirds, such as the satin bowerbird and eastern whipbird or perhaps it is just the Albert's lyrebird, famous for its mimicry of all the other birds in the rainforest. For thousands of years the forebears of the Yugambeh Aboriginal language group lived a comfortable life in the region collecting nuts, honey and plants, fishing and hunting small game. The Woonoongoora section of the Great Walk, which descends through piccabeen palms, large red cedar trees, majestic flooded gums and casuarinas to the base of spectacular white rhyolite cliffs, pays homage to the Yugambeh. Here on warm sunny hillsides you may see glossy black cockatoos, honey eaters, thornbills and brightly coloured parrots as well as snakes, skinks and other lizards. By comparison, European settlement appears both paltry and devastating. A mere 140 years ago timber-getters seized on the rich deposits of cedar and hoop pine and agriculturalists farmed the rich soils where the rainforests had thrived. Had they continued unabated, Lamington and Springbrook national parks and, indeed, the Gold Coast Great Walk would never have been created. Luckily, Lamington National Park's visionaries came in the unlikely form of prominent pastoralist and state parliamentarian Robert Collins and engineer Romeo Lahey, whose family owned a timber mill in the nearby town of Canungra. Collins was inspired by the declaration of Yellowstone in the US as the world's first national park in 1872. The battle to save the remaining rainforest lasted more than 30 years, but in 1906, the national parks concept was captured for the first time in Australia when the Queensland Government passed the State Forests and National Parks Act. Lahey took up the cause in 1911, even deferring his enlistment in World War I, until Lamington National Park was declared in 1915. In the dying embers of winter daylight, as a full moon is already shining torch-bright on glossy palm leaves, we arrive tired and hungry at Binna Burra Mountain Lodge.Romeo Lahey and his good friend Arthur Groom bought the last freehold title on the park's boundary to build Binna Burra in 1933, its first cabins constructed from tallow wood slabs and stringy bark shingles. Today the lodge is still rustic in all the good ways and a home away from home for bushwalkers who gather to share stories at long tables in the dining room with its drop-dead views across the Coomera Valley.After warm showers we give thanks to Romeo Lahey over a steaming bowl of soup and a hearty red. He not only protected Lamington from his family's own timber mills and built a walker's haven in the middle of this Gondwana paradise, but he also used his engineering skills to design remarkable trails like the Border Track so that there is nary too steep a step across all 21 kilometres. And 70 years later there is such little erosion that, just maybe, those ancient Antarctic beeches and hoop pines might survive the incursions of us newcomers for a little while longer.>TRIP NOTES* Getting there Qantas, Virgin Blue and Jetstar have daily flights to the Gold Coast Airport. Gold Coast Hinterland Great Walk: www.epa.qld.gov.au/projects/park/index.cgi?parkid=262, includes information about getting there and campsite bookings.* Staying there For accommodation and transfers see www.binnaburralodge.com.au and www.oreillys.com.au.* Guide services and tours Gondwana Guides: www.gondwanaguides.com.au and International Park Tours: www.parktours.com.au. Subject to issuing of permits by Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.
© 2008 Sun Herald
