About
About
This is an ecology book about one stretch of subtropical Queensland coast — and an attempt to make its landscape readable to anyone curious enough to look.
The Sunshine Coast packs an extraordinary range of country — reef, estuary, heath, swamp, forest and rainforest — into a short, steep run from the sea to the range, and lays it out in such a clear order that it makes an almost perfect classroom for how the living world is put together. Hardly anyone uses it as one, which is a pity, because a landscape is easier to look after once you understand it.
This book was written with the help of AI tools — used for drafting and for gathering the published research together — with the author directing the work, checking the facts against their sources, and doing the editing. It is mentioned plainly because a reader is entitled to know, and because it is the reason the book exists: a natural history of one stretch of coast, for one region's readers, is not the kind of book that pays its way through a publisher, and without these tools it would probably never have been written.
It was written first for the author's own interest, to learn to read the country they live in. If it turns out to be useful to anyone else, so much the better. The price asked for it is meant only to cover the costs of making it.
The Sunshine Coast is Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) Country. The Kabi Kabi people are the Traditional Owners and continuing custodians of this land and its waters — a connection recognised in the Federal Court's 2024 determination of their native title, and reaching back many thousands of years before that. We pay our respects to Kabi Kabi Elders past and present.
This is an ecology book. It makes no claim to tell that Country's cultural story, which belongs with the Kabi Kabi people themselves; where it touches on the long human history of the landscape, it draws only on the published record.
Daniel Addington grew up in Sydney and spent his working life in the tech industry, first as a product manager and then as a software developer. After seven years in Adelaide, he settled on the Sunshine Coast, where he has run a native gardening business and worked as a project manager for an ecological consultancy, and where he now lives with his wife and two children as a stay-at-home dad. He wrote Same Sky, Different Ground to learn to read the country he lives in, and self-published it.
When he isn't writing about the place, he is out in it: walking up the mountains before breakfast, loitering in native nurseries, building sandcastles at Coolum Beach, or riding bikes through the wallum with two small passengers.
Questions, corrections, or a good place to see something on the coast? Send an email — all three are welcome.