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Wonders

The stories too good to leave out

Every landscape has its set-pieces — the tales that make you stop and look again. Here are a handful of the Sunshine Coast's best: dead volcanoes, a soil you can read like a diary, frogs that breed in vinegar, and the whales that came back from the edge.

Wonder

The blue peaks are dead volcanoes

Those steep blue hills on the skyline are the burnt-out plumbing of volcanoes that stopped erupting 26 million years ago.

Look west from almost anywhere on the coast and you'll see them: a row of impossibly steep blue-grey domes and spires standing up out of flat farmland like something dropped there by mistake. They are the Glass House Mountains, and they are the worn-down cores of volcanoes that last erupted 26 to 27 million years ago.

The trick is what you're actually seeing. When a volcano dies, the soft ash and lava that built its slopes wear away first. What lasts is the hard plug of rock that cooled solid in the throat — the plumbing. Everything softer around it has simply been rained away over 26 million years, leaving the plug standing alone. Every one of those peaks is a volcano turned inside out: the outside gone, the inside left pointing at the sky.

It's the first lesson in reading this coast. Hard rock stands up; soft rock wears down. Once you know that, the whole skyline reorganises itself in front of you.

From Chapters 2–3 · The making of the rock  ·  See them on the map →

Wonder

A soil's whole life, twenty metres deep

At Cooloola the dunes get politely older the further inland you walk — so you can stroll through hundreds of thousands of years of soil in an afternoon.

Sand dunes don't usually keep a diary. At Cooloola they do. The dunes there are stacked in age order, youngest at the beach and oldest inland, so that walking away from the sea is walking forward in time — one of the finest places on Earth to watch how a soil is born, grows rich, and then slowly starves.

Dig into the older sand and you find the record: a bone-white column stripped of everything soluble, running more than twenty metres straight down — taller than the forest standing on top of it. Every trace of nutrient has been washed downward and away by a hundred thousand years of rain.

Keep walking inland, onto the oldest dunes, and the forest itself shrinks — tall trees giving way to low heath — not because anything went wrong, but because the last of the food has finally drained out of the ground. You are watching a landscape run out of nutrients in slow motion, and putting your hand on the evidence.

From Chapter 4 · Soil  ·  See Cooloola on the map →

Wonder

The frogs that breed in vinegar

In the tea-dark pools of the wallum live frogs that raise their young in water as acidic as vinegar — on purpose.

The wallum heath behind the beach is the poorest ground on the coast, and its water is stranger still: standing pools the colour of strong, cold tea, stained by the sand and steeped to an acidity that would curdle milk. Nothing, you'd think, could breed in that.

The acid frogs breed in exactly that, and nowhere else. Over time they have evolved to lay and hatch in water acidic enough to see off almost everything that would otherwise eat their eggs and tadpoles. The very thing that makes the water look dead is what keeps their nursery safe: their predators can't follow them in.

It is the same bargain the whole wallum lives by. The acid does the frogs' fighting for them.

From Chapter 9 · Dunes, wallum & acid waters  ·  Read the wallum →

Wonder

The godwits' impossible flight

The unremarkable brown birds feeding on the Maroochy mudflats have just flown here from the Arctic — without stopping.

There is a smelly stretch of tidal mud where the rivers meet the sea, and every spring a flock of long-billed brown waders turns up to feed on it. They look like nothing much. What they have just done is one of the great feats in the animal world.

The bar-tailed godwits arrive on these flats having flown, non-stop, from their breeding grounds near the Arctic — days on the wing over open ocean with no rest, no food and no water, burning their own body down to a fraction of its weight to make the distance. The mud they land on isn't scenery. It's the fuel dock at the end of the longest commute on Earth, where they refuel before doing it all again.

Which is why the "worthless" mudflat that developers most want to fill in is, to a godwit, the whole point of the journey.

From Chapter 8 · Estuaries, mangroves & saltmarsh  ·  See the flats on the map →

Wonder

The eel's one journey

The eel in your local creek may feed there quietly for decades — then leave once, forever, to spawn in the Coral Sea.

In the paperbark swamps and tea-dark lagoons of the coast lives an animal with a secret double life. The longfin eel can spend decades in the same freshwater creek, a patient, unremarkable resident, growing slowly in the still water among the sedges.

Then, once, it leaves — and never comes back. Answering a signal we still don't fully understand, a mature eel abandons the only home it has known and sets out downstream, out through the estuary, and off into the open ocean to spawn far away in the Coral Sea. It makes the journey a single time, at the end of its life.

The larvae that hatch out there then find their own way back to the coast, into creeks they have never seen, to begin the long wait again. The quiet eel in the drain behind the sugarcane is one of the great travellers of the region.

From Chapter 10 · Paperbark swamps & freshwater wetlands  ·  Read the swamps →

Wonder

The whales that came back

The humpbacks streaming past the headlands each winter were hunted, within living memory, down to a few hundred animals.

Every winter, tens of thousands of humpback whales file north past the Sunshine Coast headlands on their way to warmer breeding water — close, reliable, and so numerous that watching them has become an ordinary thing to do on a Sunday. It is easy to forget how nearly we lost them.

Within living memory, this same population was hunted down to a few hundred survivors, on the very edge of gone. Then the hunting stopped. And the whales, given nothing but the chance to be left alone, did the rest themselves, rebuilding into the tens of thousands that pass the beaches today.

It is the rarest kind of story on this coast: one that ends well. All it took was for people to stop killing them.

From Chapter 14 · Sea country  ·  Read sea country →

There are more where these came from

Every one of these is a place you can go and stand in. The field guide tells you where, and how to read it when you get there — free, and made to take outside.

Open the field guide About the book