This is an early piece by Vance Palmer, early in his days spent living at Caloundra and early in his attunement to the place, and early in his ecocritical and placemaking writings. Still he was Queensland born and bred and well used to beachcombing; part of his writing philosophy was the importance of as a more recent critic has phrased it of  'profound individual and social experiences that constitute enduring and recognisable territories of symbols'. Spinning at top pace meant places would become little more that a superficial cloak of 'arbitrarily fabricated and merely acceptable signs'.

‘Maroochydoore to Caloundra: A Day’s Tramp Beside the Sea’ (Daily Mail, 7 August [1926?])

Vance Palmer

A day’s walk along the coast, with a low tide and a hard stretch of sand beneath the feet, is a delightful experience. Luckily, at this season of the year the tides are low in daytime, and there is rarely need to plough through the loose sand that sometimes make coastal walking feel like trudging through fields of snow. There are occasional strips of our coast where a car could spin for 30 miles at top pace without a check: the outer beach of Bribie, for instance. But on the mainland, little tidal creeks and occasional jutting headlands put obstacles in the way of a car. Who wants to spin at top pace, though, along these marvellous sands, where the chief pleasure is idling and doing a little beachcombing by the way? There are always shells; strange fish come ashore; the upper sands are littered with flotsam and jetsam that may be pieces of wreckage, but more probably are useless junks of timber thrown overboard by various ships’ carpenters.

From Maroochydore south to Caloundra the coast runs for 20 miles [32.1km] in an almost unbroken line, and for most of the way the amateur beachcomber can feel sure he is exploring virgin soil. Maroochydore is a little township clustering round the estuary of the Maroochy River, a pleasant stream flowing down through the canefields from Yandina, and watering one of the richest and most closely-settled districts in Australia. It reaches the sea in a wide inlet with low banks, and round this smooth stretch of water sprawl the scattered houses of Maroochydore. It is a modern watering place with café, cinemas, and all the paraphernalia beloved by summer visitors but, in addition, it has real charm and beauty. Wide stretches of still, blue water, lapping up to the very posts of the houses, and big combers breaking on the white beaches outside! No wonder the cars come spinning down to it from the ranges in summer and the little boats chug down the river from Yandina, laden with excursionists! It is one of the places that has created itself in the image of the cheerful holiday-maker, from the gay little boats drawn up on the sands to the tinned music issuing from the open windows.

But, leaving it, and going south along the beach, one enters a more primitive world. There is the great bulk of Coolum behind, seeming to rise like a whale’s back from the sea, though in reality it is several miles inland. In front is a strip of white beach, broken only by the impressive headland, where the Mooloolah River enters the sea. This swiftly-flowing river is the first obstacle to the walker. It runs out under the shadow of a black, beetling cliff, and is so masked by the white sand that one comes on it with surprise. A perfect entrance for small boats! So completely does the steep headland protect it that the fishermen from Mooloolabah, a couple of miles higher up, can go out and in safely, even in rough weather. To cross it, one must leave the beach and go inland a little to the township, where there are always plenty of boats lying at anchor. At low water it would almost be possible to paddle across the shallow lagoon, but when the tide is high it comes brimming up among the mangroves, where sharp roots lie in wait for the naked feet. Once across, a narrow track leads back to the beach again, and the hard, white sand stretches ahead as far the eye can see.

It is here that one can appreciate what is meant by the “long wash of Australian seas”2 The lazy Pacific rollers come in on a mile-long front, lift themselves with an effort, and seem to stay suspended in a frozen, greenish arch for an indefinite time before they fall with the crash of splintering glass. The pause, momentary as it is, leaves an impression of eternity. Its effect is most vivid when one of the schools of mullet that are passing up the coast at this time of the year come edging into the land. The fish, caught up in the roller, are outlined against the glassy inner curve like creatures in a bowl. They fall and are lost, and the next wave takes up another lot. Yet always one seems to be gazing at the same row of fish, flattened out against the same glass. It is a spectacle that lays a spell upon the senses.

A little further on a curdling of the smooth water beyond the breakers hints at porpoises at play. There is a continual splashing, a gleam of satiny black shapes, a hovering of brown sea-hawks above. A closer inspection shows that they are not porpoises, but bonito. The water is literally alive with them, short, chunky fish of a couple of pounds or so, and if they were of commercial value a school like this would set some of our fishermen beating up the coast. Unfortunately, though, they are coarse eating, and there is little demand for them. Occasionally a Greek or Italian vendor will take a case of them, but only when daintier fish are scarce; and there is no need to be driven back to bonito now when the schnapper are biting, and sea mullet coming up the coast like the drifting shadows of clouds.

This little strip of coast has a particular interest for beachcomers. Not long ago a leading Sydney conchologist, on his way down from the Barrier Reef pronounced it to be the best in the world for shells.
“For numbers, that is”, he qualified the statement. “Some of the Japanese beaches have a slight lead, as far a variety is concerned.”

And far ahead, a couple of black figures appear to be brooding over some rare specimen. They put their heads together for a while, and then walk on in slow procession, one after the other. On this deserted beach, miles away from any house or sign of human habitation the presence of men is such a rare event that our curiosity is roused. Who are these strangers in the distance? Holiday visitors that have wandered a little further afield than usual? The speculation is soon answered by the presence of tell-tale footprints in the sand – three long toes spread wide apart at intervals of a couple of feet or so! The emus look around, hold a hurried consultation, and make across the sand at a stately trot for the scrubby bush in-shore.

It is mostly plain country that skirts this strip of coast – open, untouched territory that is a sanctuary for emus or any other kind of wild thing. From the higher ground one can look as far as the eye can see and not come across a sign of human presence. Low-lying sandy soil, covered with shrubs and various healthy plants, and seeming as if it would remain untouched for a hundred years! In spring this sombre mass of spiky vegetation can produce a miraculous mass of bloom, from the quiet little wax flowers to the large and gorgeous Christmas bells. It can show a riot and intensity of colour that more fat and fertile country can never hope to achieve; but the time of its flowering is not yet.

A wide sheet of water catches the eye. It is Garramundi lagoon, one of those slow-flowing creeks that have their entrances to the sea shut off for most of the year by heavy banks of sand. Occasionally, after a fall of rain, their waters overflow and cut a channel outward, giving freedom to the swarms of mullet and whiting they have brought to maturity. But the tide forces the sand back again and dams them up, so that they spread over the country behind like a lake. A delightful spot, Garramundi with it overhanging tree and dark, sandstone rocks! But we are on familiar ground now, and the grey headlands of Caloundra loom in the distance, not more than three or four miles away. Soon comes the gleam of the lighthouse shining brightly through the dropping dusk.

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Related posts:

1. Caloundra: reasons for being there
2. Climbing Coolum Mountain in 1927
3. Charms of Caloundra in 1925

Nettie Palmer was born and bred in Melbourne and alive to the differences between the Sunshine and the south. She, too, was city reared so conscious in the process of attunement when she moved to Caloundra in 1925 with her husband and children. She like him lived by her pen and wrote much about the region. Here she reflects:

Some people have been telling me that when we first came to Caloundra, two years ago, we meant to stay for six weeks. I have had to ask myself why, considering we can live anywhere within reach of a reliable post office, we have stayed so long. What I am really asking is how anybody could find so much in Caloundra to see no reason for leaving it in two years and more.

Charming! But how?
You remember perhaps that old-fashioned game in which you said, “I love my love with an A, because she is – Amiable; her name is Arabella; and she lives in America. Caloundra I can only begin the same way: I love my place with a C because it is – charming; its name is Caloundra; and it lives on the north coast. But what does that mean, to be charming? Well, there is a tradition that the blacks’ meaning of the name they gave to this place was just “beautiful in every way”. I hope that is true: it surely ought to be. To say that Caloundra is beautiful in every way is to say a great deal, for it ways are so many. It is as if you had an eight-pointed star and said it was beautiful in all its points. Let me try to explain some of Caloundra’s many ways in which she is beautiful.

Caloundra gives great glimpses of beauty even to those who have not much time to spare. On the humdrum day when one task follows another, there are always moments when a single glance can take the breath with beauty. There are, first, the calm bright water of vast Bribie Passage, spreading like a lake in front of the fishing village part of Caloundra. Calm as those waters are, they are never monotonous. Their colours change all day long. There are immense sand-banks near the opening, with a deep channel skirting them. These sand-banks are sometimes hidden, sometimes covered with just a film of water so shallow that it is pale amethyst, sometimes bared and golden, with people fishing from them by line and net. The Passage itself is bordered by well-wooded curves of coast, both along the mainland, where it is broken by creeks, and on Bribie Island, that long slip of land parallel with the coast for thirty miles. When you are on the flat of Caloundra and look southward down the Passage, you would hardly guess that Bribie was an island at all. You accept it simply as one shore of an exquisite lake – a noticeably untouched shore only marked by two lighthouses about seven miles from the Caloundra end. That is Bribie Passage, for an everyday glimpse; you see it always over a stretch of live, clinging grass, very green.

Inland – On the same day, without leaving the Flat, you may let your eye wander inland to the bush and the flower-plain. Not a couple of hundred yards from the Passage there are often enough wattle trees and ti-trees to encourage birds, and I have never heard more and sweeter bush birds than here. Without being a learned ornithologist, I have gradually come to know many of them, as one comes know the look and voice of a loved friend. Shall I name some? The little golden whistler come, with his song, for which the line, “linked sweetness long drawn out” must surely have been written! The yellow robinii with his two different songs is here nowadays he has, you know, his dawn-song, like two notes of a stringed instrument, that made Gould name him “Harp of the Dawn”. Then he has his day song, a sweet little run, ending with his dawn note uttered once, as his sign manual. Then come the grey thrush, called harmonica, but her song, especially on an evening after rain, would take a chapter to describe. Her cousins, the butcher birds, have an exquisite yodel, in spite of their way of life. As for the magpies, they are rare here, but delightful. Beyond this first belt of trees, though, are some open plains, known as the flower plains, and with good reason. Caloundra flowers were winners in this year’s field Naturalist’ exhibition, and on the plains there are flowers of some kind all the year [... ] series of months that are said to be spring. Just now it is the turn of Christmas bell, shining wide apart like little scarlet and yellow lamps. Whenever I think of this inward part of Caloundra I remember the desire of the poet, W.H. Davies, to live in a cottage facing the sea,

And having, on the other hand,
A glowery, green, bird-singing land.

Up hill
But still you have not seen Caloundra! To see it for what I really is, you must climb the hill, that is, the ridge a little inshore leading up to the lighthouse. If I could, I would bandage your eyes until you reached the top and then say, “Look!” when you stood on the road outside the lighthouse-post office. Look south first. You see to the left a wide ocean, running into Moreton Bay, itself a bay so wide as to be bounded only by Moreton Island which shows like a line of phantom mountains on the east. Looking south, you see beyond a narrow opening, Bribie Island, running curved for thirty mile of ocean surf and indented on its inner side for its edging of the great Passage. You see at this end of the Passage the idyllic picture of a small fishing-port with white boats at anchor and small homes on low, grassy cliffs. You see, inland, twenty miles and more away, the incredible forms of those hills known as the Glasshouse Mountain, each rising separately from the tree-covered plain, in form of pyramid and dome and even a broken column. Geologist explain Captain Cook may well have been bewildered when, sailing as he did along the outside of Moreton Island, he caught sight of those domes and called them “The Glasshouses”. I like to think that he perhaps imagined that some giant race lived in this odd continent and made itself lofty pleasure house with domes 1,700 feet high! After all, though, nothing made by the hand of man could be more impressive than those 13 Glasshouses as seen from the Lighthouse Hill at Caloundra.

Holidays
There is not time, though, to tell you what you can see when you face the other point of the compass. I forgot that I was speaking of an ordinary day, with only odd moments to spare. You need some of the special whole day experiments, for knowing Caloundra. The point is that when one lives here one is always on the spot for a holiday; there is no time wasted in getting there when “there” is here if you understand. One can run out for a dip in the Passage and lunch a la billie, or one can take a long summer’s day and stretch it at both ends and then feel that there was not time enough to answer all the delicious invitations of the place. Caloundra itself is immense, with several headlands and varied bays; when I have brought people here and led them about they have said, “Is this still called Caloundra?”

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Related posts:

1. Candle Mountain
2. The Caloundra South Development
3. Climbing Coolum Mountain in 1927

The Indigenous people from the Undumbi, Nalbo, Dallambarra and Gubbi Gubbi clans have a long, long association with the Sunshine Coast. In the 1920s, when Vance and Nettie Palmer, the two significant Australian writers, were living in Caloundra, down on the Passage, deeply interested in questions of the human relationship to the environment, they began to ask questions about the land, the place and how it was changing. One time they climbed to the top of Candle Mountain, where they stayed. The air, Vance tells us, was so clear that he could see as far as the Tweed River hills across the state border, in northern New South Wales. Can we see so far today?  Vance’s view from the top of the mountain of the changing human habitation is pretty clear too, even as it locates him in the 1920s when he writes of Indigenous traditional cultures.

Original Image by: John Burrows

Looking down from the southern escarpment of the Blackall Ranges, one can see a bare pyramid standing out among the tumbled ridges west of the Glass Houses. It catches the eye by its symmetry. In the olden days, so I am told, when all these hills were well wooded, it stood out in even more striking fashion than it does today. That, in fact, is why it is called Candle Mountain. It served the blacks as a beacon, and when there was need to call the wandering tribes together a fire was lit on its summit – a fire that could be seen from all the broken country around, right down to the Pine River. And the view from the top… But that is anticipating. The first business is to get there.

One approaches it to-day from the little township of Beerwah, climbing up through Peachester and Crohamhurst. There is a new road now to Peachester, with a macadamised surface and easy grades, and it was needed badly enough. The previous road was a painful affair of deep ruts and steep hills and the most pleasant feature of it was a wayside store that had been used as an inn in the old coaching days. It has the atmosphere of an inn still, with its low, shingled roof, its rambling outhouses, and its great pine trees that show deep shadows, even at midday.

At Peachester one gets into flat, dairying country, with green paddocks and the feeling of running water all around. Higher still is Crohamhurst, from which Mr. Inigo Jones used to watch the sun changing its spots in the way that is prohibited to the proverbial leopard. There is a richness about all this country that is very satisfying. You know from the keenness of the air that you are well above the sea, and yet all around are quiet paddocks, with cattle wading knee-deep through the paspalum, little creeks full of water-cress, all the idyllic life of a sheltered, remote valley. And it has the feeling of having been settled a long time. Most of the farmhouses are built solidly, with shingled roofs, gardens full of fruit trees, and the comfortable, weather-worn look of places that were not blown together yesterday by a jerry-builder.

From Crohamhurst it is a mile-and-a half of steady climbing to the top of Candle Mountain. A narrow, twisty road, hardly possible for anything on wheels! From a tree-filled valley, full of scrub scents and the tang of damp earth, one gradually rises to bare mountainsides covered with coarse, stubbly grass. It is not till near the very summit that the view brakes upon one. Then what a brilliant and blinding view. The coast running with its tiny white fringe from Coolum to the mouth of the Brisbane, the Glasshouses lifting from the wooded flats below and looking quaintly surprised at having been taken from the rear, a ring of mountains all around, except for the segment cut out of the circle by the sea. Over everything the shimmer of spring, smoke rising in faint, blue spirals from hidden fires, the roofs of distant farmhouses flashing like bits of broken glass, a pocket-handkerchief of green showing in some clearing. It feels like being up in a balloon, and looking down.

To cap it all there is a little boarding-house perched like an eagle’s nest on the summit, with a roofless look-out on which one can sit and take in the prospect. No, an eagle’s nest is hardly the image, for it is surrounded by about an acre of cool orchard, filled with mandarins, shade trees, all kinds of citrus-fruit. The novelty of finding such a fruitful place on the tip of a pyramid is piquant and delightful. There was always a layer of good soil on the crest of this mountain, I have been told. It grew grass in the old days when there was practically none in the wooded country below, and the bullock-drivers, snaking out the timber, drove their bullocks up to the top for pasture.

Going down from the look-out, it is easy to go back over the history of the north coast and piece some of it together. To the south and east lies what was once the old station of Durundur, once owned by the Archers, a Scottish-Norwegian family, who did such solid pioneering work here, and afterwards went back to Norway, to build the Fram and start Nansen off on his famous voyage. The old Gympie road can almost be traced on the crests of the ridges below. Except for isolated patches of good dairying land it is not rich country, all this vast area lying beneath the Pine River and the Blackall Ranges. It is far from being thickly settled now, and one can guess what a wilderness it must have seemed 40 years ago, when the man who built this home on Candle Mountain came riding up from Brisbane at night, threading his way along the old bullock tracks.

But what a picturesque touch its very leanness and lack of settlement lends it! At night it has depth and mystery, with the dark mountains hemming it in like the rim of a basin, and the few lighthouses winking along the coast like faint stars. In the morning it shimmers in an almost unearthly light, the sun pouring a flood of thin gold over the matted carpet of tree-tops below, and the walls of the Blackalls, the Glasshouses, and the Aguilar ranges standing out with all their contours clearly modelled. The height of Candle Mountain is not great, yet so isolated in its position and clear its air that the eye takes in vast distances – picking out Tambourine, Toowoomba even, the hills above the Tweed.

At the back the Stanley River has its source. It is one of the most delightful little streams, running swiftly over water-worn stones into deep pools, over hung by water-myrtles and filled with cod and cat-fish. No one ever quite accepts fishing stories, but I am ready to believe that there is better sport for the angler here than in many seaside places. And even if the fishing were poor, it would be pleasant to drop a line into such a bubbly mountain stream, and just wait for what turned up.

Thick scrub comes down to the bank in places – palms, bunya pines, a tangle of nameless trees with glossy, enamelled leaves and a wealth of shade. The air is full of the deep, liquid calls of whip-birds, musical as dripping water. Kingfishers flit like gorgeous butterflies among the trailing water-myrtles. And driftwood, high on the banks and in branches overhead, shows with what force this torrent comes down in the rainy season, when a thousand little feeding streams pour down from the surrounding hills.

But night brings thoughts of the blacks again, and the beacon fire on the mountain that once called the tribes together. It is nourishing to the imagination to get these hints of a dark life that went on here within the memory of living men, and yet it is so far away. One can picture answering fires flaring up from the scrubby fastness of Witta, the Aguilar ranges, the fishing grounds along Pumicestone Passage; one can picture the fugitive groups trailing in to come borah or feast of the Bunya. It is a pity there is no memorial on Candle Mountain to show what significance it once held.

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Related posts:

1. Caloundra: reasons for being there
2. Climbing Coolum Mountain in 1927

A brooding Mt Coolum. Image: greghardwick.com.au

In this breezy account of a clamber up Mount Coolum, Vance Palmer, one of Australia's most significant writers of the time, opens with the Aboriginal Creation Story. Now we leave those paragraphs out, in respect to the Indigenous owners. And while Vance doesn't tell us whom he climbed the mountain with we can presume it was Nettie Palmer, his wife. His story is mostly celebratory, but he begins to articulate his concern about tree clearing. More of that was to come.

Watching its faint dome from the distance [from Caloundra], during the last 18 months, I have often wondered what the outlook was from on top. It commands some very lovely country. There is the long, winding valley of the Maroochy River, with its canefields, and its fertile paddocks; there is the dazzling strip of beach from Caloundra Head to Noosa; there are the Blackall Ranges in the back ground.

But there are so many interesting places to explore in this wonderland of white beaches and strange mountains. It was only recently that I was able to make the expedition to Coolum.  Crossing the Maroochy River, one travels north along the beach, a stretch of firm, white sand; when the tide is out, with Old Woman Island lying out at sea to the right, a triangle of dark rock, topped with shimmering green. Ahead, a little inland, lies Coolum, but its seaward face shows no accessible path.

Smooth and round at the top, its sides are sliced as if with a knife, and present walls of solid rock dropping sheer for a couple of hundred feet or so. It is necessary to make a detour and tackle it from behind. One walks along the beach, watching its huge bulk tower above the tea-tree and sand-dunes, and trying to figure out a track to the summit.?? Nine miles along the beach is broken by high cliffs that fall abruptly to the sea, but a bridle track runs over the top through the thick bush. Beautiful bush it is!

Thick, dark cypress pines meet overhead; small hoop pines shoot up at either side; the tangled gullies are full of birds. It is strange to see tropical scrubs so close to the sea. Below, the breakers are pounding on huge rocks but here above in this pillared cathedral there is dark shade and stillness. One emerges at last at Coolum Beach - a handful of red-roofed houses, green hills sloping to the sea, and cattle feeding in an atmosphere of pastoral calm.

A delightful little village, bringing to mind H. G. Well’s description of a landscape in Province, where a herdsman tending his goats looked “more like an elegant quotation from Theocritus than an economic fact."

Coolum Beach lies almost three miles north-east of the mountain, and is protected by it and by the broken heads from the worst ravages of the winds. Probably in summer there are crowds of holiday-makers on the dazzling strip of beach, but in winter the bundle of small houses is wrapped in a Sabbath calm. From just above the beach runs a tram line to Nambour, tapping the canefields and dairying country that lie inland. Following it along for two miles we circle round the base on the mountain, looking for a slope on which to begin the ascent.

“Don't go off the track,” a farmer’s wife warns us, “or you will be wandering about all night upon the mountain.”

But if there ever was a beaten track, it must have been pretty thoroughly wiped out by the autumn rains. Here and there are indications of one, but they come to an end in a wilderness. A deep indentation in the loose soil promises better things, and we climb in comparative comfort for a hundred yards or so. Alas, it is only the rut some timber-getter made when snigging out a felled log!

There is nothing for it but to put all thoughts of tracks aside, and climb, trusting to luck and judgement.  On a hot summer's day it would prove breathless, exhausting work, but with the tang of summer in the air one can make light of it. The foothold is insecure, slipping stones and crumbling gravel, and sometimes one is reduced to crawling on hands and knees.  Above are frowning faces of rock with just one clear slope between them. Scrambling and slipping we make for these, taking occasional backward looks at the country beneath, which can only be seen in sketchy glimpses through the tangled timber and undergrowth.

At last -- the summit! No, it is not; it proves to be merely a spur, covered with huge boulders of granite! There is another climb of a few hundred feet, but the slope is more gradual, running through a thinning mass of grass-trees to a bare knoll.  The further climb is worth the effort. The view breaks one suddenly, like the stage at a théatre when the foot lights are flashed on, and the curtains go up. Far below, the sea runs to the horizon, a measureless expanse, with a faint fringe of foam round it edges. Twenty-five miles to the south a dim white dot marks the Caloundra light-house. Fifteen miles to the north, Cootharaba lake shrinks to a little puddle of water, that has spilled over from the sea at Noosa Head. But it is the shimmering ocean floor that the eye rests on first, before it begins to pick out land-marks.

Somewhere near Moreton Island a spot the size of a pea is obviously a sea-going steamer. Another smaller boat, not far from it, looks more like a grain of moistened sugar. Tiny rings appear on the surface of the water. Do they show where whales have risen to blow? It is too far away to see the faint film of spray rise.  On the landward side the features are more definite. To the south-west lie the Glasshouse Mountains, seeming to merge into the Blackhall Range. In the foreground, the Maroochy River runs like a twisted silver ribbon, losing itself among dark blotches of timber, and appearing again with little green flats on either side. It is hard to realise at first that this valley of the Maroochy is supposed to be the most thickly settled stretch of agricultural country in the continent. Scarcely a house is visible. One only knows that it is fertile, and crowded by the greenness of the tiny squares that appear among the trees.

Travelling through the country, one often has the feeling that all the timber is going down, and that soon none will remain, but here, up in the sky, the chief impression is of limitless tracts of timber. The little townships and clearings are lost in that almost unbroken mat of tree-tops. Probably even in overcrowded Belgium one would get that impression of perpetual forest when looking down from an aeroplane. Here the most pleasing evidences of fertility of the country come from the shiny streaks of water – the Maroochy and Mooloolah Rivers, Lake Cootharaba, and other creeks and reedy lakes. It is a good country that the eye ranges over, except for the sandy tracts of tea-tree country near the coast.?? And it is something to have it laid out so clearly, with nothing to block the view in any direction, a relief map, with all the added wonders of reality. Once comes down with a peculiar sense of exhilaration in the mind.

“I have seen distance, and have drunk of it.”

A very satisfying drink it makes, and the intoxication lasts a long time. Slipping down, amid the crumbling gravel and sliding boulders, one feels a little more reckless, and light-hearted, than when making the ascent.

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Related posts:

1. A tramp beside the sea
2. Caloundra: reasons for being there
3. Candle Mountain

Walking back in time. Image: greghardwick.com.au

The Sunshine Coast was home to two gifted writers, Vance and Nettie Palmer, from 1925. In those days when few white people were exploring  the bush, they were out most days, glorying in the earth and sea and sky.

These were the years of their daughters growing, running free among the heath and sheoaks; the time of struggling as poets and freelance writers to find a voice and to write of the land; the time of learning how to get across their political message about how the bush was being whacked, and how a sheoak is not a sheoak unless the child is reared to name and love it.

The Palmers went on to be one of Australia's most important literary couples in the 1940s and '50s. Vance was novelist, dramatist, cultural critic and political commentator; Nettie was journalist, literary critic, historian, biographer and essayist. Some of you will know Vance's  novel The Passage.

Through their early environmental writings, drawing directly on their experiences, we can begin to see another dimension of our landscape, of our society in transition from the pristine environment while cared for only by Aboriginal custodians to the skyscrapers of the present. This early piece by Vance was written for the Daily Mail (3 October, 1925).

There is something in the liquid beauty of the name [Caloundra] that suits the place for the vowels fall on the ear like the musical dripping of water. In coming here, I was personally prepared for beauty, but hardly for such variety in its forms. There are the rocks that run out from the little headland, for instance, a perfect wonderland in themselves. When the tide is out, it is possible to spend endless hours exploring the little pools that have been left behind, some still and clear as dew-drops, others receiving continual little frehets of water and swarming with all kinds of marine life...

Gorgeous anemones, red and green, spread out their flower-like tentacles, cowries are hidden in the fissures: and in the wide, shallow pools the beche-de-mer lies like a harvest of black cucumbers, whose vines have mysteriously vanished. Here is all the life and colour of a coral reef. Peering into the still pools one sees fantastic patterns like those woven on Chinese cloths delicate tracings in black and heliotrope that seem part of a deliberate design. Occasionally under a ledge of rock an octopus finds cover, an image of absolute evil in its startling green and orange, with the white disc-like suckers showing vividly against the colour of its waving tentacles. Looking at it, one suddenly discovers where the Chinese artist got their idea of a dragon from. Indeed Chinese art must have found a good deal of its inspiration in the marine life of places like this. There are the delicate colourings, the grotesque shapes, the sense of an intense, unreal world of beauty and monstrosity.

Rowing over to Bribie across the still water, one enters another world that is just as absorbing in its own way. The boat noses against a tangled beach that is lined with a thin strip of sand, with the water running green, and deep quite close to shore. A paradise for fishermen, especially those of the amateur kind. On lucky days one will find the bream and whiting swarming round the bait as soon as it is thrown into the water. There is no need of the infinite patience and cunning that comes of long years of angling in less populous waters. They say that fishing was once a still easier business at Caloundra, and that continual netting at the mouth of the passage has spoilt the place from the angler's point of view.

That may be so, but every place has the legend of a golden past, even when the present is brightly-coloured enough.

From the other side of the island comes the boom of the surf, tempting one through the trackless growths of scrub. A tangled, semi-tropical scrub, filled with birds. Even the grey harmonica is here, that sweetest singer of all our birds, that seems to belong to the cool, fern gullies of the South. From one side of the island to the other is barely a hundred yards in places, yet so dense is the scrub, so primitive and secret, that it seems to mark a division between two different worlds. One emerges at last on the blinding white ocean beach, with the sense of having made a journey of exploration.

This end of Bribie that abuts on Caloundra will ultimately become one of the chief playgrounds of Queensland, if not of the whole Commonwealth, and it should be kept as a rigid sanctuary for native birds and animals. There is still plenty of wild life on it. As we push off from the shore, a grey kangaroo stands by the waters edge as motionless as a figure carved in stone, looking at the boat with wondering eyes. Suddenly it is gone, thudding through the dense, brittle scrub and startling the birds. Overhead comes a flight of swans, formed in a phalanx. Their long necks stretched out and their heads turned to the settling sun. Hardly a drip comes from the oars as they lift from the still water. It is all magically beautiful, and ought to be allowed to remain undisturbed for the next hundred years a paradise from which guns are barred, or any other weapon more deadly than a scout knife of a fish-hook.

Can any-one tell us does the Grey Harmonica still inhabit Bribie, or has any-one seen the beche-de-mer?

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