Caloundra: reasons for being there
Selected by Dr Deborah Jordan and taken from a newspaper cutting held in the Palmer Papers. This piece, Caloundra: reasons for being there was first published in the Brisbane Telegraph, 28 January 1928.
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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