Candle Mountain
Selected by Dr Deborah Jordan and taken from a newspaper cutting held in the Palmer Papers.
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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