Climbing Coolum Mountain in 1927
The following story is taken from a newspaper cutting held in the Palmer Papers.
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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