Eco online

A tramp beside the sea

Take a walk in August from Maroochydoore to Caloundra? Along the beach at low tide? While we no longer call it ‘tramping’, read between the lines here and it is still a fair distance to hike. When Vance and Nettie Palmer walked this southward route about ninety years ago, they encountered all kinds of creatures [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Climbing Coolum Mountain in 1927

The following story is taken from a newspaper cutting held in the Palmer Papers.
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 [...]

Charms of Caloundra in 1925

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 [...]