Free classroom downloads
Take the diagrams home
The whole of Same Sky, Different Ground — and the 27 diagrams and maps made for it — free to download, print and use in classrooms, field stations and on the wall.
The diagrams were drawn one by one for this coast, and the maps are rendered from the state's own elevation and geology data — not clip art. Free for personal, classroom and community use under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (credit the book, don't resell). Each is a print-ready PDF at a true 300 dpi. The diagrams trim landscape, about 28 cm wide, so they sit happily on A4. The maps are tall portrait sheets, 24 cm wide and 39 to 50 cm high, drawn to be printed big or scaled down to A4.
The whole book
Same Sky, Different Ground — free, in full
The diagrams and maps below come out of a book, and the book is free too: all nineteen chapters, from the reef to the range, with every map and every source. No account and no email address.
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EPUB reflows for phones and e-readers; the PDF keeps the fixed pages and colour maps, and prints well. More about the book →

The Great Gradient
The whole coast in one section — rainforest, gum forest, swamp, wallum, estuary and reef down a single slope. The spine of the whole thing.
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Landforms in section
Range, foothills, floodplain, sand and sea in profile.
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How a sand podzol forms
How wallum sand bleaches white over thousands of years.
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Rainforest structure
Canopy, sub-canopy, understorey and floor.
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Estuary zonation
Seagrass, mangrove and saltmarsh, sorted by the tide.
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Wetland zonation
The zones of a paperbark swamp, open water to dry edge.
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How the dune lakes work
Perched lakes and window lakes explained.
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Sea country
Beach to boulder reef to open water, seagrass between.
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How fire draws the boundary
The hard line between eucalypt forest and rainforest.
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The volcanic hotspot track
How the Glass House Mountains and hinterland peaks were built.
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Mount Ninderry cross-section
The geological bones of one peak.
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The Reader's Year
A naturalist's seasonal wheel of the coast.
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The mending ground
Every hectare bought back, replanted, burnt on purpose or weeded across both councils, and the thirty years of Environment Levy behind it.
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What has been cleared
Remnant vegetation against what stood here before, ecosystem by ecosystem. The land-cover change map.
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The intertidal coast
Mangrove, saltmarsh, seagrass and sand flat, mapped from satellite between the tides.
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The Sunshine Coast
Where everything is: Glass House Mountains to the Cooloola sand mass, with the places the book keeps returning to.
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The ecological zones
The base map every chapter leans on — the coast sorted into the zones the gradient makes.
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The rock beneath
The region's real geology from detailed state mapping. Everything else on this page is downstream of it.
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The land by its chemistry
A gamma-ray view that sees past the vegetation to the ground itself. The quartz sand reads almost black.
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Clay and acid
The gradient rule written in the soil: rich clay on the basalt hinterland, bottomless acid sand at the coast.
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Where the country burns
Ten years of fire scars. The sand, wallum and dry eucalypt country carry nearly all of it.
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The same rain, different ground
Rainfall barely changes across the coast. The ground changes enormously. That is the whole argument in one figure.
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The same rain
Average annual rainfall, climbing gently from the coast to the range.
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Reef to range
The land relief carried out to sea with real bathymetry. The gradient does not stop at the beach.
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Freshwater held by the ground
Where the paperbark and sedge swamps sit, and why they sit there.
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The reserved country
The conservation estate, clustered on the infertile ground nobody wanted to farm.
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What we do with the ground
The human footprint following the natural gradient: cane on the floodplain, houses on the sand, forest on the steep.
Download PDF (300 dpi) →Using these with a class or group? I'd love to know — get in touch. Want the whole story behind them? The book →