The full directory
All 72 guides, grouped by theme
Each guide is one complete story: the gradient, a force, an ecosystem, a place you can stand in and read, a species, a season, or the work of caring for the coast. Filter, or jump to a theme.
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The gradient — reef to range
The one rule that lines up the whole coast.
The forces — rock · soil · water · fire
Rock, soil, water and fire: the four things that do the shaping.
Deep time — the making of the rock The peaks on the skyline are the hard cores of volcanoes that died twenty-six or twenty-seven million years ago, and they are already half gone. 
Fire — the force that draws the boundaries Each world along the gradient is built around a different flame. So which fire is the right one? 
Podzolisation — how sand goes bankrupt A force too slow to watch, and the reason a coastal dune grows poorer the longer it stands. 
Water — the force that sorts the country Water rinses the sand coast poor, then hides beneath it the freshwater store that keeps the heath alive through the dry. The ecosystems — habitats
The worlds the gradient builds, reef to range.
Eucalypt forest and woodland The green-grey bush you drive past without looking. Read its floor and you can tell when fire last came through. 
Paperbark swamp and blackwater sedgeland The flat, wet, pale-barked country behind the dunes does for free the flood control we pay engineers to do worse. 
Sea country The land's gradient carries on underwater, sorted now by light and depth instead of soil. 
Subtropical rainforest (the big scrub) The tallest, most crowded forest on the coast shuts fire out by staying whole. Let one in, and there is no way back. 
The tidal estuary Most of the fish we catch off this coast grew up in its muddiest, least-loved ground. The wallum This heath runs on four scarcities at once, and cannot do without any of them. The places — where to go
Real ground you can stand on and read.
Bribie Island & the Pumicestone Passage A long, sheltered tidal passage between a sand island and the mainland: a whole estuary read in one calm run of water. Carlo Sandblow A dune on the move above Rainbow Beach, burying living forest at one end and uncovering the ground it crossed at the other. Cooloola (Great Sandy National Park) A field of dunes that get older the further inland you walk: a soil's whole life laid out in a row. Kondalilla Falls Two forests meet at this waterfall, and the line between them is drawn by a slab of hard rock the stream drops off — older, as it turns out, than the range it crosses. Mary Cairncross Reserve Rainforest once ran the length of the Blackall Range. Some fifty-five hectares of it still stand above Maleny. Mount Coolum A dome of bare volcanic rock standing straight off a flat coastal sand plain, its summit and its apron wearing the same low heath. Mount Ninderry Nothing pushed this peak up. Everything around it was softer, and quietly went. Mount Tinbeerwah A volcanic plug behind Noosa, and a lookout over the sand country that the Cooloola campaign kept out of the miners' hands. Mudjimba Island (Old Woman Island) Neither the fox nor the cat swims willingly, which is what makes a small rock island offshore a place a seabird can still dig a burrow and raise a chick. Noosa headland (coastal rocky reefs) A few metres below one of Queensland's most walked shorelines, a reef almost nobody thinks about. Point Cartwright & the Mooloolaba rocky reef A worked headland under a lighthouse, where many of the fish that hold on the reef were raised in the seagrass behind it. The Conondale Range The tallest, wettest pole of the forest gradient: gums in the gullies that pass fifty metres, standing on ground poorer than they make it look. The Glass House Mountains Sheer volcanic plugs rearing straight off the plain. Nothing pushed them up. The Maroochy River flats Grey tidal mud where the Maroochy meets the sea: a nursery for the bay's fisheries, and an acid that wakes if you drain it. The Noosa Everglades (Upper Noosa River) The upper Noosa runs dark, acid and almost still, and it does not dry when the rain stops. Wolf Rock (Double Island Point) The only known place on the east coast where pregnant females of a critically endangered shark gather to carry their young is four stones in open water off Double Island Point.
The species — plants & animals
Who lives here, and what they depend on.
Plants 11
Bunya pine A conifer that rides above the rainforest canopy and drops cones weighing five to ten kilograms. Far too heavy for wind or bird to carry. Dune pioneers The dune that shelters this coast was built, grain by grain, by three sprawling plants that are standing on top of it. Grass-tree Neither grass nor tree, centuries old at head height, and cued to flower by the smoke of a burn. Hoop pine A pale conifer standing alone above the rainforest roof, fifty or sixty metres up, the odd one out among the broad-leaved trees below. Paperbark The pale, papery-barked tree that stands in airless, acid, waterlogged ground where other trees drown. Red cedar The most valuable timber in eastern Australia never grew in stands, which is why the cutters had to range across the whole forest. Scribbly gum A tall pale gum covered in looping scribbles, growing on sand that holds almost no nitrogen. She-oak The whistling tree that fertilises the ground it stands on, and feeds a bird that will eat almost nothing else. Strangler fig A tree that begins high in another tree's fork and lets its roots down to the ground. The host does not survive. The grey mangrove A tree that lives in salt water and airless mud, and breathes through a bed of roots standing up out of the tide. Wallum banksia The gnarled, corky-barked shrub that gives the wallum its name, and mines its own phosphorus out of sand that has almost none left.
Birds 5
The Australian brush-turkey Chicks that hatch deep inside a compost heap, dig their own way out, and never meet a parent. The glossy black-cockatoo A smoky-brown cockatoo that lives on a she-oak cone almost nothing else bothers with, and nests only in hollows a century in the making. The ground parrot A parrot that gave up the trees, and lives only in heath of one particular age since the last fire. The migratory shorebirds A bird the weight of a small parcel crosses an ocean without once feeding. This grey mud is where it refuels. The powerful owl The continent's largest owl needs two things: a hollow big enough to breed in, and a whole forest full of possums to hunt.
Mammals 4
The flying-foxes The keystone everyone has been taught to hate: a bat carrying pollen and seed between forest patches, and often the only thing still joining them. The forest diggers Small night-digging marsupials that eat buried fungi and, in the eating, plant the partner the trees depend on. The greater glider A cat-sized possum that crosses the forest without touching the ground, and cannot live there without hollows that take a century to form. The koala The region's emblem lives on almost nothing but eucalypt leaf, from particular trees, in forest still joined up enough to cross.
In the sea 4
The dugong A mammal the size of a small cow grazes an underwater meadow a few hundred metres off this coast. The grey nurse shark Divers line up to swim with it. Its face is the reason it was very nearly wiped out. The humpback whale Hunted along this coast down to a few hundred animals. Tens of thousands now, and each winter they pass in plain sight. The loggerhead turtle A turtle with no sex chromosome. The temperature of the sand its eggs are buried in decides whether they hatch male or female.
Frogs, fish & insects 3
Richmond birdwing One of Australia's largest butterflies, tied by a single thread to one native rainforest vine its caterpillars can eat and nothing else. The acid frogs of the wallum A small club of frogs breeds in water acid enough to kill most other freshwater animals. The acid is also their protection. The acid-water fish of the wallum Two thumb-sized fish that live in water so sour that almost no other fish shares it. A refuge, but a partial one.
The guilds — who works together
The working crews of the web of life: partners named by the job they do, not the species they are.
Through the year — season by season
The same country, read season by season.
Autumn — the fruiting and the turn The summer wet eases, the rainforest comes into fruit, and the forest's next generation leaves in the gut of a pigeon or a bat. Spring wildflowers in the wallum Spring in the wallum heath is hundreds of species coming into flower at once. Every bloom is a livelihood falling due. Summer frog-song and the wet One hot night of summer rain sets the wallum swamps roaring, and some of the callers breed in water too sour for almost anything else. The naturalist's year Spring wildflowers, summer frog-song, autumn fruit and nectar, winter whales and wattle. The coast keeps its own seasons, and the weather sets them. Whale season — the humpback highway Twice a year the humpbacks pass the headlands close enough to watch from a clifftop: north through winter, south again in spring with calves. Wildflower season in the sand country For a few weeks from late winter into spring the wallum heath stages the coast's biggest wildflower event, building in August and peaking September–October. Winter whales and cold-season blossom Winter looks like the coast's empty season. It is when the humpbacks go north past the headlands and a few trees flower against the cold.
Caring for country — protected & repaired
How the coast was shaped, and how it is read, protected and repaired today.
Caring for Country today Why you cannot care for this coast by leaving it alone. Protected country: keeping what's left The cheapest and surest form of care is to keep the intact country intact. Not all of that country sits inside a park. Saving Cooloola (and the dam that wasn't built) The fight that stopped sand-mining at Cooloola and made it a national park in 1975. The Blue Heart A century ago this floodplain was drained for cane. Now more than five thousand hectares of it are being deliberately put back under water. The century of extraction (the taking, in order) For a short, violent century the coast was mined of its trees, soil, whales and fur. The most valuable things went first. The koala recovery effort A locally made vaccine can now cut koala deaths from the disease that blinds them. It still cannot plant a tree. The Noosa oyster reef A whole habitat vanished from the Noosa River before anyone thought to record it. Putting it back starts with a barge-load of clean shell. The restorer's toolkit Three restoration methods this coast has taken up and contributed to, and every one of them works by doing less than instinct demands. The things we let loose Almost everything the settlers let loose here arrived with the best of intentions. Very little of it simply joined the country's ecology. The work of many hands A surprising share of the caring for this coast is done by ordinary people, at the scale of the weed and the single creature.
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