The Conondale Range

Keep climbing inland, past the first low ranges, up where the road bends into cloud and the country keeps getting wetter, and you reach the Conondale: the high, folded, rain-soaked range at the far end of the whole reef-to-range climb. This is where you arrive when the land has run out of higher, wetter ground to offer. It shows in the trees. The gums are nothing like the spaced, sunlit trees of the open ridges below. They rise as giants, pale straight columns lifting clear for many metres before they throw a branch, standing over a soft green understorey that already looks half rainforest. Wet sclerophyll, the tall timber. It grows this big for one plain reason. Water, on sheltered ground, builds trees. A flooded gum in one of these gullies will pass fifty metres and reach for seventy, among the tallest, fastest-growing trees on the continent.

The tall forest never quite settles. Its giant eucalypts cannot raise their own young in their own shade; the seedlings need bared, sunlit, ash-cleared ground to get away. So the forest leans on fire to come through now and then, open the floor, and beat back the rainforest that forever creeps up out of the sheltered gullies. Withhold fire and the gullies win: the rainforest closes over, and the tall gums, unable to regenerate beneath it, are quietly replaced. Send too much fire, too fierce, and the slow growers and the damp-loving gully plants die outright. Which forest holds which ground is the fire boundary’s story; here the story is simpler — the forest lives balanced on that knife-edge, too little flame and it turns into something else, too much and it burns down to something poorer. The most majestic forest on the range survives by the grace of a force we usually file under destruction.

Drop into one of the gorges, where streams saw down through the range’s hard old basement, and you leave the eucalypts behind and step into cool, closed rainforest, dim and dripping and still. Deep, sheltered, ancient forest — and it holds animals that reach no further. Roll a rotting log here and you may turn up a land mullet, a glossy blue-black skink as long as your forearm, running clean out of continent; the Conondale, near Maleny, is about as far north as the species gets.

Be honest about the ground, though: the range is not quite what its grandeur suggests. Much of the Conondale runs on the Amamoor and Booloumba Beds, old hard metasedimentary basement laid down and folded long before the volcanoes ever fired, rather than on Maleny’s rich red basalt. Basalt caps the higher ground in patches, and where it does it weathers to the deep red fertile soil that rainforest most needs. But that soil holds only on the caps, not across the whole range. So the wealth here is written less in the rock than in the rain and the shelter: deeper, moister soils gathered in protected ground, and the heaviest rain on the coast funnelled into gorges too damp and too sheltered for fire to reach. The giant trees and the gorge rainforest grow on that — more than on any single stone beneath them.