The Conondale Range

Keep climbing inland from the coast, past the first ranges, and the country goes on rising and getting wetter until you reach the Conondale — the high, folded, rain-soaked range that stands at the far end of the whole reef-to-range climb. This is where the forest stops being scenery and starts being cathedral. The gum trees here are not the spaced, sunlit trees of the open ridges; they are giants, straight pale columns lifting clear for many metres before they throw a branch, standing over a soft green understorey that already looks half like rainforest. This is the tall timber, the wet sclerophyll, and it grows this big for one simple reason: this is the wettest country on the coast, and water, on good ground, builds trees.

The strange thing about the tall forest is that it is never quite settled. Its giant eucalypts cannot raise their own young in their own shade, so the forest depends on fire to come through now and then, open the ground, and beat back the rainforest that is forever creeping up out of the sheltered gullies. Withhold fire and the gullies win — the rainforest closes over and the tall gums, unable to regenerate, are slowly replaced. Send too much fire, too fierce, and the slow growers and the damp-loving gully plants are killed outright. So the grandest forest on the coast lives balanced on a knife-edge of flame: too little and it turns into something else, too much and it burns down to something poorer. It is one of the quiet marvels of this country that its most majestic forest stands only by the grace of a force we usually think of as destruction.

Drop into one of the gorges — Booloumba country, where streams saw through the range — and you leave the eucalypts behind entirely and step into cool, closed rainforest, the wet pole of the gradient at its purest. This is deep, sheltered, ancient forest, and it holds animals that reach no further: turn a rotting log here and you may find a land mullet, a big glossy blue-black skink as long as your forearm, running out of continent, because the Conondale is about as far north as it gets. Honesty about the rock, though: much of this range is not the rich red basalt of Maleny but old, hard metasedimentary stone, so the wealth here is written less in the rock than in the rain and the shelter. It is the most water and the deepest gullies, more than any one soil, that grow the biggest trees on the coast.