Mary Cairncross Reserve

Mary Cairncross rides the crest of the Blackall Range above Maleny: some fifty-five hectares of the old big scrub kept whole on deep red basalt, in the care of the Sunshine Coast Council. Leave the mown picnic ground, step in under the trees, and everything changes at once. A few paces past the grass the light sinks to a green underwater dusk, the air turns cool and wet, and the glare and the road noise fall away behind you. What replaces them is small and close: water ticking somewhere out of sight, and the clatter of a pigeon breaking from a branch overhead. A whipbird cracks once and falls silent. This one fragment now stands in for a forest that used to run unbroken along the whole range.

Why here, of all the slope? A single line answers it, and the rest of these guides fill it in: this is the wettest, most fertile rung of the long climb up from the sea, deep basalt clay lying under the range’s heaviest rain, and a canopy that closes right over your head. The soil that does the work has its own guide (basalt fertility); here it is enough to know the forest sits where the ground can afford to keep it.

Give your eyes a minute in the gloom and read what that ground grew. The huge grey trees whose trunks flare at the foot into wide, flat plates of wood are booyongs, the old giants of the scrub; those plates are props, the answer of a top-heavy tree that holds itself upright sideways because it never put down a taproot at all. Off the path a strangler fig stands as a lattice of fused roots wrapped around a core of empty air, the host it germinated on long since rotted clean out of the middle. Piccabeen palms crowd the shaded midstorey, their smooth green crownshafts catching what little light gets down. And at dusk the red-legged pademelons step out to graze the verges, the reserve’s resident mob so used to walkers that it has given up bolting, so that for once you can stand still and watch a rainforest wallaby feed.

One thing above all holds this ground for the forest. Kept whole, its interior stays too dark and too damp to carry a flame, so fire running through the open eucalypt country upslope reaches the green edge and dies at it (that boundary has an entry of its own). But the defence is all or nothing, and it buys no protection from steel. The cedar-getters worked the range first, drawing out the prized red timber ahead of almost any other settlement; the general clearing came behind them through the 1880s and 1890s, axe and firestick together, to open the dairy country underneath. A standing scrub offered the newcomer two payments in one: cabinet timber to sell now, and the richest farmland on the coast waiting beneath it. Against that sum the forest had nothing to bargain with.

That is what makes the surviving patch matter out of all proportion to its size. It can still be read. On the same red basalt, this is the forest that once cloaked the range from end to end and was gone inside a single working lifetime. So walk it slowly. You are not looking at a woodlot that will grow back within your own; you are looking at a window somebody had the wit to leave open, and the nearest thing left to standing inside the big scrub entire.