Wonders

The stories too good to leave out

Every landscape has its set-pieces, the tales that make you stop and look again. Here are a handful of the Sunshine Coast's best: dead volcanoes, a soil you can read like a diary, frogs that breed in vinegar, and the whales that came back from the edge.

Wonder

The blue peaks are dead volcanoes

Those steep blue hills on the skyline are the burnt-out plumbing of volcanoes that stopped erupting 26 to 27 million years ago.

Look west from almost anywhere on the coast and you'll see them: a row of steep blue-grey domes and spires standing up out of flat farmland like something dropped there by mistake. They are the Glass House Mountains, and they are the worn-down cores of volcanoes that last erupted 26 to 27 million years ago.

When a volcano dies, the soft ash and lava that built its slopes wear away first. What lasts is the hard plug of rock that cooled solid in the throat. The plumbing. Everything softer around it has simply been rained away over the 26 million years since, leaving the plug standing alone. Every one of those peaks is a volcano turned inside out: the outside gone, the inside left pointing at the sky.

Hard rock stands up; soft rock wears down. That is the first lesson in reading this coast, and once you know it the whole skyline reorganises itself in front of you.

From Chapters 2–3 · The making of the rock · Read the guide → · See them on the map →

Wonder

The dunes keep a diary

At Cooloola the youngest sand lies at the beach and the oldest inland, so walking away from the sea is walking forward in time.

Sand dunes don't usually keep a record of themselves. At Cooloola they do, and reading it takes an afternoon. It is one of the finest places on Earth to watch a soil be born, grow rich and slowly starve.

Dig into the oldest sand and there it is: a bone-white column stripped of everything soluble, running more than twenty metres straight down, taller than the forest standing on top of it. Every trace of nutrient has been washed downward and away by seven or eight hundred thousand years of rain.

Keep walking inland and the forest shrinks, tall trees giving way to low heath as the last of the food drains out of the ground. Nothing has gone wrong. You are watching a landscape run out of nutrients in slow motion, and you can put your hand on the evidence.

From Chapter 4 · Soil · Read the guide → · See Cooloola on the map →

Wonder

The frogs that breed in vinegar

In the dark pools of the wallum, frogs raise their young in water as sour as orange juice, and far more acid than any pond — and are safer for it.

The water in the wallum heath behind the beach is a strange thing to look at: standing pools the colour of strong, cold tea, stained by the sand and steeped sour. Nothing, you'd think, could breed in that.

The acid frogs breed in that, and in little else. They have evolved to lay and hatch in water acidic enough to see off almost everything that would otherwise eat their eggs and tadpoles. The very thing that makes the water look dead is what keeps their nursery safe.

The whole wallum lives by that rule. The acid does the frogs' fighting for them.

From Chapter 9 · Dunes, wallum & acid waters · Read the guide → · Read the wallum →

Wonder

The godwits' impossible flight

The unremarkable brown birds feeding on the Maroochy mudflats have just flown here from the Arctic. Without stopping.

On a smelly stretch of tidal mud where the rivers meet the sea, a flock of long-billed brown waders turns up every spring to feed. They look like nothing much. What they have just done is one of the great feats in the animal world.

The bar-tailed godwits arrive on these flats having flown, non-stop, from their breeding grounds near the Arctic. Days on the wing over open ocean with no rest, no food and no water, burning their own body down to a fraction of its weight to make the distance. The mud they land on isn't scenery. It's the fuel dock at the end of the longest commute on Earth.

Which is why the "worthless" mudflat that developers most want to fill in is, to a godwit, the reason the journey is possible at all.

From Chapter 8 · Estuaries, mangroves & saltmarsh · Read the guide → · See the flats on the map →

Wonder

The eel's one journey

A longfin eel can live in the same freshwater creek for decades. It leaves once.

Most of a longfin eel's life is uneventful. It lives in the paperbark swamps and still lagoons of the coast, growing slowly among the sedges, in the same creek, for years and sometimes decades.

Then it goes. Answering a signal we still don't fully understand, a mature eel sets out downstream, out through the estuary, and off into the open ocean to spawn in the Coral Sea. It makes the journey a single time, at the end of its life, and does not come back.

The larvae that hatch out there find their own way to the coast, into creeks they have never seen, and settle in for the long wait themselves. None of this is visible from the bank. What you see, if you see anything, is an eel in the drain behind the sugarcane.

From Chapter 10 · Paperbark swamps & freshwater wetlands · Read the guide → · Read the swamps →

Wonder

The whales that came back

The humpbacks streaming past the headlands each winter were hunted, within living memory, down to a few hundred animals.

Every winter, tens of thousands of humpback whales file north past the Sunshine Coast headlands on their way to warmer breeding water. They pass close, and reliably, and in numbers that have made watching them an ordinary thing to do on a Sunday. It is easy to forget how nearly we lost them.

Within living memory, this same population was hunted down to a few hundred survivors, on the very edge of gone. Then the hunting stopped. And the whales, given nothing but the chance, rebuilt themselves into the tens of thousands that pass the beaches today.

It is the rarest kind of story on this coast: one that ends well. All it took was for people to stop killing them.

From Chapter 14 · Sea country · Read the guide → · Read sea country →

There are more where these came from

Every one of these is a place you can go and stand in. The field guide tells you where, and how to read it when you get there. It's free, and made to take outside.

Open the field guide The book — free