The following article gives a glimpse of Bribie Island in the 1930s within a description of the broader environs of the Blackall Range – a distance that travelling by horse afforded people at that time. A view of Bribie Island from the Glasshouse Mountains afforded Helena a wonder that was matched by the view she had of the Glasshouse Mountains from Bribie Island!
It was folly to plan a riding tour with Mystery over the Blackall Range. But there is a special providence for helpless women, and a guide presented herself. She was short and very fat. She wore a flop hat and a grey ulster, and on her undersized grey pony she looked like a pilgrim from the Canterbury Tales. Having made my will, I placed myself in her hands. We turned our backs on the little fishing village, still unspoilt, which one day will draw the world to see the sun set behind the Glass Houses – those vast pillars of rock which loom in splendid isolation like pyramids against skies of cerise and primrose and purple-blue. Our way lay through bush thick with wildflowers. We rode past groves of magnificent palms, tangled lawyer-vines and water-vines, nests of the white ant several feet high, and tall gums with thin, straight trunks like columns in a Gothic nave. It was strange, in this depth of bush, to hear the roar of a 'plane and see, in the narrow lane of sky, the mail 'plane pass south. In one clearing was a section of a house, with people living in it as they built. The garden was being kept in boxes upstairs until the chickens, could be fenced in.
At Landsborough, with its three timber mills in action, we gave our bush ponies their first shoes, and pushed on up the range for the night. Below us stretched 80 miles of coastal scenery, clear as in an aeroplane photograph - the blue of Moreton Bay, that quiet arm of water called The Passage, cut from the sea by the long length of Bribie Island, low hills in the foreground, and behind and above us the Montville Range.
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| Aerial view of Bribie Island and hinterland. Description: Earth observation views taken from shuttle orbiter Endeavour during STS-67 mission. Date taken: 3.5.1995 Source: The U.S. National Archives |
The Glass Houses
Suddenly we gained a plateau and stopped to gaze at the amazing scene. Below, on a great plain, were the Glass Houses and a multitude of lesser mounds. These are no ordinary mountains, nor, speaking accurately, are they mountains at all. They are solidified lava, which has choked the vents of old volcanoes. Seen closely there is something awe-inspiring about them; they belong not to our age, but to a past world, what we know as Mesozoic times. I have seen them in the early morning, their hard surface gleaming in the sun. It was so that Cook saw them and named them more than 150 years ago. At Maleny, the heart of the dairy country, we stopped to see the show. Ten years ago, when I rode through the fruit country, a stretcher case had to be carried over the roughest of tracks 13 miles to the railhead. Now Maleny has a modern hospital, and patients are brought by ambulance on a metalled road. Next day we were passing through the most heavily timbered country in Southern Queensland. We met teams of 18 to 26 bullocks dragging the huge logs. In one place a man had just been killed: he had misjudged the fall of a tree. In the late afternoon we were descending the range into Conondale. With no warning my guide plunged down a deep slope, exactly like Italian cavalry in the films. The grade there was one in two; there was no track, only an occasional wallaby trail. Feeling thankful about my will I urged Mystery to get it over. He at once began to tack. Presently my haversack with a week's supplies, was brushed from the saddle by a tree. It could have stayed up there as far as I was concerned. But the bush girl was magnificent: she came back at the double and retrieved it for me.
Five minutes more and we were trotting across newly cleared country, with wood smoke rising here and there in the quiet air. Long lines of white ash marked the place of many fallen trees. The last rays of the sun threw a welcoming gleam on the windows of the bush girl’s studio high up on iron capped logs, and set upon a hill. The night was full of the noises of the bush – the eerie call of the curlew, the cry of an opossum or a disturbed plover the howl of the dingo, the scamper of a drove of wallabies at dawn. We rested our horses for a day and went wallaby shooting in the scrub. The bush girl got one with her first shot. The air was already hot, though it was easily spring: a family of bellbirds was chiming overhead, and we rested at a little green pool on the banks of the River Mary which flows to Maryborough. Over the range we went, with wonderful views of great extent, and in to Woodford. The pioneers must have faced difficulties in this countryside, for some houses were without front windows. One man had a primitive sawmill made by taking an engine from a Dodge car and coupling the saw spindle directly to the universal of the tail-shaft. The next day's ride to Beerwah was a lovely stretch of 30 miles. There were jungle gullies, lunch at a lily pool, and a well-graded road down the range, with Crooked Neck, one of the Glass Houses, rimmed in trees, looking like an ancient castle.
At Beewah we went over the Government forestry reserve, where, for five years, experiments have been made and where 500 acres have been planted with pinus caribacea.
Bribie IslandWe crossed to Bribie Island by a ford called the Shallows, and galloped down the surf beach. We were met by some aborigines, who grilled fish for us on pronged sticks. They took us to the nets on the other side of the island, in the passage, and showed us baby sharks and the dreaded stingray. We saw "oysters growing on trees”; there were pelicans, ibis, and hawks. Lulu, with the quick eyes of the native, saw bees about a tree, which, when cut down, gave a kerosene tin of honey. A large iguana was up one tree, and a recently discarded snakeskin hung from another. As we swam our horses across the channel to the mainland, the soldier crabs were swarming in millions on the sandbanks, maneuvering, with human ardour their miniature armies. Moreton Bay was still blue, even in moonlight, when we gained the beautiful headland which was the end of our journey, the lovely length of Bribie's beach was still golden and I waved good-bye to my Bush Girl with the surf breaking lazily below pandanus trees.
REFERENCE
Over the Blackalls. Riding in Queensland. By Helena Cass. The Argus (Melbourne) 7.1.1933 p. 9 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4518239
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Helena Cass (nee Holmes) was born in 1887 in Toronto, Canada and was a serving army nurse when she married Australian Major Walter Edmund Hutchinson Cass in October 1916 in London, England. Their only child Angelia was born in 1926. Brigadier General W.E.H. Cass died in 1931 and he was given a full military funeral service. In her widowhood Helena established a career in Melbourne as a freelance journalist.
This story is one of 27 stories presented in Describing Bribie Island 1865-1965: historical first-hand accounts of visiting Bribie Island produced by the Bribie Island Historical Society in 2017.
PHOTO: Description: Earth observation views taken from shuttle orbiter Endeavour during STS-67 mission. Date taken: 3.5.1995 Source: The U.S. National Archives sts067-730-010-sts-067
FURTHER READING
State Library of Victoria appeals for funds to conserve Walter and Helena Cass collection. By James Hancock. ABC Online, Wed 16 May 2018.
Walter and Helena Cass Collection appeal - State Library of Victoria.
https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/cass-appeal
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