1933 Riding tour over the Blackall Range to Bribie Island

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!

Over the Blackalls. Riding in Queensland.

By Helena Cass

1933

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. 

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

A new guide took me in charge next morning, a bush girl riding a spirited animal which she had broken in herself, and leading another which she was training to follow like a dog. The country rivalled the land of "Swiss Family Robinson.'' We passed banana gullies, pineapple fields, and orange groves. When we were hot and thirsty we bought pineapples and ate them by the wayside, in the only way to eat a pineapple – by cutting off the top and eating the pulp with a spoon.

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 Island

We 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. 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-16/state-library-victoria-walter-helena-cass-collection-appeal/9763720

Walter and Helena Cass Collection appeal - State Library of Victoria.
https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/cass-appeal

The Glasshouses

Renowned Australian authors Vance Palmer (1885-1959) and Nettie Palmer (1885-1964) lived economically "by their pens" at Caloundra from 1925-1929. The following article entitled The Glasshouses was written by Vance Palmer in 1927 - almost one hundred years ago.  These distinctive geological landforms still have a wonderous presence today and as Vance wrote below "have the same power of steeping the mind in mystery and casting a spell over the imagination".

The Glasshouses
by Vance Palmer
1927

On entering Moreton Bay by daylight one is struck by the fantastic shapes of a group of bare mountains that rise from the low, scrubby shores of the mainland. In the morning light, with the sun on them, they look as if they were made of crystal; at dusk they might be cut out of cardboard, so sharp and definite are their lines, and so flatly do they arrange themselves along the horizon. 

The wonderous view of the Glass Houses at sunset.
Photo: Queensland Government
Glass House Mountains National Park webpage

At any time their aspect is surprising. The highest of them, Beerwah, is the exact replica of one of the Pyramids, and the others, each in its own way, suggest monuments of ancient Egypt. What intrigues the imagination is that they rise, independent and separate, out of flat, almost marshy, country, and are not conected with any range of mountains. This gives one the queer feeling that they have some human significance; that they are the relics of an old civilisation, and not merely natural features of the landscape.

Captain Cook noted them on the skyline when he sailed along this coast nearly a century and a half ago [now nearly two and a half centuries ago], and named them the Glasshouses. From the low decks of his little ship, or even from the rigging, he could only have seen the tops of them, with Moreton Island lying between, but he seems to have been struck by their strangeness. Flinders, some years later, got a clearer view of them. While his ship was lying at the southern end of Bribie Island he set out with a few men in a boat with the object of climbing the highest of them. Making his way up the passage he landed, and penetrating the dense tea-tree scrub he reached the base of one of them, but after gazing at the rocky escarpments above him he returned unsuccessful. His opinion was that they were inaccessible. Since some of them are easily scaled, even by ordinary climbers, it must have been one of the three chief mountains — Beerwah, Coonowrin, or Tibrogargan — that thwarted Flinders. It is a pity, for from the top of any of these three he would have gained a sight of the main object of his search — a river flowing into Moreton Bay.

None of these extraordinary peaks is quite inaccessible, as later explorers have proved. The highest of them, Beerwah ("up in the clouds" it meant in the native tongue), was climbed by Andrew Petrie in the 'forties. There is a pathetic story told in connection with this feat. A good deal of the folklore of the neighbouring native people was naturally connected with these striking Glasshouses, and they firmly believed that an evil spirit presided over Beerwah — a spirit that would turn anyone blind who attempted to invade its fastness. Since Andrew Petrie was their friend and protector they did their best to dissuade him from the attempt, but the sturdy old Scot laughed at them and found a path to the summit. His son records that when he actually did go blind later on, an acute tragedy to him in his vigorous middle-age, the native people took the fatality for granted. He was only paying the penalty, as they had foretold! 

But other people have climbed Beerwah since then without evil results. Although the highest of the Glasshouses, it is not the steepest. At the base there is a dense, twisted scrub that thins out higher up into shrubs and grasstrees, and, except for a couple of hundred feet of sheer rock rising almost perpendicularly, a scattered fringe of vegetation runs to the very top. Nor would the height (1,760ft.) seem formidable to New Zealand climbers. Like the others, its uniqueness lies in its shape, and in the way it rises suddenly from a swampy plain that was once a sea bed. From the top one gets an uninterrupted view over the dazzling panorama of Moreton Bay, with its grey-green islands, its sandy foreshores, and its wide expanse of blue water. It is a pity that the intrepid Flinders did not persist in making the ascent.

Of the other two major mountains, Tibrogargan (shaped like a helmet) has been climbed fairly often, but Coonowrin is a different proposition. In form it is a pyramid, with a great pillar of rock, several hundred feet high, rising perpendicularly from the summit. The approach up the sides of the pyramid is fairly easy, but when one reaches that massive pillar, smooth as the sides of a bottle, there seems no possibility of making the ascent. Until near the end of last century it was given up as impossible. Then a young artillery man, named Harry Mikalsen, who had been brought up near its base, succeeded in reaching the summit. He had formed the ambition of doing so when a boy, and had studied it from all angles and in all lights, tracing footholds and fissures in the rock till at last he found a path. A path, did I say? Even the chamois deer would hardly regard it as that, for at one point the only possible means of progress was up a thin, tall sapling that happened to grow in a line parallel to the face of the cliff. A few other people have since made the ascent, with Mikalsen to guide them, but there is never likely to be a beaten track to the summit.

What is the origin of these strange mountains? Geologists say they are volcanic eruptions of incredible age, probably from an ancient seabed. Through succeeding aeons they have passed through many changes. Once, when they were extinct and their sides were covered with crumbling lava, a thick vegetation began to clothe them. The wind and weather of centuries eventually wore off the crumbling surface at their crests, and most of the vegetation with it, leaving the basic rock exposed. The smooth pillar, for instance, which makes the climbing of Coonowrin so difficult, is formed of the molten stone that once plugged the crater of the extinct volcano. In practically all the Glasshouses hints of these plugs of molten stone can be seen; but in Coonowrin the outside shell has been more deeply worn away, so that the plug is left naked to every eye. It is like looking at the bones of an ancient dinosaur. That indefinable atmosphere of an earlier world hangs about it, and almost oppresses the imagination. Even the vegetation that clings about its base now — spiky shrubs, grasstrees with pointed spears and blackened trunks, and writhing teatrees — seem to belong to a vanished age — an age when everything was hard and horny, before the softness of the fern-world.

But, seen in the distance, they are strikingly beautiful. From many places along the northern coast of Moreton Bay one gets glimpses of them, and they seem to arrange themselves along the skyline, like a set of quaint hieroglyphics. The farther one gets away from them the more fragile they appear, and the more do their domes and pillars take on the semblance of crystal. There is a magic about them that makes them impossible to forget. I do not know any mountains that have the same power of steeping the mind in mystery and casting a spell over the imagination.

References:

The Glasshouses by Vance Palmer
The Australasian 4.6.1927 p. 70 [viewable via National Library of Australia's Trove online resource http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article140734966 ]

Glass House Mountains National Park, Sunshine Coast. PHOTO
https://parks.des.qld.gov.au/parks/glass-house-mountains/about/culture

Biography of Edward Vivian (Vance) Palmer (1885-1959)
by Geoffrey Serle, 1988, Australian Dictionary of Biography v. 11.
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/palmer-edward-vivian-vance-7946

Bribie Island in the sun 1980

Cross the Bridge to Bribie Island: Queensland's island in the sun

brochure circa 1980

BIHS has recently recorded in our historical database, a tourist brochure entitled Cross the Bridge to Bribie Island: Queensland's island in the sun.

The brochure was produced by the Bribie Island Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with Caboolture Shire Council and Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation around the year 1980.

While some of the scenes depicted in the brochure could have been taken yesterday, other scenes are of attractions from days gone by.

Koolamara Motel 

These scenes are timeless!

Sun, sand and sea!

The Saddlers' Restaurant 

Our Bowls and Golf Clubs are still very popular!

A montage of the Glasshouse Mountains in the background

with the bridge and Pumicestone Passage in the foreground.

Sculpture of Ian Fairweather in a tree trunk

near a replica of his hut.

Acknowledgements

The above brochure was reproduced on this blog with the kind permission of the Bribie Island Chamber of Commerce.

Further reading:

Squatters Restaurant (BIHS Blogspot) with a copy of a 1989 article ... 

http://bribieislandhistory.blogspot.com/2017/06/squatters-homestead.html

.... Squatters Homestead has been a landmark on Bribie for 14 years [in 1989].  It was built by Don Buckley...

If you would like to share your Bribie Island postcards - our email address is bribiehistoricalsociety@gmail.com