Carving Wilderness: Queensland’s National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands, 1890–1910

Abstract

In late October 1903, Queensland’s Inspector of Forests, G. L. Board, took a walking tour of a timber reserve in the southeast ranges of the Bunya Mountains. These ancient ranges rise abruptly from the flat fertile regions of southern Queensland where the climate is more temperate and less humid than the tropical capital, Brisbane, a few hundred kilometres to the east. Making special mention of the mountain climate as ‘most salubrious and bracing’, Board scrambled through the reserve’s scrubby terrain, traversed rugged outcrops and ranges both timbered and bald, and camped in the notable peace of mountain air. As he went, he viewed the lands around him with a practised gaze that evaluated soil quality, water, topography and the value of timber. The soil, Board later wrote, was ‘a rich chocolate’ and the land was ‘splendidly [supplied] with cold running water’. On the Balds — the stark rugged hills throughout the ranges where only grasses rather than forests grow — he scanned the ‘fair grasses’, praised their ‘luxuriant growth’ and reflected on their availability to the encroaching gridded farmlands of the fertile plains. But for the purposes of settlement, Board wrote, the mountains held little value, being steep, ‘somewhat rugged’ and ‘only fit for foot traffic’.1 On concluding his tour, Board stood on a rise in the south-eastern extreme of the mountains where the foothills met the fertile plains below, and surveyed the signs of colonisation before him. With his back to the mountains, whose rugged unsettlement left blank spaces on the colony’s survey maps, he faced the emerging chequerboard scene of straight fences and property boundaries before him.