Ancient story, new eyes: walking Queensland’s Scenic Rim – photo essay

In the winter of 2019, photographer Carin Garland and I stepped out the door and set foot on Macdonnell Road, the first of 183 roads that would carry us for the next month 700km around Queensland’s Scenic Rim. We are to write a book on the Scenic Rim through the prism of its roads – who they are named for, who walked them first, who walks them now.

Macdonnell Road is a good example. Known to the oldest residents of Tamborine Mountain as the Do-It-Yourself Road, it earned this appellation in 1958, when the local people grew tired of waiting for the government to put a road to the Gold Coast in, and made one themselves. The bulldozer operator – 93-year-old Bill Geissmann – is still alive, and his inspiring tale of volunteerism, sacrifice, and camaraderie of the community inspired me to ask: what other stories lie beneath the roads we drive every day?

That led to the discovery that Macdonnell Road is laid atop an ancient route of connection for the First Nations people, travelling between saltwater and freshwater country. This interweaving of people’s stories, of culture’s stories, in the colours of the road, is reflected in the title of the book, and how we are all connected.

As the road carries us into the story, we discover how the Scenic Rim was created more than 20 million years ago and learn of the volcanic enthusiasms of Wollumbin (Mount Warning), Focal Peak, and the Main Range volcanoes. Nowhere is that more apparent than from Mount Wanungara on the Border Track in Lamington National Park. The route was taken by F.W. Roberts in his 1863-1866 quest to delineate the border between Queensland and New South Wales, but few are aware that he was accompanied by Bilin Bilin, a Wangerriburra man whose assistance provided not just the names of locations – Wanungara being one – but also ensured Roberts’s survival and ultimate success.

But that is the purpose of our journey, to uncover the hidden, the forgotten, the lost … and the way we do that is through people. People like 103-year-old Josie Arthy, who, like the Rim’s basalt mountains around which all else eroded, is all that remains of another era. Born in 1917, her story is written into her skin, and the tales she weaves as she crochets paint a picture of a very different world.

So too those of Ugarapul elder Uncle John Long (Burragun). One of the last to live traditionally in the Scenic Rim, his stories of the land we walk through lend us a new set of eyes to read an ancient story. Mount Castle is a case in point – to Uncle Burragun, it is Butcha, the greatest hero of the Ugarapul, who died in the defence of his people and now lies staring at the sky, his profile outlined in the mountain itself.

But just as compelling as the past is the present: we find ourselves walking through the worst drought in a century in the eastern rim, the worst drought on record in the west. The implications this has are even more dire than the dying cattle and crops. We witness the start of the Black Summer bushfires, and walk through the blackened remains of farms, houses, and the historic Binna Burra Lodge. In this last we are accompanied by Lisa Groom, granddaughter of the man who built Binna Burra, Arthur Groom. He named this place the Scenic Rim.

It is a microcosm of Australia, where Indigenous elders try to secure lore in the next generation alongside fourth-generation farmers trying to hang on to what they inherited; where South Sea Islander descendants of Queensland’s first “blackbirded” workers seek to reconnect to their culture, alongside sisters trying to save their town from extinction. Carin and I were invited into hundreds of lives, and in so doing discovered how we are all connected – by the roads that brought us here, by the roads we travel every day through this country we share … and discovered an answer to the question: where is the road leading?