A DECLARATION IN LANDSCAPE.

On 31 July 1915, the Queensland Government gazetted 19,035 hectares of mountainous, forested land on the McPherson Range as Lamington National Park. It was not a grand ceremony. There was no crowd, no ribbon cut in mountain air. What existed, in the colonial administrative language of the time, was a gazettal — a formal inscription in the government record that declared this particular piece of the earth no longer available for clearing, logging, or pastoral conversion. That quiet bureaucratic act, born of decades of campaigning by a small number of determined individuals, stands today as Queensland’s most consequential conservation gesture. Everything that followed — the walking tracks, the lodges, the World Heritage listing, the science, the recovery programs after fire — proceeds from that single foundational decision.

While New South Wales and Victoria had successfully declared national parks by 1900, many in Queensland still saw the land as a timber supply or potential dairy farm, and opposition remained strong. Queensland was, in this sense, late to the conservation table. The colony’s — and then the state’s — relationship with its land was overwhelmingly extractive. Timber, cattle, sugar, crops: the land was a resource to be worked, a frontier to be subdued. The declaration of Lamington in 1915 represented a rupture in that settled logic. It said, in effect, that value could be located in wildness itself — that a forested mountain range had worth precisely because it was left alone.

While Lamington wasn’t Queensland’s first national park, it is the most significant — and it was regularly referred to, in the early decades of the twentieth century, simply as “Queensland’s National Park,” as though the state had only one worth naming. That informal title captures something true. Lamington was not merely the largest or the oldest. It was the park that crystallised the conservation idea in Queensland’s public imagination, the place where the abstract argument for preservation became concrete, walkable, audible in birdsong.

THE COUNTRY BEFORE THE PARK.

Before the gazettal, before the surveyors and the timber-cutters, the plateau and ranges that would become Lamington National Park belonged to the country of the Yugambeh people. Known as ‘Woonoongoora’ in the Yugambeh language, the mountains of Lamington National Park are sacred and spiritual places. The land upon which the area stands has been home to the Yugambeh people for thousands of years, who carefully managed and used the area’s rich natural resources, sharing language, ceremonies, and cultural traditions across the region.

For at least 6,000 years, Aboriginal people lived in and visited these mountains. The Wangerriburras and Nerangballum tribes claimed home to the plateau territory. Bushrangers Cave, which is close to Mount Hobwee and is 60 metres long, was once an Aboriginal camp, with evidence of Aboriginal occupation going back 10,000 years. It is believed a traditional pathway stretching from northern New South Wales to the Bunya Mountains passed through the southern section of what is now Lamington National Park.

The first European record of the McPherson Ranges was by Logan, Fraser and Cunningham, who saw the rugged mountainous area from Mount Barney’s peak in 1828. The first Europeans to traverse the area were surveyors Francis Edward Roberts and Isaiah Rowland. Between 1863 and 1866 they surveyed the Queensland–New South Wales state border along the highest peaks from Point Danger to Wilsons Peak. Bilin Bilin and members of his family and community carried equipment and identified trees and animals.

The European record of the ranges is, in part, a record of extraction. The timber cutters soon followed the early explorers, including the Lahey family who owned one of Queensland’s largest timber mills at the time. The forests of the McPherson Range were dense, ancient, extraordinarily productive — and therefore, in the logic of the colonial economy, there to be felled. That they were not entirely felled, that a substantial portion survived into the twentieth century and was then protected, is the consequence of a sustained campaign by people who understood something different about what forests were for.

THE CAMPAIGNERS: COLLINS AND LAHEY.

The story of Lamington’s creation is, at its core, a story about civic persuasion. It is a story about individuals who understood, earlier than most, that conservation was not sentiment but strategy — that the health of catchments, the resilience of ecosystems, the long-term livability of a region all depended on the survival of its native cover. The campaign to preserve the resource-rich, mountainous land as national park began in the 1890s with a particularly passionate grazier, Robert Collins, who, while travelling overseas, learned about the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in the United States.

Collins returned to Queensland with an idea that the colony’s own landscapes — specifically the forests of the McPherson Range — deserved the same legal protection that Americans had extended to Yellowstone in 1872. Robert Collins campaigned heavily for the protection of the area from logging from the 1890s. Collins entered state parliament and saw a bill passed that preserved state forests and national parks, but he died before the McPherson Range was protected.

Attitudes began to shift by 1906 when the Queensland Parliament passed The State Forests and National Parks Act 1906. This led to the state’s first national park, Witches Falls on Tamborine Mountain, being declared in March 1908. This was a significant, if modest, legislative threshold — the state had accepted, in principle, that some land could be reserved from development. But the McPherson Range, with its far grander scale and its enormous timber value, remained contested.

In 1911, Romeo Lahey, the engineer son of a Canungra sawmiller, joined the campaign and continued the fight after Collins’ death in 1913. Lahey argued that an even larger parcel of land should be protected and drummed up support from locals with ‘lantern lectures’ — slide shows — and door-knocking. The detail of those lantern lectures deserves reflection. Lahey, whose own family had made its living from the timber industry, took glass plate negatives of the plateau and projected them before audiences in local halls. He was showing people what they stood to lose. He was making the argument through images of the land itself — the beech forests, the waterfalls, the cliffs over the Numinbah Valley.

Some of the photographs featured in Lahey’s campaign were taken by Romeo Watkins Lahey himself. His lantern slides and glass plate negatives, now part of the State Library of Queensland’s collection, were used in his campaign for the preservation of the area. In pursuit of this goal, Lahey went around the district, lecturing and obtaining signatures which successfully influenced the Queensland Government to act for the park’s creation.

In July 1915, 19,035 hectares of mountainous, forested land was declared Lamington National Park, in honour of the past Queensland Governor Lord Lamington. Although Lahey favoured ‘Woonoongoora’, the Yugambeh name for a local mountain, the park was named in honour of Queensland Governor Lord Lamington. The park was named after Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1902. That the Yugambeh name was set aside in favour of a colonial governor’s title is a reminder of the era’s assumptions — and a reason why many of the place names within the park carry Yugambeh words today, a partial correction that was itself advocated for by Lahey.

THE EARLY PARK: PROTECTION ON PAPER.

The gazettal of 1915 was a legal act, but its practical effect was initially limited. When Lamington National Park was first gazetted in 1915, the park was barely surveyed, and there was no protection against illegal logging and poaching. A park without rangers, without defined boundaries, without an enforcement mechanism, was largely a park on paper. The forests remained vulnerable; the declaration had changed the law but not yet the ground.

In July 1918, Lamington National Park was declared a ‘reserve for the protection and preservation of native birds and native animals’. In December that year, the Queensland Naturalists explored, collected and recorded the flora and fauna found in the remote wilderness areas of Lamington National Park. New plant species were collected and the name ‘Green Mountains’ was coined because of their visit.

The park remained largely unpatrolled apart from scientists and government surveyors, until early 1919, when the O’Reilly brothers and cousins, along with Mr George Rankin, were appointed unpaid honorary rangers under The Native Animals Protection Act 1906. Later that year, Mick O’Reilly was made the first paid park ranger, for £4 a week, an above average wage for the time. The appointment of O’Reilly family members as rangers — and their simultaneous establishment as residents of the plateau — created a relationship between human settlement and conservation that would come to define Lamington’s character. The park was not a wilderness emptied of people; it was a living place, stewarded by those who lived within and adjacent to it.

After the area was proclaimed and gazetted as Lamington National Park, Lahey continued to fight for the national park ideal. In October 1915, he delivered a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia Queensland Branch titled ‘Some reasons why national parks should be established in Queensland, with special reference to Lamington National Park’, and called for other large areas to be reserved as national parks as well as an extension of the state forest system.

"There is only one way to 'improve' a national park and this is to leave it absolutely alone." — Romeo Lahey, in a letter to the Minister for Lands, quoted by the Queensland Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation

That sentence, written by Lahey during his service in World War One, encapsulates a philosophy that would take decades to become orthodoxy in Australian land management. The instinct to improve — to clear, to grade, to make productive — was deeply embedded in the settler relationship with landscape. Lahey’s insistence that leaving alone was itself an act of improvement, a form of civic wisdom rather than neglect, was ahead of its time.

THE LANDSCAPE ITSELF: WHAT WAS BEING PROTECTED.

To understand the scale of what the 1915 declaration preserved, it is necessary to understand what kind of country Lamington actually is. The Lamington National Park is a national park in the McPherson Range on the Queensland/New South Wales border. From Southport on the Gold Coast, the park is 85 kilometres to the southwest, and Brisbane is 110 kilometres north. This is a park that sits at the edges of one of Australia’s most densely urbanised coastal corridors — and yet, within its borders, the landscape reads as primordial.

Most of the park is situated 900 metres above sea level, only 30 kilometres from the Pacific’s ocean shores. The plateaus and cliffs in Lamington and Springbrook National Parks are the northern and north-western remnants of the huge 23-million-year-old Tweed Volcano, centred around Mount Warning. The volcanic origins of the plateau explain, in part, the extraordinary richness of its soils and the density of life they support. The basalt-derived earth of the McPherson Range has been accumulating biological complexity for millions of years.

Lamington is part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area, which includes the most extensive areas of subtropical rainforest in the world, most of the world’s warm temperate rainforest, and nearly all of the northern-most Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest. The Nerang River, Albert River and Coomera River all have their source in Lamington National Park. These catchment functions — water storage, flow regulation, sediment control — are not ornamental. They underwrite the water security of a large section of south-east Queensland. The protection of the park was, among other things, an act of hydrological prudence.

As part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area, Lamington is an extremely important refuge for many animals. These include several species of earthworm found nowhere else in the world, the beautiful Richmond birdwing butterfly, endangered birds such as the eastern bristlebird, the colourful Lamington spiny crayfish, and mammals like the spotted-tailed quoll. Lamington plays a vital role in protecting this rich diversity of globally significant wildlife.

The significance of this biodiversity is not simply that it is unusual or aesthetically remarkable. It is that Lamington functions as a refuge — a place where species that cannot survive in cleared, fragmented, or degraded landscapes persist. In a region that has experienced significant land clearing since European settlement, the park is an ecological island of ancient continuity. What was protected in 1915 was not just scenery; it was the last viable habitat for dozens of species that would otherwise have nowhere left to go.

THE CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE THAT GREW AROUND THE PARK.

A national park, in its early decades, is often more idea than institution. The transformation of Lamington from a gazetted area into a functioning, staffed, managed park unfolded across the subsequent decades, shaped by individuals who understood that protection alone was not enough — that the park also needed to be known, visited, and loved if it was to be politically sustainable.

The O’Reilly family established a guesthouse near the park in 1926, now named O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat. Binna Burra Lodge has long been a gateway to the natural wonders of Lamington National Park. Founded in 1933 by Arthur Groom and Romeo Lahey, two pioneering conservationists, the lodge was established to help visitors connect with the beauty and heritage of the national park. They believed that through interpretive walks and educational programs, more people would be inspired to protect this unique wilderness for future generations.

Development of the park’s facilities started in earnest as relief work during the late 1930s, with the Border Track and Coomera circuit among the first tracks completed. The construction of walking tracks during the Depression era — using relief labour, building infrastructure that connected the park to those who might advocate for it — was a form of civic investment whose returns compound across generations. The tracks opened the forest to walkers who would not otherwise have encountered it, creating constituencies for conservation from direct experience.

In 1937, Bernard O’Reilly became a hero when he rescued the survivors from the Airlines of Australia Stinson Model A airliner, the City of Brisbane, which had crashed in the remote Lamington wilderness. In typical Australian bushman fashion he embarked on his rescue mission taking only onions and bread to eat. Only a small portion of the original wreck remains today, 10 kilometres south of the O’Reilly’s guesthouse. The Stinson rescue became one of the defining stories of twentieth-century Queensland — a narrative of wilderness, endurance, and the peculiar intimacy that develops between people and the country they live within. It also brought Lamington National Park to national attention in a way that no conservation argument alone could achieve.

WORLD HERITAGE AND THE INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION OF A LOCAL ACT.

The long arc of Lamington’s recognition reached its international threshold in the late twentieth century. The park is part of the Shield Volcano Group of the World Heritage Site Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, inscribed in 1986, and was added to the Australian National Heritage List in 2007. World Heritage status was bestowed on Lamington in recognition of its high biodiversity and the fact it contains a living museum of the evolutionary steps taken in the development of Australia’s modern-day flora.

The framing of the park as a “living museum of evolutionary steps” is worth pausing over. It locates Lamington not merely as beautiful country but as irreplaceable scientific record — a landscape where the processes of biological evolution can be read in living organisms, in the structure of the forest, in the presence of species whose lineages extend back to the time when Australia was still connected to the great southern continent of Gondwana. To have cleared this landscape, as the economic logic of the late nineteenth century would have demanded, would have been to destroy a document that no amount of money can recreate.

Lamington National Park is a reserve of international significance and is managed by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service under the Nature Conservation Act 1992, to preserve and present its remarkable natural and cultural values in perpetuity. Lamington’s outstanding geological history, evolutionary significance and role in nature conservation are recognised through its inclusion in the World Heritage listed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. Management is in accordance with internationally recognised obligations under the World Heritage Convention.

In 2009, as part of the Q150 celebrations, Lamington National Park was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as a natural attraction. That designation placed the park in the same register as the Great Barrier Reef, the Queensland outback, and the institutions of the state’s civic life. It was a formal acknowledgement that Lamington had crossed from being a park into being something closer to a symbol — an emblem of Queensland’s relationship with its own natural endowment.

PERMANENCE, IDENTITY, AND WHAT THE PARK REPRESENTS.

There is a particular kind of civic seriousness that attaches itself to a place that has been protected for more than a century. On 31 July 2015, Lamington National Park celebrated 100 years of conservation. The 21,176-hectare World Heritage-listed national park is home to 390 species of Australian wildlife and features one of the most diverse areas of vegetation in the country. A centenary is not simply an anniversary; it is evidence that a decision made in one era was maintained across all the subsequent ones — through economic booms and busts, through wars, through periods of rapid clearing elsewhere in the state, through governments of very different dispositions toward conservation. The park survived all of that. Its survival is itself a civic achievement.

What the 1915 declaration established was not just a protected area but a precedent — a demonstration that Queensland was capable of making decisions whose benefits would accrue to people not yet born. The campaigners who pushed for Lamington’s protection — Collins, who died before seeing it gazetted; Lahey, who spent his life after the gazettal expanding and defending the park’s ambitions — were operating on a timescale that most political actors find difficult to sustain. They were arguing for the future against the present, for the permanent against the temporary, for the irreplaceable against the merely profitable.

That argument has not lost its currency. In the decades since the World Heritage listing, the park has faced pressures that Collins and Lahey could not have anticipated: invasive species, altered fire regimes, the destabilising effects of a changing climate on vegetation communities that evolved under more stable conditions. The 2019 bushfires, which burned into rainforest that had not experienced fire in living memory, demonstrated that the work of conservation does not end with a gazettal or a heritage inscription. It is ongoing, contingent, and demanding of sustained institutional attention.

The park is home to 390 species of Australian wildlife and features one of the most diverse areas of vegetation in the country. Those numbers are not static; they are the product of continuous management, research, and investment. The park’s ecological health depends on decisions made every year — about weed control, about visitor management, about fire responses, about the resourcing of the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. The 1915 declaration created the conditions for conservation; sustaining those conditions requires the work of every subsequent generation.

The project of anchoring Queensland’s civic and natural heritage onto permanent, verifiable registers — including the onchain namespace lamington.queensland — proceeds from the same underlying logic that motivated the park’s founders: that some things are worth identifying precisely, protecting carefully, and holding in common trust for those who come after. The namespace gives this particular address in the landscape a persistent, unambiguous civic identity in the digital record — one that cannot be rezoned, subdivided, or developed away.

THE GESTURE AND ITS INHERITANCE.

Queensland’s conservation history is, in significant part, the history of Lamington. The arguments first won there — that wildness has intrinsic value, that catchments require protection, that biodiversity constitutes a form of public wealth — were subsequently extended to other parts of the state, building the protected area network that now covers a substantial proportion of Queensland’s land surface. The campaigners who gathered signatures in Canungra halls and lectured to the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia were not simply advocating for one mountain range; they were establishing the philosophical foundations of Queensland conservation thinking.

Lamington National Park now includes 22,000 hectares of varying forest types, from temperate Antarctic Beech forest high on the border ranges through the subtropical rainforests, to the dry eucalypt forest of the northern escarpment. Lamington National Park provides food and shelter for a huge array of subtropical birdlife — over 160 species — reptiles, frogs, mammals, and invertebrates. Those 22,000 hectares did not protect themselves. They were protected by people who made a different calculation about value — who looked at the forests of the McPherson Range and saw not board-feet of timber but something closer to a gift that one generation makes to all the others.

That is what a first great conservation gesture looks like, in retrospect. Not heroic or dramatic but patient, argued, fought for over two decades, and finally inscribed in law on a July day in 1915. The inscription that matters most is not in any digital registry but in the ground itself — in the Antarctic beech forests that still stand above a thousand metres, in the Richmond birdwing butterfly still flying through the gullies, in the rivers that still begin here and carry their water to the coast. But permanence of record matters too. The capacity to name and hold a place — as Lahey named it, as the gazette named it, as the World Heritage list named it — is part of what makes protection durable.

lamington.queensland is, in that tradition, a small act of the same kind: a naming, a registration in a permanent ledger, a way of saying that this particular place in the world has a fixed civic address that belongs to Queensland’s identity, now and beyond. The conservation gesture of 1915 was irreversible in the best possible sense. The records we make of it should aspire to the same quality.