Qualla: Brigalow Belt

Brigalow Belt: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Marathon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The early settlers cursed it. Brigalow grew so dense, its slender grey-green trunks so tightly packed and so stubborn at resprouting, that clearing a paddock could feel like fighting the land itself. Cut a brigalow and it sends up suckers; drag a chain through a stand and it springs back. For tens of thousands of years this acacia scrub formed a soft silver wall across inland Queensland, a band of woodland threading between the wet coastal rainforest and the dry red interior. Then, in roughly a single human lifetime, most of it was gone.

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Image: Mark Marathon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Brigalow Belt: The Country Between

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Freo1995 (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Brigalow Belt is a transition zone, and that is its whole character - a wide ribbon of acacia-wooded grassland running where the tropics meet the arid heart of the continent. Scientists split it in two. Brigalow Belt North covers more than 135,000 square kilometres, sweeping ...

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Image: Freo1995 (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Brigalow Belt: The Tree That Named It All

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hesperian, CC BY-SA 3.0. Everything here takes its name from one tree: brigalow, Acacia harpophylla, a tough, water-thrifty acacia that thrives on cracking clay soils and once carpeted the fertile lowlands. Brigalow rarely grows alone. It mixes with belah, with ooline in the moister valleys, with the swo...

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Image: Hesperian | CC BY-SA 3.0

Brigalow Belt: A Refuge for the Vanishing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethel Aardvark at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. What survives in the remnants is precious, because so little remains. In the vine thickets live the unadorned rock-wallaby and the black-striped wallaby, and in their leaf litter a wingless dung beetle found almost nowhere else. Two of Australia's most endangered mammals cling on...

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Image: Ethel Aardvark at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Brigalow Belt: Ninety Percent

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethel Aardvark at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. The number is stark. Since European settlement, around 90 percent of the original brigalow - roughly seven million hectares - has been cleared, most of it within the 20th century, turned over to grazing and grain. The brigalow ecological community is now reduced to a tenth of its...

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Image: Ethel Aardvark at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0