Qualla: Bunya Mountains National Park

Bunya Mountains National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MagpieShooter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Every few years the bunya pines bear heavily, and when they do they let fall something extraordinary: green cones the size of footballs, weighing as much as ten kilograms, dropping from forty metres up with force enough to kill. For thousands of years that abundance was not a hazard but an invitation. Aboriginal peoples walked for hundreds of kilometres to be here when the harvest came. Rising abruptly from the flat farmland of the Darling Downs, the Bunya Mountains hold the largest stand of bunya pines left in the world, a green island of rainforest where the air is cooler and the trees are older than almost anything around them.

Image: MagpieShooter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bunya Mountains National Park: The King of the Forest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ZaqqyJam, CC BY-SA 4.0. The bunya pine, Araucaria bidwillii, is a survivor from a vanished world. Its closest relatives turn up as fossils from the Jurassic period, when forms like it shaded the dinosaurs, and standing beneath one is a glimpse of deep time. They grow tall and straight, the largest with ...

Image: ZaqqyJam | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bunya Mountains National Park: When the Nations Gathered

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tatiana Gerus from Brisbane, Australia, CC BY 2.0. When the bunya bore its great crops, the harvest drew Aboriginal peoples from across an enormous region to one of the most significant ceremonial gatherings in eastern Australia. The Wakka Wakka, Jarowair, and many other groups, some travelling from far beyond the mountains, came...

Image: Tatiana Gerus from Brisbane, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Bunya Mountains National Park: A Cooler, Older World

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MagpieShooter, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Bunya Mountains rise to over 1,100 metres at their highest peaks, and that altitude changes everything. Temperatures here run several degrees below Brisbane's, and even at the height of summer the mercury tends to sit near a comfortable 25 degrees, a relief that makes the wal...

Image: MagpieShooter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bunya Mountains National Park: Second in the State, First of Its Kind

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MagpieShooter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Protected as Queensland's second-oldest national park, the Bunya Mountains have been recognised since 2010 on Australia's tentative list for World Heritage, a nod to a place that is at once an ecological relic and a profound cultural landscape. There are no buses here, no trains,...

Image: MagpieShooter | CC BY-SA 3.0