Qualla: Cape Upstart National Park

Cape Upstart National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unaipon, CC BY 3.0. Cook gave it the bluntest name on the whole coast. Sailing past on 5 June 1770, he watched a great granite headland heave up out of the low, flat shoreline around it, standing alone and abrupt while everything beside it lay nearly level with the sea. It "starts or riseth up singley," he wrote, and so he called it Cape Upstart. The name fits. Between Bowen and Townsville, where the coast is mostly mangrove and sugar flat, this pile of giant weathered boulders rears up like something dropped from another landscape - remote, trackless, and far older in human memory than any English chart.

Image: Unaipon | CC BY 3.0

Cape Upstart National Park: A Coast of Boulders

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Frances76 at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. The cape is a chaos of granite. Massive rounded boulders, stacked and tumbled by tens of millions of years of weathering, climb from sandy beaches into rugged hills cloaked in dry coastal woodland. There are no roads in; the park is reached mainly by boat, and its beaches and bay...

Image: The original uploader was Frances76 at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cape Upstart National Park: Juru Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unaipon, CC BY 3.0. Long before any sail appeared offshore, the Juru clan of the Birri-Gubba people lived on this cape, and they had done so for thousands of years. The evidence is written into the dunes as middens, shell heaps built up over countless generations of meals taken from the sea. There a...

Image: Unaipon | CC BY 3.0

Cape Upstart National Park: The Path of the Carpet Snake

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unaipon, CC BY 3.0. Those stone arrangements trace a creation story. In the Gubulla Munda Dreaming of the Juru and Birri-Gubba people, Gubulla Munda the Carpet Snake moved across this country, and as the great snake travelled it shaped the land and the islands where the Juru came to live. The stones...

Image: Unaipon | CC BY 3.0

Cape Upstart National Park: Twenty Years to Be Heard

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jls444, CC BY-SA 3.0. The law took a long time to acknowledge what the Juru had never doubted. In 2011, Justice Rares of the Federal Court of Australia recognised that the Juru people held Native Title over Cape Upstart National Park - the end of a twenty-year fight. Peter Prior, known as Gulumba, beg...

Image: Jls444 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cape Upstart National Park: Shacks on the Foreshore

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bauple58, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is one stranger chapter to the cape. From the early twentieth century, farmers from the Burdekin district downriver began throwing up rough huts along the western foreshore, modest fishing shacks for weekends and holidays. Over the decades the huts grew sturdier and a small...

Image: Bauple58 | CC BY-SA 4.0