Qualla: Main Range National Park

Main Range National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shiftchange, CC0. Stand at Cunningham's Gap and the mountains rise on either hand like the rim of a vast green bowl. This is the western edge of the Scenic Rim, a great semicircle of peaks that curves across South East Queensland, and Main Range holds up its long western wall. More than forty summits here climb above a thousand metres. The highest, Mount Superbus, reaches 1,375 metres, the loftiest point in the whole southern half of the state. The rock underfoot is older than it looks, and the forest clinging to it is a living fragment of a vanished world.

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Image: Shiftchange | CC0

Main Range National Park: A Volcano Without a Peak

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shiftchange at en.wikipedia, Public domain. Between 25 and 22 million years ago, in the Tertiary period, a shield volcano built this range, but not in the way a child draws a volcano. Instead of a single cone, it bled lava through countless basalt dykes, sending sheet after sheet of molten rock spreading sideways across th...

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Image: Shiftchange at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Main Range National Park: The Last Great Rainforest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brighteyes81msn, CC BY-SA 4.0. Draped across that old volcanic stone is the largest area of rainforest left in South East Queensland, and it is no ordinary bush. Main Range belongs to the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, a World Heritage site whose plant lineages reach back to the supercontinent of Gondwana,...

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Image: Brighteyes81msn | CC BY-SA 4.0

Main Range National Park: An Ancient Pathway

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shiftchange, CC0. People moved through these mountains long before they were a park. Spicers Gap, the saddle between Mount Mitchell and Spicers Peak, is believed to have been a traditional pathway for Aboriginal people travelling between the inland plains and the coast, a route worn by generations...

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Image: Shiftchange | CC0

Main Range National Park: A Park in the Making

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brighteyes81msn, CC BY-SA 4.0. The idea of protecting this country took root early. In 1909 the land around Cunningham's Gap was declared a national park, part of the first wave of reservations that gave Queensland some of Australia's earliest protected areas. Over the following decades the boundaries grew, kn...

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Image: Brighteyes81msn | CC BY-SA 4.0