Woonoongoora – by Caroline Gardam
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
The sun snuffs early and arrives late. Dawn is tardy, slow and defiant: a gentle light finally emerging, lightening – any birdsong chorus drowned by the rush of creek over rocks below, to the north. It’s a full three hours from first light to when winter rays deign to glitter the creek.
Facing this little hut is a wall of green – an entire forest shuddering down from what we call a bluff because we think the name Fort is dumb for a proud outcrop. It’s part of the ridge along the scenic rim, of which I know nothing, but you gotta start somewhere. Thiswhere is down the back of Lamington NP, Yugambeh country, via Beaudesert rather than the coast roads that lead to Binna Burra or the hinterland way to O’Reilly’s.
Deep in this valley slice of Queensland’s southeast is where they organised the rescue of the survivors of that plane crash in 1937 – that one where the plucky O’Reilly fellow, Bernard, trekked through the flung dense reaches of his childhood rainforest to find two barely alive survivors beside the tree-strung burned husk of plane, and one barely dead sitting on a rock beside the creek – this is the part of southeast Queensland where, in the damp and rumbling belly of the night, hasty calls along a crackling party-line gathered local farmers to cut swathes through the lawyer vine, making a track 14 miles long to carry out stretchers one way, while others joined O’Reilly another, forging straight back up the creek (three hours down, eight up) to bring food and a doctor to men starving and dying, one with broken bone erupting through his leg (along with the heroic water-carrying companion, the maggots saved him, they say, by eating his gangrene).
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We didn’t make it to the crash site, and I’m not sorry, although I would have liked to see the waterfalls, sad as they are now with this new knowledge. We trekked to Westray’s grave. He’s the one that died beside the creek, sitting against a rock, upright and facing the water, a burned-out cigarette in hand and bare feet dangling in the creek. Survived the fireballed Stinson Airliner but dead from smashing his insides as he fell down the waterfall en route to help. An accomplished trekker of the great Scottish glen, from all accounts, but ignorant of contrary local lilies whose roots yielded rather than anchoring his descent. The others, waiting – one immobilised by pain and the other by chivalry, first, then starvation – wouldn’t know for 10 days.
Back at the hut that night, we find a hokey video cam-corded in the 1980s, an independent documentary of sorts. Interviews with the remaining survivor, some of the rescue party, and some O’Reillys. (Briefly, so briefly mentioning the others who died in the plane, and we are not encouraged to imagine how: pilot and crew, Boyden and Shepherd, cursed by weather and lack of a radio, passengers Graham and Fountain.) Then there’s a black-and-white photograph of Westray. Recently married, world at his feet, etc. We had come for a weekend’s solitude, to reset busy city heads, deep and slow, in green, not history – but we received both. That morning, we stood in silence above his body, white noise creek behind us, held by a rough circle of palms, figs, eucalypts, vines above. That night, his smiling face, introduced via VHS, served a shock of sad levity.
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It's a grim framing for a lovely walk. Perhaps I shouldn’t have led with it. Now, while the sun’s rays paint the trees in front of me: greens, ochres, gold, glorious in their obviousness, and while the cows warm themselves in the top paddock behind me, in a loftier space the sun can contact, I could tell you about the utter gorgeousness of the sub-tropical rainforest walk: stands of massive ghostly rivergums, fruiting cordylines, hoop pines that two sets of arms can’t encircle, and the folded buttresses of figs. Delicate fungi glistening in the sunlight, backlit and cartoon-bright. Palm groves with thudding limbs plopping from the canopy. Staghorns the size of a man three stories above the creek, which roared a loud constant like surf, like foreign thunder.
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But, like us, you’re still with Westray on his rock, looking downstream, towards a route to refuge that was so very nearly within his reach, save for slippery boots and the wrong anchor. ▼
Images courtesy of the author
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