Leslie's Travelogue: O'Reillys

Our destination for this part of the trip was O'Reilly's which is a guest house and conference center that started as a dairy in the hinterlands above the Gold Coast about 100 years ago. The Aspen Family Business Group held its annual spring meeting here with Moores Family Business Consultancy. Ken Moores serves on the board of this family business and we had planned to follow our conference with a program for Women in Family Business. However, there was insufficient registration to make a go of it...we did enjoy our dialogue with our colleagues and then a few hours of exploring the Lamington Forest.

But I am getting a little ahead of myself. We flew from Adelaide in the South of Australia to the airport

At the Gold Coast (600,000 population) in the middle of Queensland. The Gold Coast might seem a it like Miami ( in fact there is a section called "Miami"). Beautiful beaches and skyscaper hotels and apartments along the beach. We rendezvous-vous'ed with Aspen partner Joe and wife Jane along with colleague Anthea Moore at the airport and then drove to the part of the beach called Surfer's Paradise where I had heard of a sand castle contest.

We walked along the beach and enjoyed the wonderful sand sculptures:

And some views of the beach

And the birds and flowers

We were joined by Anthea's father (who is also her business partner), Ken and the head of the Queensland family business association for lunch at a beach club.

And then headed for a 90 minute drive on a very windy, narrow mountain road to O'Reillys.

Along which we saw some farm life

A laughing kookaburra

And a kangaroo with her joey:

Then a lovely sunset from our villa:

So, like the soldier settlers of Kangaroo Island, the Government of Queensland gave incentives to farm in the hinterlands and th O'Reillys took advantage of this opportunity.

It was 1911 when the O'Reilly boys shouldered their swags and left the relative comfort of the Kerry Hotel to carve a home for themselves on the rainforest covered spurs of the McPherson Range.

Overloaded with supplies and equipment they left the Cainbable Creek Valley, climbed the torturous 'Heartbreaker' and scrambled along dense rainforest ridges to claim their selections. Their motivation was not the beauty of the mountains or a dream of a future tourist industry, it was dairy farming. The government encouraged young men to take up dairying by making land available on the mountain for this purpose. Please note..the roads we road on to get up there did not exist...not even paths.

When the remaining land was withdrawn from selection three months later, eight O'Reilly's boys of two related families from the Blue Mountains in N.S.W. were the only applicants. Tom, Norb, Herb, Mick and Pete built their first hut on top of the cliff at Moran's Falls while cousins Pat, Luke and Joe built theirs at Pat's Bluff. Each man paid thirty-five shillings an acre for approximately one hundred acres of land and could pay it off over thirty years at 5% interest. According to government regulation each selector had to clear his land, plant grass, build fences and yards and establish dairy farms. Their tools of the trade were axes, cross-cut saws, brush hooks and stout hearts.

Even as the O'Reilly boys were carving out a living as dairy farmers in the dense scrub, moves were well underway to turn the rainforests of the McPherson Range that surrounded them into what we now know as Lamington National Park.

Inspired by a visit to the world's first national park, Yellowstone in the US, grazier Robert Collins entered state parliament in 1896 with the express purpose of seeing green areas like the Lamington Plateau preserved – although his original idea was for a much more modest 'health reserve'.

Others joined him in the fight, calling the area the 'Blue Mountains of Queensland', but it was Collins who rightly earned the title 'Father of the National Parks system in Queensland'.

Collins was so enthusiastic he secured a visit to the isolated area by then Queensland Governor Lord Lamington, after whom the park was eventually named - somewhat ironically.

Lamington reportedly disgraced himself in the eyes of the lovers of Nature when barely out of the sound of applause from locals, he stopped and shot a koala out of a tree!

We didn't see any koalas as we walked the Booyong walk, but we saw interesting vegetation, a mountain garden and a treetop adventure. Among our companions up there were the crimson rosella and the Aussie brush turkey.