The Scenic Rim & Hinterland Producers

The land and its first people

This is the traditional Country of the Mununjali, Wangerriburra and Ugarapul Peoples. Queensland Parks explains that “Tamborine” comes from the Yugambeh language and means “wild lime”. The mountain rainforest gave Yugambeh people food and resources. Each year bushwalkers join the Drumley Walk, a pilgrimage in honour of Billy Drumley, an Aboriginal ancestor. Canungra’s name is thought to come from an Aboriginal expression for a small owl, and Boonah perhaps from a word for the bloodwood tree.

The nature story

The rim runs from Mount Mistake in the west, through Cunningham’s Gap, east to Mount Barney, over the New South Wales border and north to Lamington, where walking tracks follow the McPherson Range. In 1994 the rim became part of the World Heritage rainforests now known as the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.

Tamborine Mountain was born of fire. Some 20 to 23 million years ago, a huge shield volcano near Wollumbin (Mount Warning) buried the land in layers of basalt lava. Today the mountain’s forests hold more than 900 plant species.

What you will see

A few of the region’s makers:

• Tamborine Mountain Distillery. Michael and Alla Ward moved from Tasmania and began making liqueurs and spirits here in 1993. Their English Tudor-style cellar door stands at the gateway to Gallery Walk.
• Witches Chase Cheese Company. A boutique cheese factory on Tamborine Mountain where you can watch cheese being made.
• Witches Falls Winery. A Tamborine Mountain cellar door known for wild-ferment wines, which also makes its own Jambreen cheeses.
• O’Reilly’s Canungra Valley Vineyards. Silky oaks line Canungra Creek, beside a homestead called Killowen that is about 165 years old.
• Summer Land Camels, Harrisville. It calls itself Australia’s largest camel farm and dairy, and makes camel milk, gelato and cheeses.
• Towri Sheep Cheeses, Allenview. Hand-crafted sheep milk cheeses. The farm opens to the public on the first Saturday of each month.

Wildlife and plants to look for

• Piccabeen palms, with their roots showing above the soil.
• Albert’s lyrebirds, red-legged pademelons and cascade treefrogs in Tamborine National Park.
• Cattle country and irrigated fields around Boonah, where potatoes are a key crop.
• Lavender at Kooroomba Vineyard and Lavender Farm in the Fassifern Valley.

A little history

European farmers arrived in the 1840s, and in the 1880s and 1890s scrub was cleared for closer settlement. Dairying followed. The Fassifern Butter Factory at Boonah ran from 1901 to 1974. On Tamborine Mountain, dairying tailed off in the 1950s and avocado farming grew quickly. Canungra was a timber town. In the 1880s the Lahey brothers built a sawmill there and pushed a tramway into the ranges, with a 100-metre tunnel built in 1901. In 1942 the Army opened a jungle-warfare training centre at Canungra. A road from the Gold Coast (built in 1958, officially opened in 1966) brought more visitors to Tamborine, where guesthouses, galleries and, later, cellar doors grew up.