HELLO SUNSHINE

When James Cook sailed along our eastern shore in 1770, he named the craggy 26 million-year-old volcanic plugs that emerge dramatically from the southern Queensland hinterland the Glass House Mountains. His log from 17th May reads:

'These hills lie but a little way inland and not far from each other, they are very remarkable on account of their singular form of elevation, which very much resemble glass houses which occasioned my giving them that name...'

It’s a name, however, that has lost relevance to modern travellers who wouldn’t know a Yorkshire glass foundry from a Yorkshire pudding.

Home to Aboriginal groups for millennia, it might have been smarter to acknowledge the mountains already had names and somewhat more poetic than his. At 556-metres elevation, Mount Beerwah is the highest and known to the local Kabi Kabi people as Birrawaman or “climbing up to the sky. “

Aptly named or not, the volcanic spires are a dramatic gatepost to the Sunshine Coast for visitors, either by sea or up the Bruce Highway from Brisbane, a hundred or so kilometres south.

Europeans descended in 1864, and it