Tamborine Mountains

After Surfers Paradise we headed up into the MacPherson Mountain Range and ended up at Mount Tamborine. We wanted to check out the rainforest region inland to learn a bit about that. Tamborine Mountain, a flat topped plateau is the Northern slope of a gigantic, extinct volcano that is centred on Mount Warning in New South Wales. Its massive crater rim forms the border of the states of Queensland and New South Wales. It is one of the worlds largest volcanic erosion calderas in the world. In its prime around 20 million years ago, the great Tweed Volcano was 2000m high and had a diameter of 100km! Now Mount Warning stands at 1156m high and Mount Tamborine is 550m above sea level.

Here we learned that each year Australia actually moves 7cm North by the movement of white hot liquid rock which flows between 30-100km below the surface. Tamborine Mountain was formed 23 million years ago by lava, however the deep crack in the earths crust from which this lava flowed remained in position as the continent slid North. This resulted in the mountain moving away from the volcano from which it was created. This volcano now sits beneath the state of Victoria in Southern Australia and last erupted 5,000 years ago creating Tower Hill, West of Melbourne.

In the mountain there is a sky walk which you can do, here we found out lots of cool information about the rainforest. The first thing we found out was that some of the plants (Ferns, Cycads and Pines) found in this forest have been around since the days of the dinosaurs. We also learned that these mountains were once the home of the Yugambeh people which comprised of 8 family groups. It was funny to find out that the Aboriginals called this place Wonglepong, meaning "deaf" and then white settlers renamed it Tamborine. It is suggested that the whites translated it from the following words; Jambreen meaning "lime tree" and Dumbirin meaning "yam in cliff".

Australia has two different types of forests which are the rainforest and the Eucalypt forest. They compete for land as the Strangler Fig trees which grow on the outskirts of the rainforest advances and conquers new land by growing on top of and eventually strangling Eucalypt trees. Once Strangler Figs are attached they grow tall and open huge leaves to create a canopy that blocks the sunlight and creates a perfect condition for a rainforest to develop. To combat this, Eucalypt trees have evolved into one of the worlds most advanced trees. Each year they shed their bark to remove any lose figs that may be attaching themselves to the trees. In addition, Eucalypt trees produce flammable eucalyptus oil and creates conditions to create bush fires which burn back the rainforest.

Despite this funny tale of the two forests competing, the trees are no match for the white man. Australias landscape was once dominated by forests, however since the arrival of white settlers, 99.7% of Australias rainforest has been logged or completely destroyed!