For resource driven communities in particular, people from differing cultural backgrounds came together at the point of exploitation depending on their experience, people like the residents and visitors to Mount Shamrock saw their landscape in different ways.

But there are many ways of seeing the landscape. This creation of place is culture at work in the landscape. Now, as the gold rush took off, people made their place in the spot where resources were found. But to Allen, before the townships it was ‘the kangaroo and other wild animals’ that fed relatively undisturbed in the solitude of the Queensland bush. Charles Allen found at Gympie Creek ‘two large and populous townships’.

Like Herberton, the start of the Gympie gold rush saw new townships emerge. the Wild Rivers once clear waters running discoloured and shallow from the cradles of hundreds of miners, and from the battery’s sludge, the throb of pounding stampers echoing around the age-old hills-hills rudely awakened from their eons of slumber. Steadily the first tents and bark huts were replaced by wood and iron buildings. Glenville Pike writing in the 1950s described it as follows: With the early rumblings of the town at Herberton we see the exploitation of the land: people establishing their place, using and polluting rivers and stamping the music of industry into the landscape. Ours, it could be said, is a culture of exploitation.

In the Queensland cultural landscape, whole towns have been born in the search for resources. Places such as hard rock mines were literally carved from the landscape and the forests of Queensland made way for timber mills, sugar cane fields and railway lines. Our demand for resources has changed the land.

Township tale mines map