It was a tent-overfilling crowd of around 150 that gathered at Fairhill Native Plants for the launch of our book ‘Walking On The Wilder Side… in the Conondales’ and our website www.exploreconondales.com.

The colourful and informative book represented an enormous upgrade from a previous low-budget booklet of walks in the Conondale region produced by Cheryl Seabrook some years ago. Although the Conondales are a key conservation area in southeast Queensland, they have generally featured only as small sub-sections in other books.

‘Walking On The Wilder Side’ is devoted almost entirely to the Conondales, but also adds nearby walks at Gheerulla as well as the Great Walk on the Blackall Range.

More than just walks though, it is very special in including sections by a number of writers with special biological and historical expertise in the Conondales. It features the conservation history of the Conondales; how this great forest mosaic, once destined for clear-felling for hoop pine plantations, has slowly and incrementally been either added to the National Park estate or been afforded other protective tenure.

Conondale Range Committee President Ian Mackay acted as MC for the launch and welcomed guest speakers Carolyn Male [Member for Glasshouse], Richard Giles [past Project Officer for the CRC] and Mark Ricketts [long serving CRC Vice President].

All spoke of their love of, and involvement in, the Conondales, and Mark in particular, spoke of the dilemma in producing a book that would inevitably bring more people to the area. Through all our submissions over the years has been recognition of people’s needs to visit native forests, literally for ‘re-creating’. As Bob Brown puts it, “people don’t put up photos of clear-felled forests or denuded hillsides, it seems we all have a need to be somewhat in-touch with a natural world, and for many this means visiting National Park or State Forest areas. This isn’t something driven by groups like the Conondale Range Committee but in reality, this need has probably resulted in most of our wide support base over so many years.

We felt it was our special job to inform and educate visitors, a feature that is making eco-tourism the popular success that it is. We sought to inform them, not only of the forests and some of the special things that live there, but also of the protracted battle to see the area protected, firstly from rapacious clearing for farmland, then from plantation establishment and more recently from the ravages of gold mining.

A project such as this requires sustained enthusiasm and skills. Ours came from a couple of quarters. It was to Elaine Green that we owe the initial concept and hard work in securing funding from Queensland State Development and to Cheryl Seabrook that we owe the unenviable task of the myriad of functions entailed in bringing such a task to fruition.

The website, produced by a life-long visitor to the Conondales Arkin Mackay, is a ready and attractive way to access information and particularly photographs about the Conondales, purchase books and t-shirts, and generally keep up with the activities of the CRC. It will continue to grow as issues change. Do visit it at www.exploreconondales.com.

The Conondale Range Committee is indebted to the Queensland Government for funding towards this book and website. While we were able to supply the willing expertise in writing, researching, trialling walks and drives, and in collating, the assistance through funding has been the enabling factor.