Qualla: Allan Cunningham Monument

Allan Cunningham Monument: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before any surveyor put a name to this notch in the mountains, the Yuggera Ugarapul people told of how it was made. They had penned all the kangaroos in a great enclosure, the story goes, until an old woman set them free, and as the animals bounded west toward the inland they tore the gap clean between Mount Cordeaux and Mount Mitchell. The pass was a pathway, a route between the Fassifern Valley and the open plains beyond, walked for countless generations. The obelisk that now stands at its summit remembers a different man entirely, a botanist who arrived in 1828 and wrote the gap into colonial maps, and the contrast between those two histories is the whole story of this place.

Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

Allan Cunningham Monument: The Botanist Who Found the Pass

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Allan Cunningham was a collector of plants before he was an explorer of country, and the two pursuits travelled together. In 1827 he led a party north from the Hunter River and made the first recorded European sighting of the Darling Downs, naming rivers and ranges as he went and...

Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

Allan Cunningham Monument: A Pass That Cost a People Their Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Picken, Public domain. What opened the Darling Downs to graziers closed it to the people who had always lived there. The southern plains below the gap were the country of the Githabal people; the valley to the east belonged to the Yuggera Ugarapul. As squatters drove their flocks through the passes Cun...

Image: Andrew Picken | Public domain

Allan Cunningham Monument: Raised by a Town That Wanted a Road

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fred Eager, Public domain. The obelisk did not come from the government. It came from the people of Warwick and the surrounding districts, who feared their town would wither if a reliable road to the coast went to Toowoomba instead. They paid for half the memorial and half the roadway themselves, and turne...

Image: Fred Eager | Public domain

Allan Cunningham Monument: Standing in the Rainforest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the monument keeps watch at the peak of the pass, ringed by eight mature hoop pines planted in 1935, eleven once stood, fittingly the very species that bears Cunningham's name. Around them rises the subtropical rainforest of Main Range National Park, part of the World Herit...

Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0