Back in the 1970s, so I have been told, you could see from the western end of Beacon Road across an undulating grassy paddock to the North Tamborine village. The Forest Park area was mainly a dairy farm with a few houses scattered about.
Warning: Includes sad and ugly images. Native wildlife on Tamborine Mountain is not only under pressure from development. A significant risk to survival of our native wildlife is feral and domestic animals.
The EPA have captured photographs and our members often see dogs and cats in native mountain bushland. We cannot be sure if they are domestic or wild but the fact that many wildlife victims were not eaten, indicates that they could be domestic dogs allowed to run wild. Please to be very attentive to your dogs as lack of supervision can be very deadly to the native wildlife.
Esme Street was named after Esme Lahey who was a member of the prestigious Lahey family. Her brother, Romeo, was an environmental campaigner and was largely responsible for the preservation and protection of Lamington National Park, while her sister, Vida, was a well known artist.
Esme, too, was an avid environmentalist and talented artist. Later in her life she lived for about 15 years at the eastern end of Licuala Drive. The street was named after her when the subdivision in that area occurred in the 1980s. As required in all subdivisions, a section of land was set aside for community use, hence the formation of Esme Street Environmental Reserve. This is an area of natural sclerophyll forest with a rainforest understorey and follows the creek draining the area.
A regeneration projects by Tamborine Mountain Landcare Inc. The site is a strip of slope between Contour Road and Kinabalu Drive in Eagle Heights. This is notable for a recent survey which found an unidentified plant species which is currently being examined by the Herbarium for classification. The slope is steep but the dirt path makes it acceptable for at least a down hill movement. Going back up may be a test for some. It is a great example of regeneration around small pockets of old native growth rainforest sections.
Why does attentiveness to nature matter? In a very fundamental sense, we are what we pay attention to. Paying heed to beauty, grace, and everyday miracles promotes a sense of possibility and coherence that runs deeper and truer than the often illusory commercial, social "realities" advanced by mainstream contemporary culture. ... Our attention is precious, and what we choose to focus it on has enormous consequences. What we choose to look at, and to listen to--these choices change the world. As Thich Nhat Hanh has pointed out, we become the bad television programs that we watch. A society that expends its energies tracking the latest doings of the celebrity couple is fundamentally distinct from one that watches for the first arriving spring migrant birds, or takes a weekend to check out insects in a mountain stream, or looks inside flowers to admire the marvelous ingenuities involved in pollination. The former tends to drag culture down to its lowest commonalities; the latter can lift us up in a sense of unity with all life. The Way of Natural History, edited by Thomas Lowe Fleischner and published by Trinity University Press (Texas)
