There is a particular quality to the relationship between a national park and the places where people sleep alongside it. The park is public — declared, protected, held in perpetuity for all Queenslanders. The lodges are private — built on freehold land, shaped by families and shareholders and the decisions of ordinary commerce. Yet at Lamington National Park, the line between these two categories has never been entirely clear. Binna Burra Lodge and O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat did not merely sit beside the park as conveniences for passing visitors. They grew with it, helped define its character in the public imagination, and, in some cases, were responsible for the very idea that the park needed to exist at all.

Between them, these two establishments span a remarkable arc of Queensland history. O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat was founded in 1926 by the O’Reilly brothers, and the first camps at Binna Burra occurred in 1933 with members of the National Parks Association of Queensland. Together they represent close to a century of continuous, low-impact accommodation at the edge of what would become one of Australia’s most significant World Heritage areas. Their stories are not identical — the circumstances of their founding, the philosophies that shaped them, and the adversities they have endured all differ considerably — but they share an underlying conviction that has rarely wavered: that proximity to wild places, done with care, does not diminish those places. It enlarges the constituency for protecting them.

The permanent onchain civic address for this landscape, lamington.queensland, anchors the park and its surrounding heritage within a durable digital identity layer — a fitting counterpart to the physical lodges that have served as Lamington’s human anchors for a century.

THE MAN WHO BUILT A PARK, THEN BUILT A LODGE.

The story of Binna Burra cannot be told without Romeo Watkins Lahey. Romeo Watkins Lahey, M.B.E., was born on 2 June 1887 in Pimpama, Queensland. In 1911, Lahey, the engineer son of a Canungra sawmiller, joined the campaign to protect the McPherson Range and continued the fight after Robert Collins’ death in 1913. By the time the park was gazetted, Lahey had been petitioning, lecturing, and lobbying successive Queensland governments for years. In July 1915, 19,035 hectares of mountainous, forested land was declared Lamington National Park, in honour of the past Queensland Governor Lord Lamington — the state’s ninth national park gazetted under The State Forests and National Parks Act 1906, accomplished after a twenty-year campaign.

What makes Lahey’s subsequent role at Binna Burra particularly striking is that he did not rest once the park was proclaimed. He understood that declarations on paper were fragile unless the public understood and valued what they were being asked to protect. In 1930, Romeo Lahey, who had played a significant role in having Lamington National Park gazetted in 1915, met Arthur Groom, a freelance journalist seventeen years his junior. It was a meeting destined to form an association for nature conservation in and of national parks. At that meeting the National Parks Association of Queensland was established — the first such organisation in Australia, with Lahey as its driving force.

Three years later, the association’s ideals took physical form on the plateau. In 1933, Lahey, Groom, and four others formed a limited company, Queensland Holiday Resorts Ltd, to provide tourist facilities and accommodation in beauty spots throughout Queensland and as far as possible to assist in preserving them in their natural state in accordance with the ideals of the NPAQ. As shares sold slowly due to the Depression, it was decided to organise camps at Binna Burra in order to promote the company. The first camp was held over Christmas in 1933. Guests stayed in tents and enjoyed guided trips into the national park. It cost five shillings a day.

The original lodge building at Binna Burra was Leighton House, built in Canungra in 1902 and owned by the Lahey family. When the Spanish Flu reached Australia after the First World War, the house was used for patients impacted by the pandemic. In 1934, it was transported piece by piece on horseback up the track to Mount Roberts and became the initial central building of Binna Burra Lodge. The name itself carries deep significance: Binna Burra means “where the Antarctic beech trees grow” in a local Aboriginal language. It was a name chosen carefully, consistent with Lahey’s longstanding belief, expressed during his years of campaigning, that Aboriginal words should be used as place names across the national park estate.

THE FARM THAT BECAME A GUESTHOUSE.

O’Reilly’s arrival in the McPherson Range came through entirely different circumstances. In 1911, eight men of the O’Reilly family from the Blue Mountains district selected 100 acres of land to create a dairy farm. Their plan was pastoral, not visionary. They milked cattle and collected timber in the manner of settlers across the range. Then the landscape shifted beneath them — literally and legally. In 1915, Lamington National Park was proclaimed, preventing further development in the area and leaving the O’Reilly farm an island surrounded by the new national park.

The proclamation that Lahey had spent years fighting for inadvertently enclosed the O’Reilly family within a conservation reserve. Rather than resisting this, the family made a pragmatic and, in retrospect, far-sighted decision. By 1926, the O’Reillys had decided to abandon farming and built the guest house to capitalise on the increasing tourist interest. Due to its remote location, guests had to ride up the mountain on horseback. In those early years, the former O’Reilly’s Guest House and slab huts took nature lovers two days via car, train, and horseback.

That first Easter of 1926 — when paying guests arrived on horseback for the first time — marks one of the earliest instances of what would later be called ecotourism in Australia. The O’Reilly family pioneered ecotourism in Australia when they began hosting visitors in Lamington National Park in 1915 and later charging for this service in 1926. The family’s connection to the park was not merely entrepreneurial. The park remained largely unpatrolled apart from scientists and government surveyors, until early 1919, when the O’Reilly brothers and cousins, along with George Rankin, were appointed unpaid honorary rangers under The Native Animals Protection Act 1906. They were, in other words, the park’s first custodians on the ground.

The name ‘Green Mountains’ was coined by Queensland Naturalists who explored the remote wilderness areas of Lamington in December 1918. The O’Reilly guesthouse sits at Green Mountains to this day — the name of both the place and the section of the park bearing the mark of that early scientific visitation the O’Reillys helped facilitate.

CONSERVATION AS COMMERCIAL PROPOSITION.

What distinguished both Binna Burra and O’Reilly’s from ordinary accommodation operations was the explicit philosophical alignment of their business purpose with conservation goals. At Binna Burra, this was embedded from the beginning. From the outset the company aimed to make ecotourism and environmental protection a significant objective under the guidance of one of its founders Romeo Lahey. The walking tracks that became Binna Burra’s primary attraction were designed by Lahey himself, with his characteristic methodological precision. The park is covered by more than 150 kilometres of clearly marked walks that were constructed during the Great Depression and designed by Romeo Lahey. Lahey studied dairy cow movements on the surrounding hills, noticing that their paths never had a gradient of greater than 1:10. He laid out the park’s tracks in a similar manner so that walkers would not be out of breath.

The tracks solved a problem that the lodges alone could not: they gave visitors a reason to be in the rainforest rather than merely adjacent to it. The history of the seventy-year partnership between Lamington National Park and Binna Burra Mountain Lodge explores wide contributions to natural area conservation. Scientific visitors, birdwatchers, and naturalists found in both establishments a base from which to understand the ecology of the plateau. Since its establishment in 1933–34, Binna Burra has provided a base for further zoological studies of Lamington National Park.

At O’Reilly’s, the conservation-tourism relationship was deepened by a family that lived, worked, and became locally famous within the park’s boundary. Bernard O’Reilly became a national hero after discovering the survivors of the Stinson plane crash in 1937, and Mick O’Reilly served as Queensland’s first paid park ranger. The guesthouse was not merely a facility from which to observe nature — it was inhabited by people who understood the rainforest with the intimacy of people who had lived within it for generations, and who were willing to act on that knowledge with extraordinary consequences.

In 2000, the resort was the first commercial accommodation provider to be awarded Green Globe Certification in Australia. The recognition was, in a sense, an institutional confirmation of something the founders had understood intuitively seventy years earlier: that restraint, proximity without exploitation, and the cultivation of public reverence were viable as a long-term commercial strategy.

THE STINSON, AND THE WEIGHT OF A NAME.

No account of O’Reilly’s is complete without the Stinson. On 19 February 1937, an Airlines of Australia Stinson Model A airliner disappeared during a flight from Brisbane to Sydney, carrying five passengers and two pilots. Both pilots and two passengers were killed in the crash. One of the surviving passengers died while attempting to bring help to the other survivors. The aircraft had crashed in the McPherson Range on the border between Queensland and New South Wales.

Bernard O’Reilly became a national hero after finding the Stinson mail plane and two surviving passengers, nine days after it had disappeared in the rugged country of the McPherson Range. It was an astounding feat of bushmanship and of stamina. Official searches had failed. Most had concluded the aircraft was lost at sea. O’Reilly, who knew the McPherson Range and its weather patterns with the authority of a man who had grown up within them, simply walked into the forest on his own calculation.

He hiked into the mountains to look for the aircraft on Saturday, 27 February 1937, and after camping overnight he found the crash site at about 4:30pm on the afternoon of 28 February, with the two survivors waiting by the wreckage: Joseph Binstead, who was uninjured, and John Proud, who had a broken leg. Bernard O’Reilly later wrote of his experiences in the book Green Mountains, first published in 1940. The rescue was dramatised in The Riddle of the Stinson, a 1987 made-for-TV film about the crash, directed by Chris Noonan and starring Jack Thompson as O’Reilly.

The Stinson rescue permanently enlarged the O’Reilly name and, by association, the guesthouse’s place in the national imagination. It is one of those moments in Queensland history that resists the reductions of myth — not because the deed was extraordinary, which it plainly was, but because it expressed something genuine about the relationship between the O’Reilly family and the landscape they had chosen to inhabit. Bernard O’Reilly did not go looking for the plane as a representative of any institution. He went because he believed he knew where it was, and because the forest was his home.

WHAT THE 2019 FIRES REVEALED.

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019 arrived at Binna Burra on the morning of 8 September. On Friday afternoon, 6 September 2019, all guests and staff at Binna Burra Lodge were evacuated as a major bushfire advanced on Beechmont and Lamington National Park. Early on Sunday morning, 8 September 2019, the bushfire devastated the heritage-listed lodge and cabins and caused damage to two of the Skylodge buildings. The rainforest surrounding the accommodation at Binna Burra is normally fire-resistant. The 2019 fires were not normal.

All of the heritage-listed lodge and adjacent accommodation buildings were destroyed during the September 2019 bushfires. It took 14 months and 30 million dollars, jointly funded by the state and federal governments under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements, to repair the only road in and out of Binna Burra — a fact that captures, starkly, the infrastructure vulnerability of a place that had received visitors since 1933 via a single mountain road, originally served by horseback and a draught-horse-powered flying fox.

O’Reilly’s fared differently. During the severe 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, more than 100 guests staying at O’Reilly’s, which was unaffected, were safely evacuated ahead of the bushfires that destroyed nearby Binna Burra. The divergence in outcomes between the two lodges — separated by roughly 23 kilometres of the Border Track — speaks to the complexity of fire behaviour within a landscape that contains multiple ecosystem types at varying elevations.

For Binna Burra, the aftermath tested the resilience of an institutional structure that had always been unusual. “It’s akin to a social collective … no one can own more than 2.5 per cent in shares,” its CEO noted in the years following the fire. The shareholder base — many of them members of the National Parks Association of Queensland, the very body Lahey and Groom had founded — became the foundation of the recovery effort. Community solidarity was not merely rhetorical. It was structural, written into the company’s founding documents.

The Queensland Government allocated 18 million dollars towards the reconstruction through the Regional Tourism Recovery Program, administered by the Department of Tourism and Sport, to support Queensland’s visitor economy through new and enhanced tourism infrastructure. Construction began on 1 September 2024, with a projected completion date of 23 January 2026. The rebuild was entrusted to Medhurst Architects, with Griffith University serving as a partner in earlier stages of the recovery.

The fires did not merely destroy buildings. They revealed, with painful clarity, how much of what these lodges represented was woven into the physical fabric of places that had accumulated meaning across generations. As Binna Burra’s chairman Steve Noakes said after first seeing the destruction: “The dining area, the lounge, the library — these places where people have gathered over generations, just totally gone, devastated.” The loss was not only material. It was the loss of rooms in which families had sat together across decades, in which naturalists had identified birds by ear, in which children had heard the forest for the first time.

TWO MODELS, ONE ARGUMENT.

Binna Burra and O’Reilly’s arrived at the same territory through different paths and represent, in their contrasting origins, the two primary ways that conservation-oriented tourism has entered the national imagination. One was designed from the outside in — conceived by urban conservationists who wanted to create a constituency for the parks they were trying to protect, and who understood that proximity and comfort were necessary conditions for that constituency to form. The other grew from the inside out — a farming family that found itself enclosed by a national park and made the practical and, in retrospect, visionary decision to become its most intimate ambassadors.

Neither model is superior. Both have produced something durable. The third generation of the O’Reilly family now holds the responsibility of managing the retreat, villa and campground precinct and has continued the transition of this iconic business into a multi-faceted award-winning organisation. At Binna Burra, the rebuild in progress represents what its chair called “the second era of a lodge at Binna Burra,” echoing the first creation that bubbled around the members of the then newly formed NPAQ in the early 1930s.

What both establishments share is an architecture of restraint — a commitment, however imperfect across the decades, to the proposition that human presence in a significant natural landscape should serve the landscape rather than simply exploit it. Binna Burra is marketed as an ecolodge and was one of the first nature-based resorts to be established in Australia. O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat consists of accommodation villas, picnic grounds, and marks the starting point of a number of popular hiking trails. In both cases, the primary offering is not comfort for its own sake but access — structured, guided, interpreted access to a landscape whose depth rewards sustained attention.

The relationship between these lodges and the park also reflects a longer tension in Australian conservation thinking: between those who would protect wild places by keeping people away from them and those who argue that public connection is itself a form of protection. Lahey was firmly in the latter camp. The O’Reilly family, by circumstance and then by choice, embodied it. The parks that have the broadest constituency of people who have slept beside them, walked their tracks at dawn, and heard their soundscapes in the dark tend to be the parks that survive political pressure with their boundaries intact.

The two pioneering conservationists Lahey and Groom shared a vision to create a place where people could stay and experience the beauty of the Lamington National Park rainforest. Through interpretive walks and educational programs, they believed more people would become committed to preserving this natural wilderness for future generations. That wager — that intimacy produces advocates — has, across nine decades, been substantially vindicated.

PERMANENCE AND THE CIVIC RECORD.

What Binna Burra and O’Reilly’s have always understood, even if they would not have used this language, is that places need persistent identity in order to accumulate meaning. The Binna Burra Cultural Landscape was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 31 December 2002. That listing — acknowledging not merely the buildings but the entire cultural landscape, including the walking tracks, the vegetable garden remnants, the memorial to Arthur Groom, the wells and pump sheds — recognised that heritage is not lodged in a single building but in the relationship between human intention and natural terrain, expressed across generations.

The formal heritage register is one kind of persistent record. It confers legal protection and civic acknowledgment. But places also need to be findable, citable, and legible within the information systems through which contemporary society navigates itself. The onchain namespace lamington.queensland is precisely that kind of durable civic address — a permanent, verifiable point of reference for Lamington National Park and the institutions that have grown up alongside it, including the two lodges that have served as its human face for nearly a century.

There is something fitting about this. Lahey and Groom formed Queensland Holiday Resorts Ltd in 1933 partly because they understood that durable institutions require formal structures — shares, directors, recorded purposes. The O’Reilly family created a guesthouse that would outlast the individual members who founded it, held together by the fact of the place itself and the loyalty it generated across generations. Both operations are, in their different ways, arguments for permanence. They persist because they meant to persist, and because they earned the loyalty of people who wanted them to.

Lamington has been shaped by individuals who understood that the impulse to protect must be matched by the capacity to remember, to record, and to make visible. The lodges are part of that record. The tracks Lahey built so that walkers would not be out of breath are part of that record. The story of Bernard O’Reilly walking into the forest with bread, onions, and a moral conviction that the plane was there — that too is part of the record that this landscape holds, and that a permanent civic identity layer must be capable of anchoring for the generations still to come.