A GRAZIER, A WORLD TOUR, AND AN IDEA THAT WOULDN'T DIE.

Conservation movements rarely begin with legislation. They begin with a person standing somewhere wild and deciding — against the prevailing grain of their era — that the place must not be destroyed. For Queensland, that moment came in the 1870s, when a pastoralist named Robert Martin Collins travelled to North America and encountered a concept that had no equivalent in his home colony: land set aside not for profit, not for production, but for people and nature in perpetuity.

Robert Martin Collins, born 17 December 1843, was an Australian explorer, grazier, and member of both the Queensland Legislative Council and the Queensland Legislative Assembly. He grew up in the pastoral heartland of south-east Queensland, the son of a family that had built its fortune on the land. Collins was born in Sydney, and in June 1844 his family left to take shares in Mundoolun, a new run taken up by a friend in the Logan district south of Brisbane. The McPherson Range — that great wall of rainforest running along the Queensland-New South Wales border — was the defining landscape of his childhood and adult life. He knew its rivers and ridges with the intimacy of a man who had worked cattle across them for decades.

While in America, Collins heard stories of Yellowstone National Park and for many years kept closely with that park’s progress. What he encountered was an idea entirely foreign to colonial Queensland: that land could have civic value precisely by being left alone. Yellowstone had been declared in 1872 by the United States Congress — the world’s first formal national park, a recognition that natural landscape could belong to a public in a different, more permanent way than the fee-simple ownership of pastoral runs. For Collins, coming from a colony where almost every acre of the subtropics was understood as either productive or wasted, this was a conceptual revolution.

He brought the idea home. And for the rest of his life — more than three decades — he did not let it go.

THE LANDSCAPE HE SOUGHT TO PROTECT.

To understand what Collins was fighting for, it is necessary to understand what the McPherson Range was, and what was being done to it. By the time Collins returned from North America with Yellowstone in his mind, the forests of south-east Queensland were already under serious pressure. By the 1870s, a battle had developed between those seeking to clear more land and those wanting to preserve valuable areas of southern Queensland’s subtropical rainforest. Timber-getters spearheaded the onslaught in the search for cedar — ‘red gold’. Agriculturalists followed, eager to farm the rich soil where rainforests had thrived.

The forests of the Lamington Plateau were among the richest in the continent. The plateau sits on the northern rim of an ancient volcanic caldera — the remnants of the enormous Tweed Volcano centred on present-day Mount Warning — at elevations reaching above a thousand metres. Most of the park is situated 900 metres above sea level only 30 kilometres from the Pacific’s ocean shores. The plateaus and cliffs in Lamington and Springbrook National Parks are the northern and northwestern remnants of the huge 23-million-year-old Tweed Volcano, centred around Mount Warning. The combination of altitude, rainfall, and ancient geological substrate had produced forests of extraordinary complexity: subtropical rainforests in the valleys and lower slopes, cool temperate Antarctic beech forest near the ridgelines, open eucalypt country on the drier northern escarpment. It was, as naturalists would come to recognise, a living museum of Gondwanan botany.

By the century’s end, most of the red cedar, crows ash and white beech trees had been harvested from the area surrounding what is now Lamington National Park, and the coastal lowland rainforest had been destroyed. The upland forests remained, but only because the terrain made extraction difficult. Collins understood that this fragile protection — the accident of ruggedness — would not hold indefinitely as sawmillers grew more determined and technology improved.

THE CAMPAIGN BEGINS: FROM PASTORAL LAND TO PARLIAMENT.

From the 1880s, Collins campaigned for the reservation of the wild and beautiful McPherson Range south of his home and although only partly successful, he had awakened public interest in the concept of national parks and had persuaded the government to legislate for such reservations. This is the shape of what made Collins remarkable: he was not a scientist, not a naturalist in any formal sense, but a working grazier and pastoralist who had traversed the western Channel Country as much as the subtropical highlands, and who had made a civic argument out of his personal experience of landscape.

Collins turned to politics and in 1896, standing as an independent in the seat of Albert, he defeated the sitting member, Thomas Plunkett Sr., by a narrow margin. He served the electorate for three years before Plunkett regained the seat at the 1899 election. During his time in the Legislative Assembly, Collins used every platform available to him. He was no orator performing for galleries — Robert and William were modest, thoughtful and inclined to be shy — but his knowledge of the land was authoritative and his case was grounded in both ecological and civic reasoning.

During March 1898, he took the then Queensland Governor, Lord Lamington, walking up Christmas Creek. This was not an idle excursion. Taking a Governor into the mountains was a deliberate act of advocacy — an attempt to make visible something that colonial administrators rarely experienced directly. Collins wanted Lord Lamington to feel the scale and quality of the country, to understand through experience what was at risk. It was an early lesson in the politics of place: that landscape has to be encountered to be defended.

Collins spoke of the ‘South Eastern Highlands’ as a site of economic and spiritual opportunity, describing it as ‘an undeveloped source of wealth … which may not be won by gambling, nor even made by work, but which is the free gift of Heaven.’ He took the Governor of Queensland, Lord Lamington, there on horseback for several days and lobbied for tracks to be cut to allow others to see the ‘bold grandeur’ of the country. The framing is instructive: Collins spoke in the economic language his contemporaries understood, while smuggling in something more radical — the idea that not all value can be extracted.

THE RESISTANCE, AND WHY IT WAS SO STRONG.

Collins did not campaign into empty air. He campaigned against a coherent, powerful set of interests that understood exactly what designation as a national park would mean: land taken permanently off the market.

While New South Wales and Victoria had successfully declared national parks by 1900, many in Queensland still saw the land as a timber supply or potential dairy farm, and opposition remained strong. Queensland’s political economy in the 1890s and early 1900s was organised around land clearing and production. The pastoral frontier was still moving. Timber-getters were among the colony’s most politically connected interests, and the notion of setting aside productive country — particularly country with such demonstrably rich soils as those derived from volcanic basalt — seemed to many legislators like a kind of wilful waste.

The Queensland Parliament was not ready, and the colony’s administrative culture was not equipped. National parks existed elsewhere as concepts but Queensland lacked the legislative machinery to create them. The opposition Collins faced was not simply greed or ignorance: it was the institutional weight of a colony that had been built, physically and economically, on the premise that land was for use.

It was this context that made Collins’ persistence so significant. He was not pushing against a reluctant bureaucracy — he was trying to introduce an entirely new category of public value into a political system that had no framework for it. Attitudes began to shift by 1906 when the Queensland Parliament passed The State Forests and National Parks Act 1906. This led to the state’s first national park, Witches Falls (Tamborine Mountain), being declared in March 1908.

It was not an easy journey, but some 30 years later, on 28 March 1908, Collins succeeded in securing protection for Witches Falls at Tamborine Mountain, which became Queensland’s first national park. The 1906 Act was Collins’ legislative victory — the institutional proof that his decades of advocacy had moved the Queensland Parliament. But the McPherson Range he had most wanted protected remained ungazetted. Collins had won the argument in principle; the specific campaign for Lamington would require a successor.

ROMEO LAHEY AND THE BATON PASSES.

In 1911, Romeo Lahey, the engineer son of a Canungra sawmiller, joined the campaign and continued the fight after Collins’ death in 1913. Lahey argued that an even larger parcel of land should be protected and drummed up support from locals with ‘lantern lectures’ (slide shows) and door-knocking.

The conjunction of Collins and Lahey is one of the more instructive moments in Queensland’s civic history. Collins was a figure of the nineteenth century — a pastoralist who had encountered an American idea and spent his political career trying to transplant it into Queensland soil. Lahey was a figure of the twentieth: technically trained, methodical, and equipped with a new medium for public persuasion. Lahey’s lantern slides and glass plate negatives — now part of the State Library of Queensland’s collection — were used in his campaign for the preservation of the area. He turned a landscape argument into an image argument, bringing the waterfalls and beech forests of the McPherson Range into town halls and drawing rooms across the region.

In 1911, while studying an engineering degree at Sydney University, Lahey returned to South East Queensland with a friend, William Potts, and documented their journey up the Coomera River to the border. The article set in train his concept of a larger national park on the Queensland side of the McPherson Range. Lahey did not merely want to preserve what Collins had identified: he wanted to enlarge the vision. A much more ambitious plan for an area of around 50,000 acres was proposed by Romeo Lahey in a letter to the Minister for Lands in June 1911. Lahey became the main campaigner for this larger park, encompassing all the timber reserve land in the Nerang, Coomera, Canungra, Cainbable and Christmas Creek watersheds.

A quote from Romeo Lahey’s diary, as told by Alec Chisholm in an article in The Sydney Mail in 1919, states: “I do not remember my reasoning but the idea of those glorious falls being destroyed by selection higher up filled me with an intense determination to have them kept for people who would love them, but who did not even dream of their existence.”

This passage captures something essential about the Lamington campaign that formal advocacy cannot quite convey: the emotional logic underneath the political argument. Both Collins and Lahey were driven not only by ecological reasoning or civic principle, but by the felt knowledge that something irreplaceable was under threat from people who had never seen it.

THE PETITION, THE WAR, AND THE GAZETTAL.

By 1913, Lahey’s joining the campaign was timely as Robert Collins was to die in 1913, aged 70, before his dream for Lamington became reality. In June 1913, Collins was nominated to the Legislative Council, but he died on 18 August at Tamrookum, near Beaudesert. He was survived by his wife, six daughters and a son. Six hundred people attended the funeral, many coming from Brisbane in a special train. The scale of the mourning — six hundred people, a special train from Brisbane — speaks to how well-regarded Collins was in south-east Queensland. That same community would be called upon, two years later, to sign Lahey’s petition.

The campaign entered its most precarious phase almost immediately after Collins’ death, when the outbreak of World War One in August 1914 shifted all public and administrative attention away from domestic conservation arguments. When World War I broke out in August 1914, focus shifted away from the national park proposition. Undeterred, Lahey continued the campaign and in April 1915 wrote to the Lands Minister, James Tolmie, about his exploration of the McPherson Range.

By May he had used lantern lectures and canvassed residents around the area of the proposed park for signatures on a petition in favour of the national park. He then wrote to the Minister of Lands Department advising that 521 residents of the district, a clear majority, had signed a petition in favour. He included an 11-page letter setting out 10 reasons for reserving the proposed national park: including the health benefits, the economic benefits, and the benefit to flora and fauna species preservation.

"The reserve should be set apart for ever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the short-sighted greed of a few."

So wrote Romeo Lahey to the Minister of Lands in 1915, in words that function as the moral foundation of Queensland’s conservation story. The phrase “short-sighted greed of a few” is striking from a man whose own family had built its fortune in the sawmilling industry. Lahey knew intimately what he was arguing against, and he argued against it anyway.

Following the state election and the new T.J. Ryan Labor Government in May 1915, Lahey appealed to the newly appointed Minister for Lands, John Hunter, with a letter, photographs and signed petition. On 30 July 1915, the park was proclaimed and gazetted as Lamington National Park in honour of Lord Lamington.

It was the state’s ninth national park gazetted under The State Forests and National Parks Act 1906 and accomplished after a 20-year campaign. Twenty years from Collins’ first sustained advocacy in the 1890s to gazettal. A campaign that outlasted its founder, survived a world war, and ultimately succeeded through the combined efforts of a grazier-parliamentarian and a sawmiller’s engineer son.

Although Lahey favoured ‘Woonoongoora’, the Yugambeh name for a local mountain, the park was named in honour of Queensland Governor Lord Lamington — the same Lord Lamington whom Collins had taken walking up Christmas Creek seventeen years earlier. The naming was a kind of closure: the Governor who had been shown the country on horseback was now commemorated in its permanent protection.

WHAT THE CAMPAIGN ESTABLISHED.

The significance of the Collins-Lahey campaign extends well beyond the gazettal of a single park. It established a template for conservation advocacy in Queensland that would be used repeatedly over the following century.

This action was successful in securing Lamington National Park, and became a model to create new national parks, deployed by Romeo Lahey and the soon-to-be created National Parks Association of Queensland for decades to come. Lahey did not stop at Lamington. In April 1930, Lahey founded the National Parks Association of Queensland, where he served as president until his death in 1968. For almost six decades up to the 1970s, he was instrumental in convincing successive Queensland Governments to declare many of the state’s national parks.

The template itself deserves examination: Collins and Lahey demonstrated that conservation advocacy could be conducted by non-scientists, that the argument could be made simultaneously in ecological, economic, and civic terms, that petitions and personal lobbying of ministers were effective tools, and that the media — whether through newspaper articles or lantern slides — could turn a remote landscape into a public concern. These were not incidental tactical choices. They were the foundation of a civic practice.

The campaign also demonstrated something about the relationship between democratic participation and the long-term preservation of public goods. The 521 signatures Lahey gathered were not the signatures of naturalists or scientists. They were the signatures of residents of the district — farmers, tradespeople, families — who had been persuaded that the McPherson Range had value as a shared inheritance rather than a personal resource. This is what makes the Lamington story a conservation origin story in a deeper sense: it was the first moment Queensland’s public formally said, through civic process, that some land should be kept rather than used.

Declared in 1915, Lamington was one of the first national parks in Queensland and its role in developing conservation practices in the state makes it historically significant. The park that resulted from that twenty-year campaign has since grown to protect a landscape of international standing. Lamington National Park is a reserve of international significance, managed by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service under the Nature Conservation Act 1992, to preserve and present its remarkable natural and cultural values in perpetuity. Lamington’s outstanding geological history, evolutionary significance and role in nature conservation are recognised through its inclusion in the World Heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.

The park is part of the Shield Volcano Group of the World Heritage Site Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, inscribed in 1986 and added to the Australian National Heritage List in 2007. None of this was inevitable. It was the consequence of choices made by individuals who argued, against strong resistance, that a different relationship between people and landscape was possible.

THE LONGER INHERITANCE.

There is a particular kind of civic courage that operates across generational time — that accepts the likelihood of not living to see the outcome, and works toward it anyway. Collins died in August 1913, two years before the park was gazetted. He had spent the last thirty years of his life arguing for something he would not see completed. The history preserved in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and documented across Queensland Government archives, is unambiguous: Robert Collins was one of the founders of the national park system in Queensland. Impressed by accounts of the Yellowstone National Park on his visit to America, he had kept closely in touch with the developments there.

The monument to that work is not primarily a plaque or a named lookout — though those exist — but the landscape itself. The Antarctic beech forests that had been harvested down to their upland limits by the late 1890s were not lost. The waterfalls Collins showed Lord Lamington on horseback still run. The subtropical rainforest that Romeo Lahey photographed on glass plates, carrying the slides across the district to persuade farmers and householders in village halls, is still there. The park’s lush rainforests include one of the largest upland subtropical rainforest remnants in the world and the most northern Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforests in Australia. The roots of the oldest Antarctic beech trees are over 5,000 years old.

It is worth holding that figure in mind: trees whose root systems began growing five thousand years ago, now protected by a decision made in 1915, by a campaign that began in the 1870s, by a man who returned from a North American journey with an idea that seemed, in colonial Queensland, almost eccentric.

At the centenary celebrations in 2015, descendants of Robert Collins and Romeo Lahey gathered at Green Mountains with members of the Groom and O’Reilly families, whose names have long been connected with the park’s conservation and tourism. The presence of those families at the centenary was a reminder that the Lamington story is not only historical — it is still carried by the communities that grew up around the park, and by the institutional culture that Collins and Lahey established.

The onchain namespace lamington.queensland functions as a permanent civic address for this landscape and its heritage — a way of anchoring the park’s identity in Queensland’s emerging digital infrastructure with the same intent that Collins and Lahey brought to their parliamentary petitions: to fix the place in the public record, to make its status legible and enduring across whatever administrative or technological changes may follow.

The conservation origin story does not end in 1915. It continues through every subsequent decision about how Queensland manages what Collins first identified as irreplaceable. What Collins established — and what Lahey systematised into a model of civic advocacy — was the understanding that landscape has a public life distinct from its productive value, and that this public life must be actively created and defended through democratic process. That is still the argument being made, and still the work being done, wherever the forests of the McPherson Range are under pressure.

The campaign to protect Lamington was, at its core, an argument about memory and obligation: the obligation of a generation to preserve what it had inherited, so that others, who did not yet exist and could not speak for themselves, might also know it. Collins did not live to see the park gazetted. But the six hundred people who travelled to Tamrookum for his funeral, and the 521 signatures Lahey gathered in 1915, and the five-thousand-year-old beech trees still standing in the highland forests — these are the answer his campaign eventually received.

lamington.queensland carries that same civic intent into the present: a permanent, legible marker of a place that was nearly lost, was fought for across three decades by two men from the same landscape, and now stands as one of Queensland’s clearest expressions of what conservation, at its most foundational, actually means.