Maleny a warm friendly country town in Queensland

Many years ago, escaping the winter in Canberra, Paul and I stopped off at a small town in Queensland, called Maleny.

Maleny is two hours drive from the city of Brisbane

Our memory of this pretty country town was that it had three bookshops, and a huge expanse of land which was about to be developed into Maleny Botanic gardens. The setting was half way up a mountain, and my memory is that we stood looking at the carved out land, and said to each other….this is going to make a wonderful Botanic garden.

This is a photo taken by the Maleny Botanic Gardens

This year, we decided to make a trip to Maleny again, and the town and surroundings are as beautiful as ever. However, as with the best laid schemes, things did not go according to plan. First of all I left the battery for the camera at home. As everyone would know it is very hard to track down a specific camera battery unless in the city or online.

A wonderfully helpful young man in a Pharmacy cheerfully said that he could provide me with Hearing Aid batteries, but definitely no camera batteries.

So almost all the photos of this holiday are taken from my phone or Paul’s (many thanks to Paul)

The Botanic Gardens covers a large and hilly area and has many paths and transport vehicles to get around.

Our second setback was much bigger. Recently there had been severe rainfall and flooding around parts of Maleny, and many of the mature Botanic Garden trees and shrubs and small bridges were destroyed.

Very sad to see, and very costly to start again in some areas. However, we walked through the parts of the Botanic Garden which had survived.

We could see the Volcanic peaks of the Glass House Mountains in the distance
This photo shows how damage had been done, not only to the plants, but to the beautiful variety of waterfalls and ponds.
Fortunately, many of the lovely tree ferns stayed intact .
This photo shows the layers of colourful plants which had survived.

For anyone who is interested the website for the Maleny Botanic Gardens is very comprehensive, and the photos are gorgeous. (https://www.malenybotanicgardens.com.au/).

The website mentions the extensive aviary and colourful birds to see, however, we did not have time for this part of the gardens.

The town of Maleny still has three bookshops and we spent the afternoon in Rosetta Books which had a varied collection, from poetry to children’s books and many genres in between. The owner of the bookshop told us that Maleny has many book clubs and active readers, and some authors too. The local library is also known in the district to be very popular.

We had booked into AirBnB just a short drive out of Maleny. Here is the cabin we rented for four days. (apologies for the sun shadow across the photo)

Way up on the side of the mountain, the ever changing views of the mountains and valley below were wonderful. I did wish I had my camera, (and a long lens, which I don’t have)

Early morning view …no birds in sight, but we heard many of them…

The generous owners of the cabin had provided us with local milk, yoghurt, butter and fresh fruit. Looking in the fridge, I was reminded of a quote by a fellow blogger, Laurie Graves “Notes from the Hinterland” who wrote that Mainers have a saying,

‘when we go to town, bang goes the butter money”‘

Well, I have to say, ”when we went to Maleny bang went the low cholesterol diet!

The shadows come across every afternoon…

The day we left the mist was rising and it looked as if rain was coming, so we were very very lucky.

As we waved goodbye to the curious cattle, we also saw a few distinctive and interesting Queensland houses along this stretch of road. Characteristically Queensland houses are made of timber and raised off the ground, built on stilts or stumps for the sub-tropical climate. This is to counteract the extreme temperatures, flooding and to avoid termites and pests.

A sad goodbye to this dairy farming mountain and picturesque Queensland farm houses…including our lovely cabin.

Thanks for taking time to read my post, and as they say in Zimbabwe… go well…during these unsettling times.

Copyright Geraldine Mackey: All Rights Reserved