An obituary for Binna Burra Lodge, which first moved me when I was a teenager
This is an obituary for quaint slab-wood cabins, a place that was burned down on the weekend in a fire devastating for the many thousands of people who have visited over the past 85 years.
Binna Burra Lodge, in the worldheritage-listed rainforest of Lamington national park, has been destroyed by bushfire.
Binna Burra was the environmental lodge started by conservationist and adventurer Arthur Groom and engineer Romeo Lahey (brother of artist Vida) in 1933 as a place for ordinary people to “experience the grandeur”. It was never luxurious, with cabins, a big fireplace in the reception lounge and access to a forest like no other. There’s still only one road in, from the Gold Coast to the ridge of Beechmont and then, a single-lane final climb through eucalyptus forest to the edge of the rainforest. Often the place is shrouded in mist. Most years, it rains a lot.
I first visited Binna Burra as a high school biology student 40 years ago, staying in the dorm accommodation at the campsite across from the main lodge. I had all the attitude of a damaged teen and a firm belief that nothing could surprise or move me. And yet, here it was, this place of giant trees and different air and light that changes minute to minute. The birds, the understory, the smell of it. I can’t hope to make you understand. You’d have to go there.
I do not come from a hiking family – we never once visited a national park – but that first experience began for me a lifelong love affair with this national park in particular and national parks more generally. And what a gift it has been. Like a mother, the rainforest at Binna Burra takes you in its arms. In one way or another, I have been in those arms ever since.
Binna Burra Lodge’s bird-in-boots logo was possibly daggy when it was launched in the 70s, and it’s even more daggy 50 years on. I say this with all due affection, an affection I know is shared by other visitors. They will have slept in bunk rooms with shared amenities or splurged on a cabin of their own with a bathroom. They might have spent rainy days in the upstairs “library” with its yellowed books donated by guests. They’ll have enjoyed a pre-dinner drink (or cup of tea) while watching the sunset under massive gums on the terrace. They’ll have eaten the fancy boarding school food in the dining room, supplies trucked up three times a week – hash browns at breakfast, three meats and a veggie option at dinner, soup in a massive tureen on each table with fresh baked bread. More recently, they might have stayed in the self-contained skylodges, less bluestone, less timber but still with that simplicity that admits the grandeur.
And they’ll have walked. They’ll have taken a packed lunch of meats and salads and bread and fruit cake on the trail. They might have gone just a little way in, to Tullawallal, rewarded by the sight of those ancient Antarctic beech trees Binna Burra is named for. Even in an hour in the rainforest, they’ve heard more birds and seen more trees than in a week in a city. They return to the lodge and the staff listen as they describe a lyrebird’s call as if they are the first person who’s ever heard it. Others may have walked more kilometres than they thought possible.
Once, I went abseiling with a lodge group. We hiked out and crawled through narrow caves to drop down off the Shipstern and Turtle Rock, finishing
in the evening at Natural Bridge to see the glow-worms. I’m afraid of heights and small spaces. It didn’t matter out there.
In recent years, I have shied away from the lodge, preferring a campsite in the national park to a soft bed and conviviality. Perhaps I’ve wanted time alone, grieving for the world, but now, I wish I’d stayed at the lodge more often. You’d look around the dining room at night and you’d see it on the faces. It’s wonder, the experience of awe. It’s what nature gives us, a chance to be small, insignificant. At Binna Burra, you are gently encouraged to come to understand just how little you matter. And it’s a relief.
The fire was swift and out of control by Friday when the lodge was evacuated. On Saturday, no one could get in to fight it. It was a black dawn for Binna Burra’s director and 70 staff on Sunday. The dining room is gone. The lodge cabins are all gone. Even the new sky lodges are devastated.
Perhaps it was always written that this would happen. It has happened. A place that offered nothing but a way to help us see has been destroyed by our blindness. Now is the time, if you have breath in your body and have ever experienced Lamington national park and Binna Burra Lodge, to help them out in whatever way you can. I am hoping they will set up a support page. I will be on it as soon as they do.
Because the rainforest is still there to be shared. There is something fundamentally good and unchanged about Binna Burra, as if the place itself takes over whoever happens to be in charge. Whatever rises from the ashes will be different; of course it will. But the new Binna Burra will still be the place where Antarctic beech trees grow. It can provide another generation and another with the safest arms they will ever rest in. It’s us who have a chance to do something to help make it real.
Mary-Rose MacColl is a Brisbane writer and grateful walker.