Caloundra - Culture and History

The Blackall Range area is thought to have bee occupied by the Gubbi-Gubbi people prior to European investigation. They gathered once every few years on the banks of Obi Obi Creek at Baroon Pocket to feast on Bunya nuts.

The first European to sight the Caloundra area was Captain James Cook who noted and named the Glass House Mountains in May 1770. Perceiving a similarity between the unusual shapes of these volcanic plugs and the glass furnaces in his native Yorkshire, he named them the 'Glass Houses'.

The next explorer was Matthew Flinders who, in 1799, entered the channel which lies between modern day Caloundra and Bribie Island, staying in the area for fifteen days. Because of the pumicestone on the shoreline he named it Pumicestone River, which subsequently became known as Pumicestone Passage. Flinders ventured ashore and climbed Mount Beerburrum on 26 July, 1799.

The first European settlers in the Caloundra area didn't arrive until 1862 as the land grab, which started in the early 1840s, had concentrated on the Darling Downs and the fertile lands north of the Brisbane River Valley. The first permanent settler in the area was John Ballinger who selected land for sheep-raising south of Lake Currimundi.

Perhaps the most important nineteenth-century settler was the explorer William Landsborough who, with a £2000 reward from the Queensland government, purchased 2372 acres of what is now Golden Beach, on Pumicestone Passage, in 1882. Although he only lived another four years, during which time he grazed sheep, Landsborough Shire is named in his honour.

It was during the 1880s that Caloundra began to acquire its reputation as a seaside resort. The first hotel was built in 1885 on Shelley Beach and by 1905 Wilson's Guest House offered holidays on Dicky Beach. A bakery was built in 1909 and the first general store appeared the following year.

While the fertile inland soils were used to grow maize, oats, sugar and tobacco and the local dairy industry prospered, all Caloundra could offer was tourism.

Anne Wensley's An Introduction to The History of Caloundra is an informative and useful publication on the area.