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Rainbow Retreat Eco Tourism Register interest

Journal

The land and its history.

Sourced writing about the Country, the settler history and the bush at Wyee. Each piece is labelled by the kind of evidence it rests on and lists its sources.

DocumentedSourcedOur positionReasoned

Country

The people, the language and the stone — the long story of this land.

Still water at the southern end of the lake

Sourced · 10 min

Awaba: the language of a plain surface

The Awabakal language was written down in 1834 by a missionary and the man who taught him. Here is what that record says about the lake, the words, and the people who are speaking it again.
A timber cabin at the edge of the water, seen through bush

Sourced · 8 min

Stories in the landscape: the lake as the Awabakal described it

The 1834 record preserves how Awabakal people explained the petrified wood, the island, the moon and the coal around their lake. Here are the landscape stories, as printed, with their limits marked.
Aerial view of the valley, bush to the horizon

Reasoned · 8 min

The years the record goes quiet

Between 1799 and the 1840s the Awabakal world around this lake was broken. The documents are thin, the numbers uncertain, and the silence itself is part of the story.

The settlers’ century

Timber, rails, coal, fire and flood: what the record says happened here.

Aerial view of the valley: house, lodge and dams in the bush

Sourced · 12 min

Timber, rails and a town: the settlers' century at Wyee

From a sawmill on the lake in 1874 to a railway town proclaimed in 1891, a mine in the 1960s and a longwall today: what the record says the settlers did with this valley.

Caring for the land

The bush, its wildlife and how it is looked after.

Palms and planting beside the water

Sourced · 9 min

Caring for the bush: weeds, corridors and gliders

Seventy-seven acres of protected forest does not look after itself once people arrive. Here is the practical, sourced plan: what grows here, what should not, and how we intend to leave the bush better than we found it.

Something here wrong, missing, or yours to tell? Write to us. Corrections are recorded on the article they belong to, with the date.