Find the stories hiding in plain sight.
Echidna Maps is a public knowledge map for historic places, local memories, industrial sites, old tracks, lookouts, ruins, and community stories.
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View from Heale's Lookout, Gillies Highway, c. 1935
Mapped place
A car pulls up at Heale's Lookout, about 2,000 feet up the Gillies Highway, with the ranges and valley spread out below. The lookout sits on the climb from Gordonvale to the Atherton Tableland, a road of 263 bends that rises about 800 metres in roughly 19 kilometres.
Touring car on the Gillies Highway through rainforest, October 1927
Mapped place
A soft-top touring car stops among tall rainforest trees and tree ferns on the road between Yungaburra and Cairns, photographed in October 1927. The range road had opened to traffic on 10 July 1926, cutting the trip between the coast and the Tableland to a single drive.
View on the Cairns to Yungaburra Range Road, October 1927
Mapped place
A car comes through a cutting between huge granite boulders on the Cairns to Yungaburra Range Road in October 1927, a little over a year after the road opened on 10 July 1926. The single-lane range road ran one way at a time to a timetable, with traffic controlled at Top Gate and Bottom Gate.
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