There are a dozen or more places to head for within the park’s approximately 280-square-kilometre boundaries. The pick of these include Bellbird Grove (4km from Park Headquarters), containing another of the city’s Aboriginal trails with an outdoor museum of bark huts housing more information on traditional plant uses; Boombana’s one-kilometre rainforest circuit, complete with moss-covered logs, towering buttressed trees, and optimistic signs identifying birds you should encounter; and Maiala National Park (30km into the park), a fascinating tract of subtropical forest similar to Lamington’s, where palms, figs and other giant trees compete for light, vines tangle up the forest floor and gullies guide fast-flowing creeks. Between these enclaves are the townships of Mount Nebo and Mount Glorious, as well as Manorina Bush Camp, the park’s sole campsite.
There’s plenty of wildlife to be encountered along the park’s many kilometres of walking tracks. Catbirds snarl at each other in the rainforest, while male satin bowerbirds woo females with an elaborate tunnel made from grass and decorated with blue objects (Queensland dairies changed the colour of their plastic bottle lids when it was suggested that bowerbirds might throttle themselves on them). At night, you’ll see wallabies on verges, glider possums around flowering trees in open woodland, echidnas scraping through leaf litter for ants, and possibly the bandy-bandy, a timid snake boldly striped in black and white, which forms vertical hoops with its body when frightened.
Lake Wivenhoe was created in the late 1970s to stop the Brisbane River flooding the city – the last of a series of floods struck in 1974. Its southern end is just visible from an outlook on the western edge of the D’Aguilar Range, about 10km west of Maiala, that gives a sweeping view down wooded hills to the drier country of the southwest. A road links the park with the Brisbane Valley Highway and if you’re heading west, you can get to Toowoomba via the Wivenhoe Dam (140km) – a slower-paced, far more scenic route than the alternative Warrego Highway.
While by bus (Cityxpress #506 from Albert Street) you can come within 500m of the park gates via The Gap, 5km west of the city, you really need your own car to get around – or you could take a guided tour. The Park Headquarters at Walkabout Creek (Mon–Fri 8.30am–4.30pm, Sat & Sun 9am–5pm; tel 07/3300 4855) makes a good first stop for maps, information, details of tours. In general, spring is the best time to visit; animals are active, many plants are in flower and rain is infrequent. It can be cold at night in winter, with low cloud.
Below the headquarters is the Walkabout Creek Wildlife Centre (daily 9am–4.30pm; $3.50), an idealized creek system where lungfish, turtles, snakes and frogs coexist with few of the stresses they’d encounter living this close together in the wild. Everything is well labelled and it’s unlikely you’ll ever get better views of crayfish mincing over the gravel at the bottom of the stream or water dragons sunning themselves on rocks. The centre also has a noisy walk-through aviary, as well as a collection of platypuses and a nocturnal house.