Mount Glorious History
The first known inhabitants of the D'Aguilar Range National Parks were Aborigines. The names of two national parks are thought to have been derived from the dialect of a local tribe. Maiala means 'quiet place' and Boombana means 'trees in bloom'. Manorina National Park was named after a colony of bell miners Manorina Melanophrys that are found there.
Jolly's Lookout was named after a past mayor of Brisbane. Maiala was the first national park declared in this area and was reserved in 1930. Jolly's Lookout followed in 1938 and Manorina and Boombana in 1948.
Today the main land use is recreation; formerly the timber was harvested by timber getters using axes and cross-cut saws. You may get to see some buttresses in the forest with the slots where the timber getters placed the boards that they climbed up on to cut the trees down. Very unbelievable sense of history; they were tough people!
The Mount Nebo and Mount Glorious areas with the closest elevated land to Brisbane, were relatively inaccessible until the construction of roads in the 1920s.
There were a handful of small mills in the area. P.J. Leahy established a small petrol driven sawmill in 1919, possibly one of the first petrol powered mills, but it was not a success. Leahy and his son Tom later built a steam sawmill. The site of the mill is now the grassy cleared picnic ground of Maiala National Park.
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