Cunningham Monument now heritage-listed

Allan Cunningham Monument.

The Allan Cunningham Monument, overlooking the Cunningham Highway at Cunningham’s Gap, has been entered into the Queensland Heritage Register.

The monument was erected in 1927 to commemorate the centenary of explorer Allan Cunningham’s traversing the Great Dividing Range and documenting a pass through the mountains.

However, Queensland Heritage Council chair Leslie Shirreffs said the 1927 centenary was a year out.

“It was in 1827 that Allan Cunningham identified a pass over the range to coastal settlements that became known as Spicer’s Gap,” Leslie said.

“It was one year later when Cunningham and his party set out to find a pass from the eastern side of the range, which we now know as Cunningham’s Gap.”

Twelve years after Cunningham’s expedition, grazier Patrick Leslie set out with a large party to explore the Darling Downs, establishing from 1840 the first European pastoral runs in the region.

Warwick became the urban centre of the prosperous pastoral and agricultural district of the southern Darling Downs, but transportation links remained poor with pastoralists facing a round trip of up to 800km to carry wool to the port of Maitland and return with supplies.

A direct route to the Moreton Bay settlement was needed.

Several passes across the range were tried, including a rough road over Cunningham’s Gap to the

Fassifern Valley and a dray track over Spicer’s Gap in the 1840s, a short-lived crossing called

Gorman’s Gap north of Toowoomba in the 1840s, and Toowoomba’s Toll Bar Road up the range from the 1850s.

By the early 1920s and with the increased popularity of the motor car, Warwick community leaders

formed the Cunningham’s Gap Road Committee to find a way to build a proper road from Warwick, through Cunningham’s Gap and down the east slope of the range to Brisbane.

The committee unsuccessfully lobbied the State Government for funds and, concerned that commerce would be lost to Toowoomba without a direct road to Brisbane, working bees were called over the Easter long-weekend of 1926.

Amazingly, this resulted in a drivable 4.8km road through the forest from the western base of

Cunningham’s Gap to its precipice on the eastern side.

An extension of the road over the eastern side of the range to connect with the Fassifern Valley below was planned, along with a monument at the gap itself to commemorate Allan Cunningham’s

achievement.

“Drawings of the monument were published in newspapers at the time, reporting that it would have a rock foundation formed of the broken stones over which Cunningham himself had walked,” Leslie said.

“The monument’s foundation stone was laid on 7 May 1927 by Warwick Mayor Daniel Connelly,

attended by a group of dignitaries, district residents and the men working on the road’s construction.”

A jar containing current newspapers, lists of local council and State Government dignitaries, a list of

names of the volunteers and contractors working on the road project, as well as coins, were embedded in the monument’s concrete.

“The monument was completed and officially unveiled, as planned, on 11 June 1927,” Leslie said.

“In 2022, the Allan Cunningham Monument remains in its original location and continues to be a tourist drawcard.

“The monument is on the northern side of the Cunningham Highway at Cunningham’s Gap, surrounded by the sub-tropical rainforest of the Main Range National Park.

“It comprises a stone cairn in the form of an obelisk on a stepped cement-rendered base, within a lowfenced enclosure and surrounded by mature hoop pines planted in 1935.”

Standing five metres high and three by three metres at its base, the monument is accessed via walking tracks and occupies a gently sloping elevated site with a steep embankment down to the highway on its southern side.

Allan Cunningham (1791-1839) was a British explorer and botanist in Australia from 1817, joining both terrestrial and nautical expeditions with other explorers.

Historians recognise his contributions to both Australian exploration and to botany.

The Queensland Heritage Council entered the Allan Cunningham Monument into the Queensland

Heritage Register on 29 April 2022, with the application for its listing made by the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads.