St. Joseph's Church - Queensland, Australia
S 28° 13.848 E 153° 08.106
56J E 513254 N 6877222
St. Joseph's Church is located on the grounds of O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat in Queensland, Australia. The closest town is Canungra, which is located down the mountain and takes about 50 minutes to reach by car.
Waymark Code: WM5ZB7
Location: Queensland, Australia
Date Posted: 03/06/2009
Views: 6
A plaque on the church provides the following information:
This church was built in 1881 at Tullamore on the site of the present Gleneagle Cemetery. Later transported and re-built on this land a donation of the O'Reilly family. It was re opened and blessed by Archbishop Sir James Duhig D.D., Archibishop of Brisbane on the 27th November, 1955.
Additional in information about this relocated church is available in an issue of The Catholic Leader:
The O'Reillys have been a pioneering Catholic family in the district, on the edge of Lamington National Park, since 1911 when they set out to graze dairy cattle and to carve out a new home in the dense sub-tropical rainforest of the Border Ranges. When Lamington National Park was proclaimed in 1914, the O'Reilly boys, Herb, Luke, Mick and Bernard, became honorary park rangers. The area started to attract an increasing number of visitors and this spurred the family to think about tourism as an adjunct to dairying. In 1926 the family built the first guesthouse in the mountains. To reach it was an arduous two-day journey from Brisbane, the last stage on horseback as there was no connecting road until 1947. In 1937, Bernard O'Reilly made headline news when he cut his way through the mountain rainforest to rescue two survivors of the Stinson plane crash. His heroic efforts are now part of Queensland history. In 1955, St Joseph's Church, built in 1881, was moved from Gleneagle near Beaudesert to a small plot next to O'Reilly's Guesthouse.