Road sign exposes dark truth about popular tourist attraction
Mount Gravatt is advertised as a great place to experience nature, but after the sun goes down dangerous activities begin.
An Aussie mountain that towers over the city below is advertised to tourists as the perfect place to see koalas, including “mothers and joeys”. During the day Mount Gravatt is peaceful, but once the sun goes down the road that snakes up towards the lookout harbours a dark truth.
It’s then the animals that draw visitors to the Queensland capital are being run down at an alarming rate. Just three days apart in November, separate pairs of mother and joey koalas were hit by vehicles and left to suffer on the side of the road.
When rescuer John Knights arrived to help the first couple on November 16, the joey was clinging to its mother’s fur. “Mum was unconscious and fitting. And she was dying,” he told Yahoo News.
“They were just hit and left. People don’t stop,” he added.
The official koala crossing road signs are easy to miss as you drive up the mountain. But the warnings handmade by rescuers are more arresting. “Speed kills me,” one states. “Mum and joey killed 16 November,” another says.
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Alarming koala figure revealed around 'Triangle of Death'
In Queensland, although koalas are listed as endangered, populations of the marsupials survive in reserves on the outskirts of Brisbane, but these important habitats are also dissected by a network of busy roads.
Before she began rescuing koalas Sharyn Bartlem guessed maybe 20 koalas a year were dying in Brisbane’s south. “That wouldn’t have been ideal. But the reality is this year we've hit over 100 within a 6km radius. And there will be others that we don’t know about” she said.
The koalas have been killed close to Whites Hill Reserve, which sits at the centre of a notorious hotspot referred to by rescuers as the “Triangle of Death”. Its corners are Cannon Hill in the north, Carindale in the east, and Mount Gravatt in the south — where the mothers and joeys were hit.
“Koala habitats have got smaller and smaller over the years, and the roads through them have got busier,” she said.
This month Bartlem’s group, Save the Koalas and Wallabies of White's Hill, issued a plea to local authorities to better protect the koalas, saying tolerating the continued high numbers “doesn’t make any sense”.
Speaking later with Yahoo she added, “It’s so frustrating. I feel often when we try and find solutions all we hear from government are reasons we can’t make changes.”
Council urged to protect koalas dying on dangerous mountain
Brisbane City Council told Yahoo it closes the gate to the Mount Gravatt lookout every night and it is reopened early in the morning.
Two years ago, the gate was closed at 7pm during the week and 8.30pm over the weekend, but to enable late-night community support work that time has been extended to 11 pm. Unfortunately, this means there's now traffic on the road when the koalas are most active.
To try and make the road safer, Council lowered the speed limit from 50 to 40 km/h after a review in 2021, but rescuers say clearly more needs to be done as koalas are still dying.
Local man Dominic Geiger recalls when he was younger, his mates would go hooning up Mount Gravatt at frightening speeds. Decades on, they’ve settled down, but new generations of racers have muscled their way in.
“Brisbane City Council encourages people to go to Mount Gravatt to appreciate nature and the views, but it seems pathetic that it’s not taking more steps to protect what’s Australia’s most beloved endangered animal,” he told Yahoo.
“In light of multiple koalas with joeys being struck by cars, whatever the council has in place is not enough to protect them from vehicle strikes.”
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