Archibald Meston in North Queensland

Towards the end of the 19th century, quirky Queensland adventurer Archibald Meston led several expeditions to explore the north Queensland rainforests, claiming the first ascent of numerous mountains in the region, despite sometimes conflicting information. He was a prolific writer, producing possibly the first extensive collection of writing about mountains and wilderness in Australia. As he stood on the summit of the second highest mountain in Queensland, Mt Bellenden Ker—claiming the first ascent in 1889—he was inspired, and responded in his characteristic style:

For some time not one of us could find a voice. All was distinctly visible, in the perfectly clear atmosphere, in a radius of, at least, 100 miles in all directions. We were silent in the awful presence of that that tremendous picture that had laid there unaltered since Chaos and the Earthquake painted it in smoke and flame and terror in the dark morning of the world! It was a hall of the Genii of the Universe, the Odeon of the eternal gods with its immortal floor paved with the green mosaic of land and ocean, and overhead the arched blue roof flashing in diamonds and prismatic radiance to the far skyline on the edge of
the dim horizon. Eastward rolled the calm Pacific, visible from the Palm Islands in the south to Cooktown in the north. The white surf breaking on the Barrier Reef was a long white line on the slumbering azure of the slumbering ocean.