The Dreaming tells it this way. One day Tibrogargan saw the sea beginning to rise, and called to his eldest son Coonowrin to help his mother Beerwah to safety, for she was again with child. But when the father looked back, he saw Coonowrin running off alone, leaving his pregnant mother behind. Enraged, Tibrogargan struck his son with such force that Coonowrin's neck was twisted, and it has never straightened since. Asked why he had abandoned his mother, Coonowrin answered only that Beerwah, the biggest of them all, could surely take care of herself. Tibrogargan turned his back and vowed never to look at his son again. To this day the father stares out to sea, the mother stands swollen and silent, and the eldest child bows his crooked head and cries. These peaks are not scenery to the Traditional Owners. They are kin, and they are holy.

The geology tells a story almost as strange. Between 25 and 27 million years ago, molten rock pushed up beneath this coastal plain and cooled hard inside the throats of volcanoes. The softer pyroclastic cones that once surrounded them have long since weathered away, leaving only the rhyolite and trachyte plugs -- the solid cores -- standing exposed like the stumps of a vanished range. There are more than a dozen of them. Mount Beerwah, the mother, is the tallest at 556 metres, its flank scored by a sheer cliff of columnar rock known as the Organ Pipes. Mount Tibrogargan, the father, is the most recognisable, presenting from certain angles the unmistakable profile of a face turned toward the sea. The mountains are visible from the Scenic Rim on the New South Wales border and far out into the Coral Sea.

On 17 May 1770, sailing north up the eastern coast in HM Bark Endeavour, Lieutenant James Cook looked west and saw the peaks. Something in their shape and the way light caught them reminded him of the tall glass furnaces -- the glasshouses -- of his native Yorkshire, and so he wrote the name into his log. Cook was the first European to record them, but far from the last to be struck. In 1799 Matthew Flinders reported on the peaks and camped among them, climbing one to survey the country. John Oxley, Allan Cunningham, Andrew Petrie, and Ludwig Leichhardt all passed this way. For mariners and overland explorers alike, the mountains were an irreplaceable landmark, readable from land and sea -- the same quality that made them sacred made them useful.

The national park was declared in 1994 and later expanded, protecting a landscape on both the Australian National Heritage List and the Queensland Heritage Register. Walking tracks climb several of the peaks, and lookouts open onto the volcanic skyline that has drawn painters and photographers for generations. But access here carries an obligation. Mount Coonowrin -- Crookneck, the shamed eldest son -- has been closed to climbers since 1999 after rockfalls killed and injured people on its crumbling faces. And out of respect for the Traditional Owners, for whom these are living ancestors, climbing the sacred peaks, Mount Beerwah among them, is discouraged. The most fitting way to meet this place may simply be to stand on the plain at dawn, watch the light move across the family of stone, and listen.