Mount Coot-tha

Mount Coot-tha is a mountain and a suburb of the City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Mount Coot-tha is a mountain and a suburb of the City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. In the 2016 census, there were no residents in the suburb.

Before the Moreton Bay penal settlement, Mount Coot-tha was the home of the Yugara Aboriginal people. The Aboriginal people came to the area to collect 'ku-ta' (honey) that was produced by the native stingless bee.

In 1839, surveyor James Warner and his team cleared the top of the mountain of all trees except one large eucalypt tree. Because this tree could be seen from many other locations, they used as a trigonometric station to take surveying measurements. This led to the mountain's former name One Tree Hill.Coot-tha meaning Honey Mountain is a derivative of the indigenous term which replaced the name One Tree Hill when the area was declared a park in August 1883. It was suggested by Henry Wyatt Radford, the Clerk of the Queensland Legislative Council.During World War II, the mountain was used as a military base by the RAAF and the US Navy. It was converted to a vast explosives depot and at one stage held more than 120,000 tonnes of explosive weapons. When darkness fell the lookout bristled with search lights in an amazing display as soldiers kept an eye out for enemy planes.anti-aircraft guns and searchlights were located on the lookout. Mount Coot-tha was also the site of US Naval Ammunition Depot (Navy 134) supplying submarines at the Capricorn Wharf at New Farm (Teneriffe) in Brisbane.In 1970 the Brisbane City Council established new botanic gardens at the base of the mountain with the intention of replacing the then Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Gardens Point in the Brisbane CBD (now known as the City Botanic Gardens) which was prone to flooding and lacked space for expansion. The new gardens were originally called the Mount Coot-tha Botanic Gardens and were officially opened in 1976, becoming the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. The new gardens cover 52 hectares (130 acres).On 24 May 1978 Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium officially opened in the grounds of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens.The Mount Coot-tha Library opened in 1975 at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. Unlike most branches of the Brisbane City Libraries, this library specialises in botany, horticulture, gardening and landscape design.Brisbane community television channel 31 Digital broadcast from the mountain from 1994 to 2017, after which it shifted to internet streaming under the new name of Hitchhike TV.On 20 November 2005, one of the Mount Coot-tha trails, the Currawong trail, was renamed the Kokoda trail in honour of the Australian soldiers who marched the Kokoda Track during World War II.

In 2017 It was proposed to build Australia's longest zip-line from the summit of Mount Coot-tha down to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. Despite initially being approved by the Brisbane City Council, in April 2019 the new Mayor of Brisbane Adrian Schrinner decided to cancel the project due to the public protests.