The Gympie Pyramid

An Egyptian pyramid in Queensland, or a Swiss miner’s vineyard

Five kilometres northeast of Gympie in Queensland, the rounded end of a sandstone ridge, Rocky Ridge, known to the Kabi Kabi as Djaki Kundu, carries the ruins of six or seven low stone terraces, and since the 1970s it has been claimed as a pyramid. Rex Gilroy said Egyptian miners built it, an amateur archaeologist, Marilyn Pye, said the Inca, and the discredited writer Gavin Menzies called it a Ming Chinese observation platform. A carved stone figure ploughed up nearby in 1966, the Gympie Ape, was said to have been verified by unnamed experts as a 3,000-year-old Thoth; a photograph of a stone circle on the summit turned out to be Filitosa in Corsica; and pictures of missing reptile statues were confessed to be fake. The record is plainer. In 1875 a Swiss miner with an interest in horticulture, John William Cauper, took up the land, and by 1905 the local paper called the terraces the old vineyard. A 2008 heritage survey found no evidence of ancient builders. Grinding grooves and scar trees show Aboriginal use long before settlers, and whether the ridge is a sacred site was disputed when a highway went through in 2020.