Cooktown–14 to 21 August 2011

We drove from Endeavour Falls to Cooktown, a short drive, but with a morning tea stop as we reinflated the tyres ready for the bitumen. 

Cooktown is a small historic town surrounded by lovely countryside.  It was here that James Cook beached the Endeavour after it struck the Great Barrier Reef at high tide near Cape Tribulation. 

The Endeavour should have sunk, but for Cook’s seamanship, the disposal of 50 tonnes of stores, canons and anchor and the fact that a piece of coral stuck in the hole, allowing the fothering of a  sail positioned on the outside the hull and sucked into the hole.  This stone marks the spot where Cook tied the Endeavour to a tree on the shore.

Cooktown was founded in the wake of discovery of Gold on the Palmer River in 1872 by William Hann. In 1873 James Mulligan found 102 ounces of payable gold and this led to the Palmer River Gold Rush.  A Port was needed for the miners and one was established on the banks of the Endeavour River and called Cook's Town.

We visited the powder magazine. This provided safe storage for the explosive used on the Goldfields. On Grassy Hill we watched the sunset and smoke from a large fire burning at the airport. Built in England the Lighthouse was shipped to Cooktown in 1885. Captain Cook climbed this hill to plot his way out of the surrounding coral reefs.

We enjoyed a stroll down Charlotte Street and seeing the lovely old buildings. Cooktown once aspired to be the Capital of the North and built accordingly. The new residents didn't understand the climate and many of the buildings were destroyed in various cyclones but enough remain to allow one to imagine the town as it would have been. We had coffee at Jackey Jackeys. Jackey Jackey (Galmahra) accompanied surveyor Edmund Kennedy on his 1848 expedition North and was one of the few survivors. He showed great heroism in saving the few remaining survivors and locating Edwards body. Exploration in the Cape was tough.

We visited the Natures Powerhouse complex. This houses the Information Centre, the Vera Scarth Johnston collection of Botanical Illustrations, the Charles Tanner exhibition of local wildlife and a nice little verandah cafe. It is situated in the Botanic Gardens which are large in keeping with Cooktown's aspirations. They had a novel approach to raising funds, selling flowers from the gardens to the locals. They are beautiful tropical gardens and we got a better look at the rare red waterlily. The Solander Garden has living specimens of the plants that Daniel Solander and Sir Joseph Banks collected in 1770.

We embarked on part of the rim walk around town. Cooktown has a series of walks visitors can do and that was our first. Most of this particular walk remains within the Botanic Gardens. We walked from the Natures Powerhouse Complex to Finch Bay then Cherry Tree Bay and then via Grassy Hill to Jackey Jackey’s, a feature of our afternoons.  These walks are steep.

We visited the James Cook Museum.  It started life in 1889 as a Catholic Sisters of Mercy Convent and Girls Boarding School aiming to bring an excellent education to the girls of the far North, a fitting school for a wealthy Capital City. Girls from remote areas lived most of their educational lives at this school as going home was not an option. Cooktown declined as the Palmer Gold fields were worked out and Cairns rose to prominence. Cairns rise was due to improved road transport and the increasing reliability of flight. Cooktown had too many cyclones. The convent became a non boarding Catholic Primary School.  During WW2 Cooktown and the North were completely evacuated of civilians and the convent was requisitioned by the Americans who used it as a one of their bases for the Battle of the Coral Sea. There were some 20,000 people in Cooktown and the airport was extremely busy. There were in fact airports and Americans stationed all through the North.  One serviceman felt Portland Roads was the worst airport he was ever stationed at.  Australia was the place from which the war in the Pacific was mounted, although almost nothing of that massive effort is left behind.

After WW2 was over the military left and Cooktown was relatively uninhabited until 1948 when people started to trickle back. Cooktown was struck by a cyclone in 1949 and the Convent was in a sorry state, so the Catholic Church decided to sell. The Old Girls who had been educated there weren't having any of that and eventually it was bought by the National Trust. It was still in a bad way but fortunately the Queen decided to visit and the Government of the day decided it would be nice if she could open the James Cook Museum. She accepted. They had given themselves about 6 months to get it ready, through the wet too. They succeeded, although the paint was not yet dry in some of the rooms as she walked through the door.
An American team located and raised the anchor of the Endeavour and the guns that Cook jettisoned.  They are on display in the museum.

We took a Guurrbi Tour given by Willie Gordon to his family’s ancestral rock art site.

We visited the cemetery, part of the rim walk. This is also huge. Many of the 3,000 people buried here do not have grave sites as they couldn't afford it. Sometimes their descendants have come and given them a headstone. The Chinese monument is a shrine where funerary rites were conducted. Mostly the bones were disinterred later and sent home for burial in China. This reminded Tricia of Aboriginal practice where your bones have to return to where you were born thus completing the circle of life for you. What is interesting about this cemetery is that the people buried here are varied and also the death rate seems fairly constant throughout life. Normally one sees ages where people die, infants, women in childbirth, maybe an epidemic and then a gap where everyone left survives and then the age of adult death for that locality. Here people die at all ages.  Many people passed through the Gold Fields. For genealogical research contact the Cooktown and District Historical Society.

We walked up Mt. Cook, the final part of the rim walk.

The Bloomfield Track- Cooktown to Cape Tribulation–18 August 2011

We took a day trip down the  Bloomfield track. Despite a number of comments about its difficulty,  it was an easy drive and very scenic. There are many lovely stopping spots.

Tricia would prefer not to take the caravan on the Bloomfield Track as it is narrow and this could make passing difficult but John thinks it is a relative superhighway although this often depends on when the grader was last through.  We met the road crew on the road and one of the crew pointed out a whale in the bay near Cape Tribulation.

 

We think Captain Cook was very understated naming Cape Tribulation.  It could easily be called Cape Disaster  as we have seen other explorers do, our particular favourites being Mt Buggery, Mt Hopeless and Mt Despair in the Victorian Alps, which leave no doubt as to the discoverer’s state of mind.

We had lunch at Myall Beach and coffee at one of the local Restaurants.

We called in at the Lions Den Hotel on the way home and had dinner. There is good camping there.

Bramwell, Archer River, Musgrave Stations, Endeavour Falls–10 to 14 August 2011

We were sad to leave Seisia, but the time had come to take the long road south. 

We again crossed the Jardine River by Ferry, admiring the grammar correction [“there are/is loose gravel”] on the sign, and chatting with the ferry driver.

We visited Fruit Bat Falls. This is a lovely place but totally overcrowded and with very limited parking so we didn't stay. You and 100 other people are getting away from it all.

We had lunch in a pulloff and drove on to Bramwell Homestead which offers camping and accommodation. It is sited on Bramwell Station, Australia's Northernmost cattle Property.  There is a large shady grassy meadow to camp in and fire circles for fires. It has a kitchen and meals can be bought. The couple running it have leased the area from the Station owners and are hard working and enthusiastic.  Facilities are basic but there are clean hot showers and toilets.

From Bramwell we drove to Archer River Station which is a lovely place to stop.  We had a swim again in the crocodile free Archer River and enjoyed our campfire. It is always pleasant and relaxing there.
 
The wife of the owner of Archer River, who we had met again in Weipa, told us of a very bad accident near Archer River the day before we arrived.  A 4WD traveling close behind in the dust of a Road Train failed to see the left hand curve in the road and went straight into an oncoming 4WD.  He was killed outright and the occupants of the oncoming 4WD were severely injured.

This is a dangerous road to drive on.  We were told of  four fatalities in the previous two weeks. We observed quite a lot of speed and bad driving in our time on the road.  The Road Trains are huge, but with good professional drivers they can travel safely and fast on these roads.  To quote from the  Queensland Government publication, “Driving the Peninsula Development Road” - ‘Overtaking a road train – Firstly ask yourself, ‘Is it really necessary to overtake, and can I see through the dust?’, like the dust shown in the photo below.

We had our first blow out on the van between Archer River and Musgrave Stations.  The van did not sway at all and John managed to pull up within four meters of the outer casing of the tyre, only because he felt the Landcruiser was not pulling as well as it should have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Archer River we stopped off at Coen for lunch and to pick up our email and then drove to Musgrave Station where we were pleasantly surprised to see our Bushtracker friends Sylvia and Colin, who joined us for dinner.

The next day we traveled through Rinyirru ( Lakefield ) National Park to Cooktown. There were lakes and River Crossings, but these were not too difficult. John and Tricia remembered how excited they were by the first river crossing. Tricia  feels the Landcruiser always smiles when it does a river crossing as if to say, 'This is what I was built for' .  We saw a lot of white waterlilies and one lake with rare red water lilies.

We lunched at Breeza Station, now a collection of tumble down outbuildings and mango trees. Tricia imagines the person planting them dreaming of the shade they would bring.  Now Breeza is a National Park and the Station and its owners long gone.  We then travelled through the Nifold Plain with its various termite mounds to Old Laura Station.

The Old Laura Station is the most complete Station building left in the North. One can imagine it in its hey day, bustling with many people coming and going.

The last leg of our drive was glorious with wonderful views round every corner as we descended the Great Dividing Range. We spent the night at the Endeavor Falls Holiday Park on the Escarpment just out of Cooktown.  In the morning we visited the Endeavour Falls, before driving on to Cooktown.

Cape York- 7 to 9 August 2011

We had done a lot of driving and decided to have some down time.
The local Year 7's were having a fundraiser car wash so they could travel down to Brisbane visit the museums and university. Their teacher wants to expand their horizons.. We had our car washed and for a while had a very clean car. Since there is about 15 k of bitumen it didn't last long. So much bad stuff is written about these kids but they are just normal children doing normal things. 

We went to look at some of the plane wrecks from WW2, a DC3 and Beaufort bomber. The most touching was the DC3 which went down killing all six on board just short of the runway. It is still largely intact including the rubber on its rear tyre. It must have been a horrible place to fly especially during the wet and many planes are lying peacefully rusting among the vegetation. We saw large numbers of fuel dumps. There were more than 10,000 men here with very little to indicate their presence now.

One of the things we wanted to do was take a helicopter flight over the region. This was a magnificent trip and worth every penny.
We flew over the mouth of Jardine River and over the Jacky Jacky Creek.  We crosssed both the Old Telegraph Track and the By Pass Road.

We flew over Somerset and up the tip then down to Punsand Bay.

Then we went out over the Torres Strait. We saw Possession Island where Captain James Cook planted the Union Jack on the 17th of August 177o and claimed the whole of the Eastern Coast,naming it New South Wales, for Britain before sailing away into History.

We flew over Horn Island, Thursday Island, Prince of Wales island and many others before returning to Red Island and Seisia.

It was a great trip.
We pottered around the town, rested, enjoyed the beautiful scenery and the sunset.