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Published: October 3rd 2007
Captain Cook Memorial
Kitschy I guess but an obligatory photo opportunityDay s 193 - 194
Monday, September 03, 2007 - Tuesday, September 04 2007
Visited the James Cook Museum - a delightful old building originally built as a convent for the Sisters of Mercy who provided education for both day pupils and boarders in the early 20th century. Unfortunately after WW11 it was never used again and fell into disrepair - it was listed for demolition only to survive by the skin of its teeth to now stand as a brilliant testament to the architecture from yesteryear. It also houses a great collection of memorabilia from both white and black perspectives.
The museum houses The Endeavour’s actual anchor, along with a cannon originally turfed overboard to limit the draw of The Endeavour when it was stuck. It also houses part of the tree that The Endeavour was moored to when it put into the bay to effect repairs to its underside after it had an altercation with one of the many reefs in the area. A number of other displays from early Cooktown history were also interesting - given it was one of the largest towns in the late 1870 - 80’s (approx 30,000 during the Palmer river
The musical Endeavour
Kids musical ship all made out of black polypipe - good doogsand a bit addicitve...you couldnt walk past and not attempt some poor attempt at music [ noise anyway]! goldrush days). It was also good to see that the local aboriginal people had displays and information that showed their point of view - to balance the somewhat myopic and misguided view we tend to have of our early colonisation. Like with most things there are always three sides to every story - yours, mine and the facts! Anyway the museum was well worth a visit and several hours could be spent there.
Cooktown - Endeavour River Escape Day 195 -196
Wednesday, September 05, 2007 - Thursday, September 06, 2007
After ginning around for a fair while with things of a real world nature (emails, papers to sign and send off - reality bites hard!) we didn’t leave Cooktown until fairly late in the piece and hardly got out of town before stopping at a nice place on a tributary of the Endeavour River. The place is fairly new and has stud Brahmans and working Clydesdales with the campground in a natural (well regrowth) bush setting. It used to be part of the Lutheran mission lands from way back when and has only recently been acquired by the current owners - although it still has strong cultural
Musical Amanda
a concert that only immediate family would tolerate! links with local aboriginal groups.
Again tried our hand at throwing a line in and managed to get a heap of bites - unfortunately they were all mozzie bites and none of the piscatorial variety.
Both kids participated in the feeding of the horses and the owner was kind enough to take them both for a bit of a ride when he did his rounds around the campground the following morning - so they thought that was the bees knees.
The wife of the bloke running the show is the principal of the local aboriginal school at Hopevale community and made an offhand comment that she could have enrolled the kids for a few days at the school. After mulling over that comment for a little while we decided that it would be a good experience for the kids so we arranged to come back here for the following week and book them in for three days.
This would put us behind in the schedule stakes but was an opportunity too good to pass up - particularly for the kids.
Endeavour River Escape - Leichardt Camp (Lakefield NP)
Day 197 -198
Friday, September 07, 2007
Endeavour River from Grassy Hill Lookout
Looking out over Cooktown and Endeavour River from the hill that both Captain Cook and Joseph Banks climbed and where they first saw kangaroos. - Saturday, September 08, 2007
Off on our quick lap around the Lakefield NP along the Battle Camp Rd which was the site of an atrocious massacre of a local aboriginal group in the late 1880’s in retribution for a single murder. The road was in a pretty bad state in some areas and we wee floating across the road from corrugations at 30km/hr. Admittedly it was a fairly scenic drive and we got to stop at Isabella Falls which is a small but nice little waterfall.
We found a great campsite under the shade of a massive tree high above the Normanby River - at least that kept Amanda happy about not being attacked by crocodiles during the night. ‘Our’ little section of river had a shallow section with flowing water so we were able to have a bit of a quick dip - a rare thing up this neck of the woods. The deeper pools north and south of us would have been a different proposition altogether though.
Went down to the river at night and counted about 8 sets of glowing red eyes. By my reckoning they would have been freshwater crocs as there
Leichardt Waterhole Camp
Good shade, near the river but 10m up and out of crocs way.... were so many sets of eyes within a small area. With estuarine crocs being territorial it was probably unlikely they would have had a nice cosy existence together. That didn’t quell the fears of the members of the family when it appeared the red eyes were coming closer whilst I was getting some water. Having pushed our luck in the opinion of some we skedaddled back up our embankment to the relative safety of camp - so unless the crocs were to climb a 10 metre high sandy bank (always possible I guess) we would be relatively safe.
Leichardt Camp (Lakefield NP) - Old Laura Station - Kalpowar Crossing. Day 199
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Drove up to the Old Laura station - one of the original stations in the area and now it and Lakefield station form the National Park area. The buildings were only recently done up the National trust and the QLD government but already the termites are making a fair amount of headway into eating the timbers away. The original building / homestead had gun turrets and access for rifles around the building in case of attack from the local aboriginal tribes - a
Old Laura Station
Lakefield National park concept that seems pretty foreign to us now travelling comparatively safely through this area. A whole different ball of wax if you were trying to make a living in virgin bush, months from any supply route, having to put up with insect infestations, water from the ‘Wet’ rising up phenomenal amounts from the river bed, high humidity / temperature, tick infestations, difficulty in getting your cattle to market and then having the possibility of being speared by your neighbours! As with most remote stations they appeared to be fully self sufficient with growing their own vegetables, killing and butchering their meat along with making all their own items of a metallic nature with their own forge and blacksmith. Once the original owners died it passed onto their family company and in turn was sold to a larger pastoral company that also owned the adjacent Lakefield station. They decided to create a new homestead (surprisingly enough called ‘New Laura’) and the original homestead (now known as ‘Old Laura’) fell into disrepair until the National Trust threw some money at it and it became part of the National Park.
Went a little further up and had a look at another campground
the clydesdales
even if your not a huge horse fan it was pretty hard not to like these gentle giants / waterhole where we had a yarn to a bloke who was camped there. As it turned out he was up from Innisfail (just south of Cairns) and he had driven up that night with girlfriend and his dogs in tow. He was type example Faaarrrr North Queenslander…..talked real slow and he could think of nothing better to do with his weekend than chuck his 5 or so dogs in the ute and head north to go pig hunting! Having said that he was a pretty genuine character - and obviously good at his chosen form of weekend entertainment he had killed 5 pigs that night - not bad after driving 600 or so kms and then bagging a whole swag of pigs. Now to give him even more credit his bag of pigs was not taken by being a wimp sitting in the back of ute and picking them off with a rifle he was out there with his knife. He would use the dogs to hassle the pig and get them to latch onto their ears and then he comes in and slits their throat! Tough stuff. The dogs had a fair few battle scars all over them
Feeding time
All hands on deck to help out - didnt have to ask twice! and they wore a little ‘armour’ vest to stop them from being speared by the 3 inch tusks of the wild pigs. He showed us a couple of the heads he was keeping as trophys to give to a couple of his mates. Should’ve got a photo. A completely different life.
With the amount of wild pigs up here creating a huge problem its surprising that the government doesn’t offer some form of bounty on pigs to try an reduce the problem which doesn’t seem to have a consolidated containment policy between all the stakeholders up here (government, private landholders, pastoral companies). Oh well Im sure some bureaucrat is working on a policy that will be ready for public comment in 5 years time!
Kalpowar Crossing - Musgrave Roadhouse - Hann River Roadhouse - Laura - Lakelands - ERE (Cooktown) Day 199
Monday, September 09, 2007
Had to complete a large loop, which we will do again on our way to the Cape / Tip, back along the Peninsular Developmental Road (‘PDR’ for those in the know). The road is currently in a variable condition with some bad bits and some good bits. Stopped at the
ubiquitous Musgrave Roadhouse - one of the old telegraph stations - for a drink before heading further south back towards Cooktown. There is a fair amount of traffic on this road so we are pretty keen to complete this area prior to the QLD school holidays from September 21st. We noted in Lakefield that many of the campsites are already pre booked from the 21st onwards so the place obviously gets pretty full with southerners coming up to do their fishing holiday with kids in tow.
Kalpowar was a good camp and Lakefield NP in general is nice enough but without being able to swim (crocs obviously) and not having a boat to really be able to fish there is only a limited amount to do there. Shore fishing doesn’t seem overly productive (and not just us either) so without a tinny you tend to stand on the bank, lose a lure or two after getting snagged (yet again) and look like part of the food chain yourself!
Endeavour River Escape and surrounds Day 200 - 203
Tuesday, September 10, 2007 - Thursday, September13, 2007
Amanda and I occupied ourselves with various bits and pieces [not quite
Ride Time
Gotta be happy with that! sure what to do with ourselves really!] whilst allowing the kids to immerse themselves back into the school thing - at Hopevale School which is 100 % aboriginal. Given that we have been learning a fair bit about the aboriginal culture on this trip it seemed a worthy and worthwhile thing to do and allow the kids an insight into something different. They both came from their first day pretty excited about new “friends” (although Brayden couldn’t remember their names) and Rhiannon reckoned the whole class were her best friends. They had better enjoy it as one of the routes to school is an 80km round trip via the formed road or the back route of 62km includes 4 creek crossings and bouncing along a two wheeled track….either way a bit different than the 600m walk from Crawford road to Inglewood school!
It seemed a bit weird having to “get back in the swing of things” and have kids up, breakfast forced down, lunches made and jump in the car to drop kids off. I reckon three days will be more than enough for us to be sick of the routine of a normal life!
After we picked
them up from school we headed out to Elim Beach / Coloured Sands and Cape Bedford for a look. Nice enough and there seems to be quite a few little shelters from locals with semi permanent camps dotted around the coast.
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