Another Bumpy Ride

Monday 21 November

Today was another traveling day, from one island to another – a distance of 547 kms – 340 miles. This meant another early start to catch the first ferry from Dunk Island at 07.15 back to Clump Point Jetty. It was a grayish morning, with the sun trying to peep through the clouds, but at least it had stopped raining – it was pouring down when the alarm went off at something past five. Everyone ate a sparse breakfast, in case we had another choppy crossing. In fact it was smoother than, the outward journey and we need not have worried.

Tom picked up the coach from nearby, happily still with all the luggage that was left on board. Then disaster – one couple’s luggage had not been collected from the hotel on Dunk Island for some reason – it could only be our ‘deaf’ couple from Holland – they have made a bit of an impression on the coach – not necessarily for the right reasons - always late, never understanding what is going on, do not listen, but instead talk in loud voices whenever Jenn or Tom is speaking. There is another Dutch couple on the coach, and they, unfortunately have almost been ‘taken over’ by this troublesome couple. Desperate phone calls were made about their luggage, and it seemed that it would be impossible to retrieve it until tonight on Hamilton – it would be flown there during the day. Tom could not afford to spend any more time at Clump Point, as the journey time to the ferry for Hamilton Island is quite tight, and that ferry would not wait for us.

We set off, passing through Mission Reach. In the 1800’s Cutton brothers tried to settle in this area and get the aborigines to work for them, for tobacco and alcohol, commonly used as payments in other parts of the country. But the Aboriginals were not interested - they were already employed, seeking large sea slugs at low tide, which they then dried on the beach and sold to Indonesian traders, as they were a delicacy and aphrodisiac in south east Asia. As they were paid in drugs – opiates from the poppy fields in Malacca – they weren’t going to work for drinks and ciggys. A mission was established here in 1911 by a Rev Webb, and he looked after both aborigines and white settlers, who could not help themselves (probably as a result of the drugs) and he called the area Mission Reach. A cyclone came through in 1918 and decimated most of the buildings, and killed Rev Webb and his daughter. His wife stayed at the Mission, but never recovered and died after a year. The area was never settled again.

But another settlement nearby, Tully, is thriving – named after Alexander Tully, who opened the first Post Office in Northern Queensland and also was the first person to have a telephone in this area. Today, the town has a population around 3,500, mostly involved in sugar cane and timber industries. The local high school is here, and children travel in from as much as 50 kms away. Tully also has the reputation of being the wettest inhabited part of Australia – receiving an average of 4,338 mm per year – about 14 feet – and is most often the receiver of the Golden Gum Boat for this honour. Whilst most areas of Australia are suffering drought conditions at present, this area is not, although 3 metres of rain would be considered a drought here.

Sugar cane is very important in this area, and any vehicles concerned with that industry - harvesters, tractors, trains - have priority on the roads. Once cut, the crop has to be processed within 24 hours and within 16 hours to be sure of the quality. The fields are ploughed in one metre furrows and planted with cuttings about one foot long. The nodules germinate and growth is rapid - they reach about two feet in 6-8 weeks and in this area of Northern Queeensland are ready for harvesting after about 9 months. We saw signs along the road asking people not to transport sugar cane – seemed a bit weird – but apparently there are about 30 different varieties of cane, all with different characteristics, and consequently need different growing conditions. The cuttings are always planted so that they can be cut before the heavy rains and cyclones arrive in December. Further south the growing period can be up to 18 months. From every 21 tonnes of cane cut, they obtain about 7 tonnes of sugar.

As the cane grows it produces an ‘aro’, a pale lilac flower, which turns deep purple and falls off when the plant is mature. The cane must be cut within 24 hours of the flower dropping, so many farmers cut the crop, just before the flower falls, but this causes loss of return – approximately 1% for every week it is cut early. Of course if it rains before it is cut, the whole crop is lost anyway. Machines cut the cane into 25cm lengths which are taken by truck trains to the mills. They have ‘return crops’ which means that two cuttings are planted in a ‘x’ pattern in the field, to get a second crop, without reploughing – this can be done a couple of times, but the yield gets smaller and smaller every time ‘return cropping’ is done – about 2-3% each time. The fields need to be rested for a year or so before reploughing.

Each mill will work 24 hours a day at cropping time, in three shifts. The cane goes through a “washing” process where it is crushed firstly by a large roller with teeth about 10 cm sq, extracting the juice – sucrose. Any fibres that escape into the sucrose will float, and are skimmed off and with the residue from the first washing, it is re-washed a further couple of times, with smaller toothed rollers, until the fourth ‘wash’ when the rollers are completely flat, to extract all the sucrose.. Any fibrous cane left at this stage is sent to the building industry to make into ‘canite’ – a form of building block. The resulting sucrose is sent to be spun – again four spins, in what are like tumble driers - to complete the process of crystallizing the sugar. All sugar is brown at this stage, and has to be bleached to turn it white, the more acceptable form – which is usually done by the importing country. Any residue left after the ‘spinning’ stages is molasses which can be treated to become treacle, or used as it is in cattle feed. The leaves from the sugar cane are used as burning material for furnaces, and the resulting ash is used as fertilizer back in the fields. So nothing of the crop is wasted.

There was a pilot project here to grow pine trees, to be sold as Christmas trees, but the resulting trees were deformed due to the lack of nickel in the soil. They had no sooner found a solution to this problem, than the local bats made these trees their home, and being a protected species, the trees could no longer be cut.

Tom told us a lengthy tale about the discovery of this coast by James Cook in the 1770’s, embellishing the story Ruben had told us a couple of weeks ago. He continued the yarn to include the part played by Joseph Banks, the naturalist and botanist on the Endeavour, whose parents had in fact, financed the voyage, but who James Cook detested. Banks, together with David Solander, collected over 30,000 species of plants, animals, insects and reptiles, to take back to England, 13,000 of which had never been seen before and many are still unidentified. Unfortunately the ship’s artist, Sidney Parkinson, died at Mauritus, on the way home, after completing only 1,000 of the drawings. Five artists were set to complete the drawings, but in fact, they weren’t finished until 1984 – 213 years later, when the last few were rushed to completion, so that a book could be published to commemorate the bi-centenary of Australia. Only 75 copies were made, each state Governor receiving a copy, along with some Churches and schools. Joseph Banks was made President of the Royal Society on his return home, and he is still the youngest and longest-serving President of that institution.

Banks had opposed the possibility of people being able to settle in Australia while James Cook was alive – he would not agree with anything promoted by Cook – but after the Captain’s death in Hawaii, he actively encouraged the transportation of convicts and free people to settle in Australia, and took a lot of credit for his evidence about this new country, that had been gleaned from James Cook.

The Battle of Coral in World War II was fought in the waters off this coast, which was the first naval battle that did not involve any ship-to-ship combat, as only aircraft carriers were used. This led to the Battle of Midway with the US intervention.

Our lunchtime stop was at Townsville, named after a Sydney cotton merchant, Herbert Towns. He thought the area would prosper with cattle farming, but instead, mining became important, with copper, zinc and lead being found in the region. There are still smelters here today, but the metals come from as far awayas Mount Isa, 950 kms inland. There is some agriculture in the area, but this is mainly mango farms. Amazingly, although we have seen many orchards of mangoes, and you can buy them in greengrocers, they are never on the menus in the hotels or restaurants. Townsville is still a fairly prosperous town, and likes to think of itself as the capital of Northern Queensland – although most people from outside the town would acknowledge that Cairns is the capital of the area.

We passed through many small towns and villages on our way to Shute Harbour. One largish town was Bowen, which is in a mainly an agricultural area, growing mangoes, peppers, tomatoes and melons. They measure their crops in trays, and produce 10,000 trays of mangoes a year – a tray may hold about eight large mangoes, or sixteen smaller ones. In all they produce about 30 - 40,000 trays of fruit and vegetables and this area is known as the “Fruit Salad Bowl of the North” On the large patches of “dry area” outside the town, a few cattle are farmed. They also have salt pans on the edge of the town, which are filled with water from the river, allowed to evaporate and the crystals collected. These pans were small “paddy fields”, similar in size to the iodine salt pans we saw in Thailand, nothing like the large salt pans we saw in the outback.

The houses along the way resemble large mobile homes – single storey, with corrugated tin apex roofs, which in a very flat dry countryside, become almost indistinguishable amongst the shrubs and trees. But they are built in this style to avoid as much damage as possible from the cyclones each year.

Near our final destination to day, we passed through Cannonvale – a town built to service the Whitsunday Islands. All goods destined for the islands, come here and are transported in special containers across the water. This includes the laundry – all of which is collected at the back of what will be our hotel for the night, and sent here to Cannonvale, to be returned five days later. There is a primary school on Hamilton Island, but once children reach secondary age, they have to commute across the water every day to the high school here. (We saw several children making this journey on our crossings to and from the Hamilton Island.

Eventually we reached Shute Harbour – a small marina settlement, the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands. There are 74 islands in this group, most of which are still as Captain Cook would have seen them when he sailed through here while mapping the east coast of Australia. He named one of the largest islands ‘Whitsunday Island’ as he was passing on the day of that religious festival.

We were on the last ferry of the day at 17.15, and the wind was blowing fairly strongly. The first words of the captain of the ferry, after “hello” was that “the going would be a little lumpy!” It certainly was – not quite as bad as the journey on the “Wavepiercer”, but pretty close – and of course, we were in a much smaller boat. It bounced up and down, over and across the waves and the troughs for about 40 minutes. We did have a short respite when we called at Daydream Island to drop off a few passengers. It was lucky we had chosen to sit inside for the journey, as it was quite chilly outside, and we certainly would have got wet. Our luggage had been loaded into large metal containers – we were taking all of it this time – so at least it arrived with us. We were taken in minibuses to our hotel – on the opposite side of the island to the marina – through a narrow cleft in the hillside – looking out over Cats Eye Beach. All rooms looked out over the straights, and other islands could be seen not too far away. The room was enormous – the bathroom alone (really a dressing room) was a large as some of our bedrooms. We had two double beds, comfy chairs, tables and chairs, and a large balcony. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of white cockatoos flying around everywhere on the island, but especially into rooms to raid the mini-bar and even your suitcases, if you leave the verandah doors open. So sadly we never sat outside – although we wouldn’t actually have many spare minutes here to sit around.

It was almost 19.00 before our cases arrived, so we only had time for a quick shower and change, before going down to the front of the hotel, to catch the local shuttle bus back to the marina, to find something to eat. The bus halted outside Romano’s, an Italian restaurant, but more than half the bus (holds 20) descended in front of us and piled into this restaurant, which was looking fairly full already. So we went next door to Manta Ray’s Café – serving pasta, pizzas as well as salads and meats. . We had to wait 20 minutes for a table (the girl on the door taking names was spot on) and in that time, around the bar there was some good conversation and laughs with others holidaying on the island. I chose a seafood pizza – very unusual for me, but it was the best pizza I have had in a long time – even better than those from Pizza Express. The marina is full of very expensive motor cruisers and yachts, but the clientele in the restaurants is Australian holiday makers – some with young families – and tour groups – not at all smart, so we are not sure where all the rich and famous go to eat, We caught the shuttle bus back to the hotel and feeling quite exhausted, decided to leave the blog for another day.