Australia 2

Down Underview - II -

After a fun packed Christmas in Cairns wespent the remaining five weeks making our way down the east coast in a beaten up 1986 Toyota Corolla hire car. We hoped to see something of Oz's colonial past, which we did at Charters Towers, an old gold mining settlemement. We spent New Year's Eve chilling out in a swimming pool at Airlie Beach, drinking champagne. Then it was back inland for some outback adventures on a Cattle Station. In Bundaberg we had some amazing encounters with loggerhead turtles. Further south, we stopped off at Hervey Bay to vsit Frasier Island, the largest sand island in Australia. We were warned not to stay in Newcastle, NSW, but we did anyway, and quite liked it. From there we visited the Hunter Valley, loaded the boot full of wine and headed off to them thar Blue Mountains to visit my uncle who I hadn't seen for 18 years since he'd emigrated. We arrived in Sydney in late January, did the tourist stuff, spent a couple of days in Canberra, we flew off to New Zealand.

Pass us a stubby, I'm as dry as a drover's dog.
The distances are just mind boggling. You can drive for hours without even seeing a town. There are road signs that say 'Warning, fatigue zone!' and 'Passenger! Is your driver alert?' The answer is usually no, your legs have gone to sleep, and your brain is on autopilot as you wobble over the line narrowly missing three-trailer road trains. The Bruce Highway led us through Innisfail, Mission Beach and ugly old Townsville these remote settlements lonely islands admid a sea of sugar cane fields.
Charters Towers After so much time on the coast, we headed inland to an old gold mining settlement called Charters Towers. This is a delightfully preserved colonial style settlement with broad boulevards, and about as much of a Wild West feel as you'll get anywhere. There's an old stock exchange where shares in the various mines could be bought and sold, 18th century stores and strange looking characters with unfeasibly long beards driving beaten up pick up trucks. It was oince w very wealthy town, where fortunes could be accumulated in months - if you were hard enough. The rush was relatively brief however, and the last mines were closed in the 1890s - until recently that is. These days, a few corporates find that modern bulk mining techniques make it fe3asible to extract a pitiful gram or two of gold per ton, where in the good old days there used to be 300 to 400 grams per ton.
The Venus Gold Battery We didn't strike it lucky with the gold, it was all pretty much exhausted years ago. An old bushman called John Mackenzie looks after the now defunct gold battery in the town. He's a bit of a local character, full of stories of the pioneering days, which he reels off at you as you stand around the cyanide pit. He's been loooking after the battery for the last 16 years, a lovely quiet spoken man who used to be a swagman on the cattle stattions before he retied to this life. He recalled days when the workers would come in from the stations after a six month stint at a time, with their cheques in hand, ready for a good time. The stations were dry as a bone, so most of the swagman's pay would get blown in the various bars around the town. Some of the stories were somewhat incredible, such as the cowboy who was so desperate for a drink that he would down kerosene or methylated spirit, with a tablet of carbide dropped in to add a bit of fizz.
John Mackenzie and Katie at the cyanide Pit		The gold battery is a facility for crushing ore is with by giant steam driven pistons and gold is extracted by means of amalgamation with mercury. A veritable satanic mill. There used tobe seventeen of these places in town, and this was the last example, preserved by the National Trust. There was a minimum processing limit of ten tons of ore. A solitary miner (and most of them were) would take a year to extract this much ore. So turning up in old jalopies or with a horse drawn dray was a major event. "Wasn't there any problem with theft?" I asked. "Ah yeah! This bloke who worked here used to come in on a bike and leave it propped outside the door. One day the foreman went to move the bike and found it was a bit heavier than it oughta have been. He'd been putting amalgam in the handlebars". At the end of the process, the mercury is boiled off from the gold. "Mercury vapour is pretty lethal stuff, so they used to wrap a wet towel around the end of the condenser", said John. I bet that was effective, I thought. At this point, anxious miners would collect their tiny gob of gold and start all over again. If you were really desperate though, you could have your 'tailings' processes. this inviolved mixing up the slag with cyanide solution in a huge vat. "They tell me you had to be careful which way the wind was blowing" said John of the cyanide vats. "Over 142 tons of gold came out of the town in the hundred years of the mine's operation" explained John, leaning over the edge of the pits." And where there's gold there's corruption. One of the families in town made their money selling shares in bogus mining rights. "They'd make a big show of it, build a head , dig a tunnel, even ship some ore in from other parts so they could pretend there was some gold in there...". Sadly, John the living local encyclopaedia will be retiring this month. Fortunately he is planning to write a book and maybe even do a bit of travelling with his wife around Oz. We wish him well and look forward to seeing his name in print!

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New Year - Airlie Beach
Airlie Beach has a reputation as a party town, in part due to it's popularity with the young hedonistic backpacker communities that visity by the bus load. New Year's Eve promised therefore to be a lively event. Things got off to a bad start when we arrived to find that most of the hostels were full. We were offered store cupboards and garages, but that didn't really appeal. The big party was in a place called Beaches, but it looked to be chock full of beer bellied soccer fans. At last we found a great place the Reef Island Resort, or "Reefo's" for short. We had our very own 'bungalow', and there was a great pool. Things were looking decidedly up. We decided it'd be a good place to celebrate the arrival of 1999. However, after dinner, the atmosphere was that of a funeral parlour. The staff packed up and disappeared and even the bloody bar closed!
The real action was in town - so we followed suit. It was a disaster though. All the bars were crammed to the point it was impossible to get a beer, and they even had the cheek to charge entry. We couldn't be bothered with that, so we bought a couple of bottles of champagne and retired to the by now deserted Reefo's, where we enjoyed the hotel pool. Midnight came and went in an alcoholic mist. People began to drift back, and the pool son filled with revellers - it became a mighty good pool party until the police showed up at 3am accompanied by several fearsome dogs. We then discovered that we had locked ourselves out of our room, with Katie being confronted by the cops "You bin skinny dipping in the pool missy?" the policeman asked. "No I just had a shower and locked myself out of my room" said Katie... yeah likely story.
		We were rudely awoken barely four hours later by two Japanese who thought they were moving in to our room! Outrageous! We decided to check out and after a subdued breakfast we bundled up our gear and headed south on Highway 1. Yet more sugar cane acreage, an unremarkable town called Mackay. The drive was monotonous and very tiring, and we shared the wheel, finally ending up in a small place called Yepoon just north of Rockhampton. It's a pleasant seaside resort town, and we stayed at the Yepoon backpackers, a huge barn of a place, sadly occupied by boorish yobs from Birmingham on a long term working holiday with no consideration for any of the other guests.

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Kroombit National Park
Take the Burnett Highway inland from Rockhampton, and you soon find yourself climbing high into the hilly hinterland. Two hours in and you get to Mount Morgan - an old and now exhausted copper mining township of rusting houses and general decay. All the mines are shut. Worse still the mount that used to be Mount Morgan is a sad flat topped stump, completely obliterated after 90 years of exploitation. The only attraction is an excellent private museum run by a leathery old lady. The place used to have a population of over 16000, a school of arts, no less than 7 soft drinks factories, blacksmiths, dozens of schools etc. The mining was originally for gold, and lasted until 1927, and the town was on the slide for manyt years until a new company discovered copper. The mining started afresh.
		We were heading for Kroombit National Park. for a taste of outback living on a cattle station. This 10,000 acre station offers a number of cabins for tourists. We reached the small town of Bilaloa, which is an aboriginal name meaning 'land of the humungous flocks of white cockatoo', or something like that. Then we took a gravel track into the Kroombit park. Our rented Toyota Corona automatic wasn't exactly built to negotiate mud slicks and creeks, but we managed just about, slithering all over the road and scaring groups of sedentary cattle. A startled flock of green parrots chased alongside us for a kilometre or so. The farm is pretty remote, set amidst scrubby grassland dotted with half dead eucalyptus trees. The food was unbelievably good though. The most succulent cuts of beef slow-cooked over an open fire by blokes in cowboy hats, followed by home made steamed butterscotch pudding. Katie was in heaven. WWe befriended a family of expatriate Brits. Martin was a lecturer in Construction Engineering at the University of Brisbane. They were loving the sunny outdoors lifestyle in Oz but finding the incipient pommie bashing a bit wearisome.
Once a week at the station, they put on a Bush Dance. This is a participatory event, so Katie and I found ourselves doing the dosey doh, playing the bush banjo and the lagerphone. I always thought the lagerphone was a euphemism for being sick, but no, it really does exist. It's a stick studded with sea shells or beer bottle tops that works a bit like a tambourine. We found ourselves dancing to songs with names like "the spotted drongo".
		In the morning we decided to go on a short hike in the countryside - a bushwalk. There ain't a lot to see here really, just endless miles of scrubby grass and gum trees everywhere. We walked up a ridge to the top of a hill giving good views of the endless scrub and gum trees. In the afternoon, we went for an hour's horse riding with the daughter of one of the owners. Kerry, to my astonishment, had oinly ever left the farm a few times in her life! I tried to persuade her that she should change the neame of their farm from Kroombit Tourist Park to something more exciting like 'Kroombit Outback Experience" or "Outback Adventures". She just laughed - but I was serious. We spotted a few brumbies (wild horses) in the distance. They let the tame horses mate with the wild ones every now and then to add some genetic diversity. We also spotted Galah - a kind of pink breasted parrot.

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Bundaberg and the Mon Repos Turtle Sanctuary
From the bush, back to the coast to.Bundaberg, home to the Bundaberg rum distillery. Yes we did take a tour and we did sample the rum. The distillery was pretty unremarkable, a chemical factory really, and the rum's not that great either. The big draw in Bundaberg though is the turtle beaches of Mon Repos. It's the second most important turtle nesting area in the South Pacific, and we were fortunate enough to be here during the nesting season, which runs from November to March. The best time to see this natural wonder is at night, and at high tide, so we found ourselves creeping along a moonlit beach at midnight. There are researchers on the beach who ensure that your presence doesn't disturb the turtles, and we joined up with a couple of them. We'd only been on the beach a few minutes, walking along the edge of the surf, when out of the waves, a shadowy blob slowly emerged.
		We stopped and held our breath. You don't actually need to hold your breath, since they cannot hear human speech. You could sing sea shanties at the top of your voice if you liked, but it wasn't really in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion. Our turtle KV7206 made its way painfully slowly up the beach to the dunes behind and began digging a pit. The researchers asked us to keep our distance at this point, since sudden movements or lights will send the tutle scuttling back to the ocean. But a short while later, the turtle climbs into the pit and excavates a nest for the eggs with it's hind legs, and it's safe to watch quietly from behind. We lay down, staring at it's bottom as it shovelled sand out very deliberately and carefully. Eventually it stopped and positioned it's hole over the hole as it were, and began dropping eggs. It was wonderful. The whole thing takes about an hour, after which it buries the eggs and disguises the nest before scuttling back to the ocean.

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Hervey Bay is a a resort town about 350kms north of Brisbane, or Brissie as they like to call it here. A few miles offshore is Fraser Island, one of the largest sand islands in Australia and a National Park. It's famous for it's floury white beaches, rainforests and crystal clear freshwater lakes. There are no roads, but it's possible to do 4x4 safaris for days at a time. We're just going to visit it on a day trip though. Unfortunately the packaged tours here are somewhat beyond most travellers' budgets. We'll have to come back when we're richer I guess.

Otter Martyr Semmich Please

Newcastle, New South Wales - We were warned by some pals up in Cairns not to come here; "It's just like Newcastle in England, grim and grimy." Well, we tried to get a place in the more salubrious Nelson Bay, but with it being holiday season, the hotel prices were three times the usual, so here we are surrounded by smokestacks and steelworks. It's not that bad really, there are some great beaches, if you don't mind a few dead fish and the traffic jams of oil tankers out to sea, and it's very hot and sunny. It's also a stone's throw from the Hunter Valley vineyards. I pursuaded Katie that it was her turn to drive, since I'd done 98% of the driving on the way down, and she kindly obliged. They're very relaxed in the Hunter Valley, more than willing to ply you with samples of their produce without pressing you to buy. At the end of the day, we'd visited seven wineries, and I'd tried 24 glasses of wine, by which stage my palate was unable to distinguish meths from Pomerol, so we called it a day. We did splash out however on a few bottles, which we're soon polished off.

You are reading the story of Adrian and Katie's travels through the India, Far East and Australasia between August 1998 and February 1999.
Adrian and Katie have put the rat race on hold for a year to travel the world.