Cardwell – Queensland Stories

The first glimpse of the sea is always exciting. Suddenly there it is, spread out blue in the sun, with light glinting off the wave crests.

I feel calmer and happier near the sea. Perhaps it’s the clean, salty breeze. Coastal air seems more charged with oxygen than inland air. Perhaps it’s the peaceful sleep that comes with the sound of the waves all night long.

We think of Queensland’s Bruce Highway, in its magnificent 1679 kilometres from Brisbane to Cairns, as a coastal highway. The irony of it is that in all that length there are only four spots where can you actually see the sea. And you have to earn those views.

First sight of the sea comes 840 kms up the Bruce from Brisbane: well into the Tropics, passing the beaches of Noosa and Rainbow Beach, of Hervey Bay and Yeppoon, without a glimpse.

After eight hours or so of hinterland driving to Rockhampton and another couple of hours through the beautiful but dry cattle country further north, suddenly, below a curving hillside, across the railway line that skirts the highway, the sea appears. On a narrow strip of land beside the water is the tiny fishing village of Clairview.

Less than a minute’s drive later, it’s gone, and the dry forested hills are back.

“That looked beautiful,” you say. “We must stop there some time!”

A few weeks ago when driving to Cairns, we did stop at Clairview, spending the night in a cabin at the peaceful BarraCrab Caravan Park.

BarraCrab Caravan Park Clairview *Photo: thetimes.com.au*

We ate fish and chips (neither barramundi nor crab was on the menu) with a beer at the casual licensed restaurant, looking across the coconut palm lined beach to the peaceful evening sky and sea, where people were strolling or fishing.

Workers commute up and down the Bruce Highway all year round, often spending the night in motels and caravan parks, and here at Clairview a tradie was standing relaxed on the beach, looking at the water, work done for the day, in hi-vis and thongs with a Fourex Gold beer can in his pocket.

We weren’t tempted to swim. Stingers and crocodiles are always a threat in these waters, and like all northern beaches in the shelter of the Great Barrier Reef, the waves are little more than ripples.

Onwards up the Bruce.

Three and a half hours north of Clairview, just south of Bowen and across the road from the Big Mango, you glimpse the sea again. The tide is out, revealing the roots of mangroves and millions of tiny mud dwelling creatures; but beyond them the water is bright blue. Looming to the east are the hazy purple hills of Gloucester Island and the Whitsundays.

Nearby, above the highway and looking out across Nelly Bay, is the Ocean View Motel, and it’s a pleasure to sit outside a unit there, under the frangipanis, and enjoy the evening view across the water to the lights of Bowen.

Bruce Highway where it meets the sea, south of Bowen, near the Big Mango *Photo: petfriendly.com.au*

This is one of the rare Bruce Highway motels with a view of the sea. You’ll need to drive north for another four hundred kilometres or so to find another.

An hour and a half north of Townsville comes the next ocean view. On a stretch of the these-days divided highway that crosses the Cardwell Range nineteen kilometres north of Ingham, you can glimpse the sea through roadside vegetation. For the full sea view, away from the fast-moving traffic, take the slip road at the top of the range and walk five minutes to Panjoo Hinchinbrook Lookout for a breathtaking outlook over the channel and Hinchinbrook Island (Munamudanamy) to the ocean.

View from Panjoo Lookout across Hinchinbrook Passage and Island (Munamudanamy)

The Banjin People are traditional owners of this large, undeveloped, beautiful island, which is part of the Girringun Indigenous Protected Area.

At Cardwell, thirty-eight kilometres north of Panjoo Lookout, the Bruce Highway at last spends time near the sea – the Coral Sea. Here, for over a kilometre, the highway follows the shoreline. A walkway leads past big old calophyllum inophyllum trees, otherwise known as ballnut trees, on the edge of the beach.

Protected since 1865, a *Calyphyllum inophyllum* at Cardwell

Governor Bowen, travelling in the ship “Platypus”, visited this area in 1865, only a year after the town was formed and the local Girringun people had been violently “dispersed” from their ancient lands. The Queensland Government wanted Cardwell for a port.

Governor Bowen was impressed by the calophyllum trees, hundreds of years old even then. Since 1866 they’ve been protected by law; and they weathered Cyclone Yasi better than most.

A postcard from c.1885 shows the dark-leaved calyphyllum trees, old even then, on the shoreline of Cardwell *Photo: northqueenslandhistory.blogspot.com*

In 2011, Cardwell was devastated by Yasi, with sand and water blown across the highway, the bitumen ripped up and houses destroyed; but now, eleven years, later, it has never looked better.

Girringun Bagu sculptures, based on the design of firesticks, by local artists Eileen Tep and Charlotte Beeron, stand enigmatically on the shoreline. They watch the tourists who stop here for the scenery, the information centre, playground, petrol and food.

There are motels and pubs, the popular Yasi Bar, and a charging station for electric vehicles. And the calophyllum trees.

Best not go for a swim, though. Crocodiles and stingers are common here, so close to the mangroves and muddy water of Hinchinbrook Channel.

That’s it for sea views from the Bruce Highway.

Named in the 1940s after a North Queensland Labor politician and Minister for Works, Harry Bruce, this highway deserves a more romantic, evocative title. Many travellers have called it derogatory names over the years, one favourite being Goat Track. That’s unfair. This is a long road, covering difficult terrain in an extreme climate, with a comparatively small population to pay for it.

I’ve been travelling the Bruce for over fifty years, in drought and in flood. I’ve crossed the old Marlborough Stretch, been stopped at its one-way bridges, experienced flat tyres and breakdowns and dodgy motels. I’ve crawled around the hills south of Gympie, stuck behind caravans on the old narrow, curving road that has now been replaced by a motorway. I’ve suffered the bumps and potholes in the flood-prone roads around Bowen and Proserpine. But to me the Bruce Highway is a beautiful road, and I’ve seen great improvements to it over the years, making it far safer and more pleasant to drive on; and upgrades are happening all the time.

However, if it’s sea views you want, you’d be better to take the Captain Cook Highway from Cairns to Port Douglas.

Captain Cook Highway *Photo: australiangeographic.com.au*

There are many spectacular sea views to enjoy in Queensland; but you’ll have to leave the Bruce to find them.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/03/blue-space-living-near-water-good-secret-of-happiness

Most of us Australians left sacred sites on the other side of the world – the River Jordan, the Ganges, the Thames. Our ancestors who came from overseas brought the stories with them, but many of us still hold a yearning for the places. Ancient stories, the myths that bind us to the earth, are always attached to places.

Indigenous Australians who know their sacred places and the stories that go with them have a feeling of deep belonging that might elude the rest of us, no matter how much dust in our hair or dirt under our fingernails, or how many generations of our ancestors have lived here.

The mythology of Australia that we, as a nation, have taken most to our hearts is based on stories of foreign places: Gallipoli, and the battlefields of France and Belgium. In Canberra last week, I went to see the sixty-two thousand knitted red poppies that are flowing across the lawns surrounding the Australian War Memorial. It’s a beautiful sight, just like the poppy-strewn fields of France. The poppies stand for the Australians who died.

IMG_20181028_171001_resized_20181031_124719464 — At the Australian War Memorial

This striking display is there to commemorate 11 November 2018, the one hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day.

No one who fought in the First World War is alive now, and few who fought in the Second World War. My father was a prisoner of war in Changi and on the Burma Railway, and after he came home, he always attended the ANZAC Day Service at the Nambour Cenotaph. For him it was personal. He remembered the faces of the men who’d died and suffered around him.

The War Memorial at Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore overlooks the countryside Dad and his battered company fought across, in 1942, in the last days before the surrender. That story is not often told.

kranji-war-cem1_orig — The memorial in Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore

Now, for Australians, the iconic story of Australians in World War Two is the story of Papua New Guinea’s Kokoda Track.

In Australian culture, these foreign places – Gallipoli, the battlefields of France and Belgium, the Kokoda Track – symbolize all our deaths in war. The people who served in these places have become a source of inspiration – the embodiment of courage, toughness, sacrifice, and a dry and cheeky humour that we regard as our own.

These foreign places have become our own iconic places. Huge numbers of Australians make pilgrimages overseas to visit them; and at home, every town has its local equivalent: a war memorial. Here the ceremonies take place year after year, with symbols and rituals, music and costume, and the re-telling of uplifting stories.

For veterans and their families, war memorials and ANZAC Day commemorations are personal, not matters of mythology; and on most war memorials there are lists of names. In the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, there are more than one hundred thousand names on the bronze panels of the Roll of Honour, all of them people who have died as the result of war service.

The Western Queensland town of Roma has trees for memorials. Wide-trunked, beautiful bottle trees line the streets. By 1920, ninety-three had been planted to commemorate ninety-three local men who died in the First World War. Each tree had a plaque with the name of a soldier, date of his death, and the words “Lest we forget”. Most of the trees still stand, giving Roma’s streetscapes a unique dignity and charm.

IMG_20180929_111126_resized_20181002_025008910 — Memorial bottle tree in Roma

The War Memorial in Barcaldine is restrained and elegant – a granite and marble clock tower, standing in the middle of an intersection. It has four clock faces, each surrounded by a marble wreath, and the names of the two hundred and ninety-two locals who went away to fight in World War One. My grandfather’s name is among them. He was one of the lucky ones; thirty-eight died overseas.

My father’s name is one of the many on the National Freedom Wall in Mount Coot-tha Botanical Gardens, and on the Ex-prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat.

Looking out from the National Freedom Wall, Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens

I remember Dad’s few stories of the war, mainly funny ones. I also remember when, in his seventies and suffering from Parkinsons Disease, barely able to articulate anymore, he suddenly spoke clearly. He said, “It’s hard to burn bodies with wet wood.”

His mind had gone back to the days on the Railway, when cholera struck the camps and men who helped burn infected bodies in the morning could themselves be dead and burned by evening.

Stories. I remember them when I see his name on these memorial walls.

We can’t spread our thoughts over all of the suffering of Australians in time of war. Instead, we focus on the battles of World War One. When we take part in the events of ANZAC Day and Armistice Day, when we stand before eternal flames and war memorials, they symbolize the pain of all the wars. The stories and the familiar rituals bring us together, not to go shopping, or to eat or drink or surf, but to think about something bigger than the individual, something that encourages higher aspirations.

We should never let this degenerate into flag-waving, patriotic theatre, the glorification of war, or divisive, bitter discourse. We shouldn’t let politics or the marketplace intrude. They intrude almost everywhere else.

We should also acknowledge the wars on our own soil – the Frontier Wars that happened here in Australia from 1788 onwards, as Indigenous people fought for their land and lifestyle, and suffered the heart-breaking loss and destruction of their own ancient, sacred places.

My favourite memorial stands among trees, looking out over the sea, in a sandy park in Cardwell, Far North Queensland. It’s the memorial to the Battle of the Coral Sea, which happened right off this coast. This was a crucial sea and air battle of 1942, fought with bombs and long-range guns. People living in the North listened in awe to the rumble of artillery far out at sea.

fullsizeoutput_3ef1 — The Memorial to the Battle of the Coral Sea, Cardwell FNQ

This battle was fought in defence of our own place, our own stories. And not a poppy in sight.

Tag: Cardwell

Where the Bruce meets the Sea

ANZAC Stories

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