by Lorna Hendry
The next morning the track got even worse. I checked my map. Where we had expected there to be a road turning off to outstations, there wasn’t one. Where there were signs, they pointed to places I couldn’t see on any of our maps or road atlases. I had seen a detailed map of Cape York a few months earlier but I hadn’t bought it at the time, not wanting to have even more bits of paper at my feet. I thought we’d be able to pick one up when we got closer, but there hadn’t been any in Karumba. If we didn’t find some kind of landmark or sign soon, we’d have to consider the possibility that we had taken a wrong turn somewhere.
After two hours of very slow going I was estimating how much fuel we would need to get back to Dunbar Station. We could probably go another 30 kilometres before we wouldn’t have enough diesel to get back safely. I told James, but he just nodded tersely and I knew he’d already worked that out. Navigating the trailer around a fallen tree, we saw a ute up ahead. Two young men were refilling their fuel tanks from jerry cans.
‘Are we still on the Musgrave Road?’ James asked.
‘Yeah, mate, don’t ya have a GPS? How shit is this road! Fifty kays to go!’
We didn’t have a GPS. We didn’t have any mobile coverage either. We had done some research on the expense of buying or hiring a satellite phone and decided against it, but we did have a UHF radio that we had bought and had installed in Perth. With a range of only 5–20 kilometres, depending on the terrain, the UHF was limited in its effectiveness in very remote areas, but the EPIRB was still tucked into the pocket in the door beside me. It gave me some comfort to know that we could send a distress signal that would summon help but the more we travelled, the more we realised that everywhere we went, so did lots of other people. Seeing the man driving past in his ute last night had reminded me that people did live out here. We were on a track that, unlike the road out to Halligan Bay on Lake Eyre, was used by locals getting to and from other communities or towns. We were starting to think that it would actually be quite difficult to get somewhere so remote that help wouldn’t drive past within a few hours.
Three hours later we drove past the sprawling sheds and outhouses and fences of the New Dixie cattle station, just a few kilometres from the Peninsula Road. When I closed the final gate behind us and looked back the way we had come, I saw a sign that said ‘Road to Dunbar Station impassable. Drive at own risk.’
We turned onto the smooth, well-graded Peninsula Road, giddy and slightly hysterical at what we had just done. At Musgrave Roadhouse, the halfway point between Cairns and the tip of Cape York, we queued in the kiosk to buy pies, sausage rolls, soft drinks and chocolate. We sat in green plastic chairs on the grass and wolfed our snacks as if we hadn’t expected to ever see food again. All around us, people were complaining about the terrible state of the Peninsula Development Road and the toll it was taking on their vehicles. We couldn’t help ourselves. ‘We took a shortcut.’ But we had to admit that, although it had knocked 600 kilometres off the trip, we had only saved ourselves two hours of travelling time.
At Archer River, another Cape York stopping point with a roadhouse, pub, accommodation and campground, we treated ourselves to what we decided were probably the best burgers in the country. We chatted to some people who were travelling in a convoy with four other vehicles, and they invited us to tag along with them. An older couple in their group had done the drive up to the tip of Cape York several times before. We had assumed that they were all friends but it turned out that, at some point in the last few days, the older couple had collected four carloads of first-time travellers and offered to lead them.
‘They really know the ropes and if anything happens you’ll have people around to help you out.’
We weren’t tempted. To us, the older couple seemed determined to latch onto these nervous travellers by instilling in them an irrational fear about what lay ahead. The man had already irritated James by expounding loudly on every subject from tyre pressure to fuel consumption.
Although we weren’t experts on any of these subjects, we thought we knew enough to be sure that the man’s predictions of disaster had little connection with reality. The Gibb River Road, spoken of in hushed voices by some of the travellers we had met, was positively busy and the Peninsula Development Road seemed that way too. The main difference was that, while the Gibb River Road attracted a lot of European and American tourists, the Cape York track was almost completely populated by Australians. I could never work out why, but perhaps it was because any trip up the Cape was, by necessity, one that required you to retrace your exact route on the way home. It wasn’t ‘on the way’ to anywhere: it was more of a pilgrimage.
Cape York, the pointing finger at the north east of Australia, is split in two by the Peninsula Ridge. The ridge is the northernmost end of the Great Dividing Range, the third-longest land-based mountain range in the world. It runs down Australia’s east coast from Cape York, through Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. It forms the Blue Mountains, the Australian Alps, the Snowy Mountains, Mount Kosciuszko, the High Plains, and the Grampians. On Cape York, water on the western slopes of the Peninsula Ridge drains into the Gulf of Carpentaria. On the eastern side, the rivers flow into the Coral Sea, flooding the Great Barrier Reef with fresh water and nutrients.
The history of European settlement in Cape York echoes that of Central Australia. Alice Springs was originally settled as a telegraph station in 1871 while, in Cape York, construction on an overland telegraph began in 1862 and was mostly completed in 1887. One particularly tricky stretch relied on horses to carry telegrams until the final section of galvanised cast iron poles carrying a single wire was finished. You can still see remnants of the posts and wires deep in the scrub of the Old Telegraph Track.
The largest town on the peninsula, Weipa, began as a Presbyterian mission in 1898. Back then, thousands of hectares were set aside as an Aboriginal reserve. Huge deposits of bauxite – the ore that produces aluminium – were discovered in the area in 1955. Over the next decade most of the land was converted to a mining lease and a railway and port were built to transport the ore directly to Japan.
We were visiting Weipa because James had flown there a few years earlier to install the lighting in the new Western Cape Cultural Centre. The Weipa–Napranum Reconciliation Committee had built the centre to tell visitors about the Indigenous culture, environment and history of the region. The idea was to promote reconciliation and encourage visitors to respect the culture and lands of the local Indigenous people. The project took years, but it eventually opened with a showcase of displays contributed by the local communities of Aurukun, Mapoon and Napranum. James had been proud to be involved in something so important.
When we arrived, the centre was deserted. At first we thought we might be too early or that maybe it wasn’t open every day. As we walked around, peering in the windows to catch a glimpse of the displays, it was clear that it had been abandoned. When we asked at the visitor centre, we were told that after several years of sporadic staffing and disagreements amongst the management committee, the centre had closed two months earlier.
Deflated, we continued on to the local campground. It was set right on the water and was generously planted with shady gum trees. It also had the twin attractions of a swimming pool and hot showers. The only disturbing thing was the list of rules they gave us. Along with sensible advice about not cleaning fish by the edge of the water because of the local crocs, was the rule that pig dogs had to be locked in their cages at all times. Some of the caged dogs had large radio receivers on their collars to track them as they chased feral pigs through the bush.
That afternoon, two cars plastered with AFL logos pulled up beside us. The men who climbed out, unfolding their long legs in relief, were holding a clinic at one of the local communities the next day. They said we were welcome to come, so we took the boys for a day of footy with a group of Indigenous kids. It was the first time I had seen Indigenous kids play football and I was amazed at their skill, their ability to keep ru
nning despite the extreme heat and the fact that none of them were wearing shoes. The only other white boy was the son of two schoolteachers, Nathan and Letitia, from Bamaga at the very top of the Cape. They invited us to visit them when we got up there.
For a lot of people, the main reason for being in Cape York was to drive along the 360-kilometre Old Telegraph Track between Bramwell Junction and the Jardine River. It was a narrow, corrugated and rocky track with lots of river crossings. The approaches were sometimes very steep and all the crossings required careful navigation around submerged rocks and deep holes.
We drove along the Old Telegraph Track for a while. We had decided to have a go at the notorious Gunshot Crossing, but on the way there we got stuck behind a tour bus that was axle-deep in the sand. The driver told James that all of his passengers were ‘about seventy, not out’ and not much help at digging the heavy wheels out of the sand. We unhitched our trailer and pushed it off the road, then tied a rope to the bus and towed it two kilometres to a firmer section of the track. An hour or so later, back on the main road, we again found ourselves behind the bus. It was stuck in the mud at the final creek crossing. We couldn’t drive around it, so we returned to the Old Telegraph Track and drove along a very rocky track into the campground from the other direction. That experience was enough for us and we stuck to the main road after that.
Eliot Falls, 280 kilometres north of Archer River and in the middle of the Jardine River National Park, was one of the most beautiful swimming spots we had seen. A wide, slow river trickled over a waterfall into the pool below. A smaller creek rushed in from the side. Where it flowed into the pool there was a tiny rock hole that filled with bubbling water. We took turns to sit in its fizzy coolness. We spent a whole day swimming and floating and doing bombs from the top of the waterfall.
At Jardine River we paid a fee that bought us a return trip on the ferry. It was also a permit to bush camp on Aboriginal land between there and the tip of Cape York. While we were waiting for the ferry to be winched across from the other side of the river we drove around to the old crossing for a look. We had heard people complain about paying to cross the Jardine, talking instead about the original crossing further upstream. We got out of the car and looked at the point where the track dived into the water. The river was at least 50 metres wide and was flowing fast. We guessed it could be as much as five metres deep but, aware that crocodiles were common in the area, we didn’t wade in to check. Years ago this had been the only place to cross the river. Back then, timber planks were placed on the sandiest sections and the entries and exits were clearly defined. The other bank now looked overgrown, dark and steep: a perfect crocodile lair.
The people who resented paying the ferry fee were usually the same people who argued they shouldn’t have to pay to enter Aboriginal land. To me, $100 to ferry our car and trailer across a river and back and allow us to camp on someone else’s country seemed like a bargain. We returned to the main crossing, drove the car onto the large steel barge and were winched across in less than five minutes.
The next morning we wasted no time getting to the top of Cape York. Homemade wooden signs with painted arrows saying ‘This Way to The Tip’ were nailed to trees along the track. At the end of the road, we followed a path into a small section of dense rainforest, through the trees and out to a large expanse of flat red rocks. We clambered along the rocks until we were standing on a small summit. Less than 200 kilometres to the north, across the Torres Strait, lay Papua New Guinea. I had read that on a clear day the mountains of Papua New Guinea were visible from where we stood. I couldn’t see them, and doubted that was even possible, but I felt a satisfaction and a thrill of achievement. It was unlike the feeling I had at Steep Point, looking west towards nothing but ocean for thousands of kilometres. Standing here, I felt as if one giant step could take me somewhere new and exotic and exciting.
Thrilled with how adventurous we were, we walked down to the final 50-metre section of the Australian mainland to find forty elderly people milling around, taking photographs of each other. The official sign was mounted on a steel post that was concreted firmly into the rock bed. It looked about as significant as a parking sign. In small, aqua writing, it declared that we were standing at the northernmost point of the Australian continent.
Over the next hour, just about everyone we had camped near in the past fortnight turned up and we all took turns taking each other’s pictures by the sign. James had decided to fish, but at the same moment that he finally hooked something, the black akubra hat he bought in Alice Springs nearly six months earlier flew into the water. I saw him consider whether or not to throw himself in after it and then stop himself as he remembered that crocodiles and tiger sharks patrolled the channel.
That night we stopped in at the general store in New Mapoon, one of the five communities that make up the Northern Peninsula Area at the top of Cape York. New Mapoon is home to about 300 people. We ordered a pizza and the man who ran the store sat on the wooden verandah with us and chatted as we ate. He said that he leased the store from the local council and that it was a goldmine. The only problem was finding reliable staff. It was a familiar story and we had heard it at most of the roadhouses in remote communities so far. At the moment, his main employees were three young Indonesian men whom he had sponsored under an immigration scheme. They lived in a caravan behind the store. They cooked a great curry, he said, although hot chips and pizza were still his bestsellers.
When he said that he was thinking of selling the business, James glanced at me. The man must have noticed, because he told us that if we were interested, he could email us the information. ‘Mind you, what you see in the books isn’t the half of it. That’s why I’m getting out. When I bought it, I thought we’d stay ten years and make enough to retire on. That was only four years ago, and I reckon we’re set up now. Besides, the wife hates it here.’
My skin crawled a little. New Mapoon was created in the 1960s when the people from Mapoon, near Weipa, were forcibly relocated to allow bauxite mining leases to be granted on their land. If he was making a fortune, it was out of the pockets of people who had been displaced from their traditional land and dumped onto someone else’s country. He had a captive market amongst the families who weren’t able to get anywhere else to shop.
‘And’, the man went on, ‘the lotto people have been in touch. They want me to stock scratchies. They’ve done their research and they reckon this could be one of their biggest selling outlets in the state. Now, fair enough, you might not think that’s a good idea. It’d be up to you. But if it doesn’t happen here, you can bet your life they’ll just buy them somewhere else and then where’ll you be?’
I sat on the verandah and wondered what it would be like to live here permanently, not as a quick fix for a meagre superannuation fund, but to build a different kind of life. It was hard to imagine, but I knew that if we were to do it, scratchies wouldn’t be involved.
We did have to earn money somehow, though. Our decision to rent our house out for another year had changed the nature of our trip, but we hadn’t yet worked out how to manage that. Our savings had nearly run out and, while the rent the Canadians were paying was covering our mortgage, we were soon going to have to work to fund our travelling. We had no plans about what we would do for money when we returned to Melbourne, more than a year from now, but I tried not to think that far ahead. Also, the school year would be ending in a few months. Our homeschooling experiment had worked out fairly well so far, but I didn’t think we could extend it for much longer. ‘They’ll learn more from travelling than they will in a classroom’ must surely have some kind of limit. I was worried that we’d almost reached the point where the reverse would be true.
The next afternoon we fished off the sun-bleached wooden wharf at Seisia, the smallest of the Northern Peninsula Area communities. We jigged for live bait, the tiny fish that clustered in shimmering schools under the pier. When we caught one, we put them on a larger hook to cast out to sea for
larger fish. Dylan refused to fish and instead perched on a wide wooden post on the edge of the wharf, deep in the world of Harry Potter. When the afternoon ferry arrived from Thursday Island, Oscar and Dylan were fascinated by a fair-skinned, sandy-haired boy who was about fifteen years old. He had switched from chatting to them while the ferry docked to speaking an exuberant and completely incomprehensible language as he helped the Thursday Island women haul their colourful striped bags along the wharf to waiting cars. We caught a few English phrases in the musical stream of words and realised he was speaking the local dialect, Torres Strait Creole.
The next day we drove to Bamaga, the administrative centre of the region, to visit Nathan and Letitia, the teachers we had met at Weipa. We asked them about the language we had heard. As the kids bounced on their trampoline, they told us that most of the local people spoke several languages, Creole among them. English was a third or fourth language and often wasn’t spoken at home. Despite this, English was the only language used at the school. They also confirmed many of the stories we had heard about very low levels of school attendance in remote Indigenous communities. The main goal of their school was to teach basic literacy and numeracy. They admitted to often being frustrated but they were philosophical about it. Up here, strongly held cultural practices and traditions took precedence over Western education.
