Queensland's Great Tropical Drive
One long day in far north Queensland began with a balloon flight in the still of a perfect dawn over the high tablelands above Cairns, and ended at dusk in the mouth of a lava tube cave, where I watched a ‘night tiger’ tree python catch and kill a bat just a few feet in front of my eyes.
In between I rode pillion behind the pilot of a microlite over a wetland paradise where wild brumbies galloped beneath us. I visited a trio of waterfalls within five miles of each other near Millaa Millaa, each one more picturesque than the one before, as if nature were trying to outdo itself. I dropped into Australia’s oldest cinema in the tiny settlement of Malanda, where locals still sit in the same canvas seats their great-grandparents frequented in the 1920s. I toured a coffee plantation, and learned that 22 minutes is the ideal roasting time for top quality beans. Lunch in Queensland’s highest town, Ravenshoe, was in the bar of a classic outback hotel, where the conversation could not have been better scripted – a tough-looking dame in her fifties was lecturing the assembled unshaven drinkers, their eyes glued to the horseracing on TV, on the gender war: “I’m through with blokes,” she told them. “They’re all losers.”
Stopping briefly to soak in the Innot Hot Springs, a creek with water heated naturally to the temperature of a scalding bath, I hit a long stretch of empty road lined by enormous anthills, cruising comfortably at 70 mph along what was virtually a dirt track. I saw perhaps three other vehicles, this really was the back of beyond.
I toasted the sunset with a glass of Aussie champagne from a rocky outcrop in the Undara National Park, the scene of Australia’s most recent volcanic explosion 160 million years ago, before visiting several of the tubes – now caves – left behind by the flowing lava when it finally set. One of these is now a bat dormitory – micro-bats in their millions gather from hundreds of miles away to breed here each year. The local pythons, six feet long with vivid yellow bellies, have worked out that a virtual flying carpet of bats heads out at nightfall to find insects to feed on – we counted a dozen snakes hanging off the branches at the entrance to the cave, waiting for their dinner.
For my part, dinner that night was a delicious kangaroo steak at Undara Lodge, a bush camp where I slept – tired but exhilarated – in a beautiful old Queensland Railways sleeper, complete with wooden panels and leather upholstery.
This range of experiences is by no means unusual in north Queensland, which packs an astonishing variety of possibilities into a week or twos worth of driving – although there are plenty of visitors with time on their hands who take a lot longer than that. There are of course, most famously, the fabulous Great Barrier Reef and the tropical rainforest, both easily accessible from Cairns, the tourism capital of the far north and – with its international airport – the main gateway for overseas visitors. The rainforest is a comparatively narrow coastal strip stretching from north of Cairns southwards as far as Townsville, tropical Queensland’s other major city. The coast offers modern high-end resorts, off-shore at Magnetic, Hinchinbrook and Dunk Islands, or at such ritzy spots as Palm Cove and Port Douglas, north of Cairns. There are plenty of less developed low-key alternatives such as Mission Beach, where the rainforest stretches right down to the water and you have to be careful not to run into a wild cassowary – an extraordinary-looking, extremely rare flightless bird.
Despite the arrival of uninvited guest Cyclone Larry at Mission Beach in March, businesses had cleaned up the mess and were welcoming visitors again less than three weeks later. It may take a bit longer for the rainforest around Mission Beach to bounce back, but as the whole region is larger than the British Isles, there are still thousands of untouched acres of rainforest to explore.
If you are on a self-drive holiday, you can push much further afield – certainly as faras Cooktown, 100 miles or so north of Cairns, a historic township near the spot where Captain James Cook beached his ship the Endeavour for repairs in 1770, which was linked to Queensland’s sealed road system only this |year. It was here that Cook’s men learned the Guugu Yimithirr Aboriginal word for Australia’s most characteristic animal – now its national symbol – gangurru or kangaroo. At nearby Hope Vale you can take a one-day bush walking tour with Willie Gordon, an elder of the Nugal-warra people, who will explain the stories and identity of the land’s indigenous owners.
Across the rainforest belt, and just two hours drive inland from Cairns, the Atherton Tableland rises, providing an astonishingly verdant landscape of rolling hills and green grass – in places almost a tropical Cotswolds, complete with cows and a thriving dairy industry. To the north, for almost 400 miles to the tip of Australia, and inland across to Broome in Western Australia, lies savannah country – dry tropics, with mile after endless mile of eucalyptus trees growing out of the rich, red earth. This is the quintessential Australian Outback, where only the passing road trains – enormous lorries pulling three or four vast trailers filled with various ores, bound for processing plants on the coast – remind you of the fabulous mineral wealth that still drives this region’s economy, gold and gemstones now joined by bauxite, a key ingredient in aluminium, and zinc.
It was mineral wealth as much as cattle that brought European settlers to the inland regions of north Queensland, in the gold rushes of the Victorian era. Two towns an hour’s drive apart tell the story vividly. At the turn of the last century, ChartersTowers was Queensland’s second biggest city, with its own stock exchange and a main street of substantial hotels and classically pedimented banks. It was founded following the discovery of gold on Christmas Eve 1871, and within two years had a post office, a newspaper (The Northern Miner, still published to this day), a jockey club, and a population drawn by gold fever from every corner of the globe. In that era of instant and unimaginable wealth, the city gave itself the boastful nickname “The World”.
These days, “The World” is stencilled in large letters on a water tank overlooking the town, but locals just call it ‘The Towers’. The community survived the exhaustion of its gold mines by establishing itself as a centre for mining expertise serving the whole tropical north, and as an education hub with boarding schools for children from the remote cattle stations of the hinterland. The grand old buildings are beautifully preserved, and on the edge of town you can visit the Venus Battery, dating from 1872, a large corrugated iron shed full of steam engines and pulleys where ore was crushed to extract gold right up to the 1960s. Locals will tell you with a straight face that the ghosts of the wild, ambitious men and women who flocked here are still seen regularly in their old haunts.
Just 30 miles away, another gold town has experienced a very different fate. Nothing is left of Ravenswood but slag heaps, a scattering of shopfronts, and two large redbrick hotels, complete with ornate bars and brass bedsteads in the rooms upstairs. The rest of the buildings – for the most part wooden houses – were simply flat-packed onto carts and moved to new towns when the gold ran out in the 1920s. Recently, modern mining techniques have reopened the town’s mines without restoring the local population: this time around, the miners commute from the coast and stay in temporary accommodation on site, while empty Ravenswood drifts on as a romantic ghost town, all but deserted.
The drive back to Cairns sweeps you through Queensland’s fertile sugarcane fields. At Ayr you can see photographs of machete-wielding cane-cutters from the early 20th century, while Ingham has an immaculate cemetery full of ornate baroque family tombs, commemorating the thousands of Italian farmers who joined this particular gold rush. For all the ease and comfort of travel today in north Queensland, this corner of Australia was unimaginably remote and tough for the pioneers who arrived just a couple of generations ago. Their ghosts are never far from view.
