Townsville

Townsville was named after Captain Robert Towns who sailed from England in 1827 and originally settled in Sydney as a mercantile agent.

In Sydney his wealth grew and he gradually kept buying up property further north.

By 1865 his northern interests totalled a million hectares of pastoral land.

Towns financed the Cleveland Bay settlement  and brought in South Sea Islanders to help establish the settlement.

Captain Robert Towns statue

Towns only visited the area once in 1866 to inspect the wharf and other work that had been done, but spent the whole time confined to his quarters suffering from bites and blight.

The Ross River enters the sea just to the south of the city and it is strewn with mud flats and mangroves.

We had a voucher for a city tour on a trike which our daughter Leann bought us for Christmas 2016. (The voucher, not the trike)

On the trike for a tour of Townsville

This tour is operated by Steve and he was very accommodating even though the voucher was more than 20 months old.

The trike which was built for him in the states cost him $50k 4 years ago, is powered by 2 litre Ford Focus engine and has a 5 speed transmission just like the car.

Steve grew up in Townsville and told us of him catching mud crab and barramundi along the banks of the river, but not so much now.

Crocodiles have been seen coming this far south and one was caught last year about a kilometre up the coast, right at one of the city swimming beaches.

Steve took us around for 2 hours and showed us all the highlights of the city area.

Street art in Townsville

Street art is a feature of a lot of the older building walls and it is really well done.  The city centre has a lot of empty shops as the suburban shopping centres are taking over, so the council it trying to brighten up the city to encourage people to come back into the city.

The highest point in the city is Castle Hill which is 286 metres above sea level.

Castle Hill got it’s name as sailors coming into the bay could see it from miles out and they always said it looked like a castle.  Being this high, there are some awesome views from up there.

View of Townsville and Magnetic Island from Castle Hill

Townsville has a large aquarium which is said to have the largest living coral reef in Australia.

Tropical fish

  They don’t have all the huge sharks and rays that you see in most other city aquariums, but they do have a huge range of colourful tropical reef fish.

Judy sitting at the base of this huge tree

The Anderson Gardens has a diverse range of local trees and palm as well as imported palms and cycads.

This Arenga Australasica  is a native of NE Queensland and Northern Territory and has the biggest trunk and canopy of any tree that I have seen anywhere.

We heard some eerie, high-pitched wailing noises coming from the bush during the night where the caravan is parked, and on investigation we found it to be coming from the endangered Bush Stone Curlew.

Quite by chance as we were walking through Anderson Gardens, Judy spotted one of these birds sitting amongst the leaf litter, almost perfectly camouflaged.

Bush Stone Curlew

  It sat perfectly still, even as I got closer to it for a photo.

Townsville sits at the base of Mount Stewart which is 584 metres above sea level.  A winding road takes you to the top of the mount where you get an excellent view of the city and beyond.  

On the left is the huge army base which we were told houses 10,000 people, it is almost another city on its own.  To the right of centre of the photo is Castle Hill with Magnetic Island in the far background.

View of Townsville from the Mount Stuart lookout

Going further to the right is the city and the port.  To the far right and 50 kilometres out to sea is the Great Barrier Reef. 

Magnetic island is a small island just 8 kilometres off shore from Townsville, so it is only a 20 minute trip across on the ferry.

Ferry to Magnetic Island

The ferry leaves the Port of Townsville amongst all the cargo ships that come and go.  We were surprised to learn that sugar is the biggest export through this port.  Incitec Pivot import a lot of fertilisers through this port, so I felt quite at home given that that is what I did for a lot of my working life in Melbourne and Geelong.

The ferry docks at the terminal in Nelly Bay on the island and there are “hop on, hop off” busses waiting at the terminal to take visitors around the island.

Nelly Bay ferry terminal on Magnetic Island

The island is a blend of national park, holiday accommodation and a resident population of about 2,000, with huge granite boulders and hoop pines towering into the skyline.

There are 4 little townships on the island with an over abundance of coffee shops, pubs and eateries.

Horseshoe Bay on Magnetic Island

We took the bus to the far end of the island to Horseshoe bay which has a beautiful beach and a host of water activities.

The island hosts a week of yacht racing starting on the first weekend of September so there were a great variety of yachts moored in the bay.  My, how the other half live.  Big flash boats with little run about boats in tow so they can come ashore.

You would need a day in each of the little towns to explore the various bays around each one of them as well as the other attractions they have.  We were a bit limited, as there were no hire cars available because of the yacht race, so we were stuck with public transport to get around and you know how much I love that (not!)

Sugar Cane must be 8 feet tall

We took a trip north along the Bruce Highway to Ingham, about 110 kilometres from Townsville.

This is real sugar cane country with literally thousands of acres of sugar cane at various stages of growth.

The whole area is chris crossed with what must amount to hundreds of kilometres of narrow gauge railway tracks, which the sugar trains use to haul the harvested cane to the mill in Ingham.

One stationary train we saw loaded and ready to be taken in was just under 800 metres long.

Willaman Falls

From Ingham we travelled a further 45 kilometres west to have a look at Willaman Falls, which is Australia’s highest single drop waterfall.

Not only is it the highest in Australia, it is the 249 highest in the world.  

This waterfall which is in the Girringun National Park  is 540 metres above sea level and 268 metres high.

The pool at the bottom is 20 metres deep.

What an awesome sight, well worth the hours drive up the windy road to reach the look out.

On the way back we found a little wayside stop called Frosty Mango.

Our granddaughter Sophie would be in her element here as they have everything mango that one could imagine, from cakes to ice cream, mango pies and mango thick shakes.

(Sorry Sophie, we ate them all on the way home before they melted, but I did take a photo for you).

Townsville seems to us to be built around heavy industry and mining.

Glencore have Australia's biggest copper refinery here which process copper concentrate which is railed in from Mt Isa.

Sun metals have a zinc refinery here also which has Australia's largest privately owned solar power farm.

This solar power farm, which seems to be spread over about 100 acres, produces 125 MW of power which is 30% of the power used in the refinery, as well as supplying some power back to the grid.

All the black bits are solar panels in the solar farm at Sun Metals in Townsville

Sun Metals is obviously confident in their operations at Townsville as the solar farm which only opened on the 17^th August 2018 cost them $200 million to build.

Queens Gardens with Castle Hill in the background

Townsville’s Queens Gardens at the base of Castle Hill were originally planted by the early settlers with fruit trees as an experiment to see what grew best here.  The fruit trees are gone and have been replaced with a myriad of rainforest plants.  These are well protected by the huge White Fig trees which must have been here for hundreds of years to have grown this big.

Huge White Fig tree in Queens Gardens

Having left Townsville behind, we start heading south on our return trip home.

Lake Maraboon to Charters Towers

Lake Maraboon is the mass of water behind the Fairburn Dam which supplies irrigation water to farms around the Emerald area.

View of Lake Maraboon from caravan

There are huge citrus orchards around the area as well as cotton and lucerne crops that all rely on the water from this dam.
After travelling for just over 6 kilometres across the lake in the Zodiac to check our red claw pots, we came up with absolutely nothing which was disappointing.  With the pots relocated we headed back across the lake for breakfast and then off to Anakie to have a look at Gemfest.

Parrots carved from rose quartz

As the name suggests, Gemfest is a festival of gems held every year at Anakie which is a little town in the gemfields about 45 kilometres west of Emerald.  Gemstones are displayed which have been found around Anakie, Sapphire and Rubyvale as well as other gemstones from other parts of the country and the world.

These parrots which have been carved from rose quartz were brought in from overseas.

Some people do well out of mining Sapphires!!

  As well as gems on show, there were also some really nice cars and other means of transport as well.

Camel transport at Anakie Gemfest

  Arriving back at the lake in the evening we saw that Bill Shorten had visited the lake during the day to promise drought relief to farmers in the area.  What surprised me was that the reporter said that the lake was down to 22% of it’s capacity and the farmers are only getting 6% of their allocation.  They also said that if they don’t get good rains in September and October, irrigation allocations will be cut all together.

Red Claw - This one was just under 12" long.  Made a nice sandwich

  Red Claw are all the talk at Lake Maraboon but we didn’t have a lot of luck.  This one kept our hopes up but sadly it was the only one.  

Fairburn Dam earth filled wall

Lake Maraboon was formed when the earth filled wall was constructed across the Nogoa River for the Fairburn Dam back in 1968.  The dam has a surface area of 37,000 acres and has a catchment area of 16,320 square kilometres.  When full it has a depth of 31.70 metres.  My GPS tells me that we travelled almost 40 kilometres backwards and forwards across the lake in our little inflatable boat trying to catch red claw, but not much luck.  Those that were getting a few were travelling between 12 and 14 kilometres diagonally across the lake, too far for us.  

I read somewhere that the anniversary stone for 45 years is sapphire.  Given that we celebrated our 45^th wedding anniversary this year, I thought it fitting that we visit Sapphire in the gem fields and have a bit of a fossick for sapphires.

Rainbow Lorikeets have NO manners

The Sapphire caravan park is in a bush setting and we were visited by Rainbow Lorikeets every morning and evening looking for a feed.

Wallaby with joey in it's pouch

  Wallabies  also come around in the evening looking for a hand out as well.  The easiest way to fossick for gem stones is to head off to one of the many miners that sell buckets of “wash”.  We found the people at Armfest to be very helpful and their “wash” came from their mine 30 feet underground.  The idea is to sieve the stones known as “wash” through 2 sieves stacked one on top of the other.  The top sieve has a larger mesh than the bottom sieve and the idea is that as you wash the stones in the Willoughby.

Using the Willoughby to wash the stones

  The heavier gem stones fall to the bottom where they are easy to collect.  We went along most days and found lots of small sapphires and some star sapphires which are black, and when polished show a silver star.

The darker coloured stones in the middle are sapphires

  On our last day we were a bit more successful and found a nice stone which can be cut to make a nice piece of jewellery.  From Sapphire we kept heading north, across the Tropic of Capricorn through the towns of Capella and Clermont.  Both of these towns have huge coal mines around them and huge mines means huge equipment.

Dragline bucket at Clermont

This drag line bucket weighs 39 tonnes and can hold 50 cubic metres of soil. This bucket came out of service in 2007 and was replaced by an even bigger machine which is in use to this day.  The Clermont mine produces 12 million metric tonnes of coal each year and is expected to have another 9 years life.  Coal mined here is transported by an overland conveyor to the rail head at the nearby Rio Tinto mine where it is loaded onto rail and taken 287 kilometres overland to the coal loading terminal at Hay Point, which is about 420 kilometres south of Townsville.

The trip between Sapphire and Charters Towers was a bit too big for us to do in one day so we stopped over at a little roadhouse called Belyando Crossing for the night, then continued onto Charters Towers the next day.  Back in the mining boom days from 1871, Charters Towers was the second largest city in Queensland.  Gold was discovered here quite by accident when a young aboriginal boy named Jupiter Mosman was sent out around Towers Hill to fetch some horses and he came back with the horses and a hand full of gold.

View of Charters Towers from Tower Hill where gold was first discovered

The gold rush began and many mines opened up around town which were quickly followed by rock crushing plants called batteries.

Stone crusher at the battery

  Venus Gold Battery is Queensland’s largest remaining gold battery.  This battery was built in 1872 along the banks of Gladstone Creek as it takes 7 tonnes of water to crush 1 tonne of gold bearing ore.  Large amounts of water were also used to feed the 2 cylinder compound steam engine that drove the whole plant.  I was disappointed that the steam engine is no longer at the plant but was surprised to hear that the engine was built at the foundry in Castlemaine in Victoria.

5 head stamping box at the battery

  During it’s operation, this battery produced 15.5 tonnes of gold until it closed in 1973.  Gold price today is $52,897 per kilogram so 15,500 kilograms of gold would be worth just under $820 million.  Our tour guide was asked how many people worked in this battery and he said 13 thieves.  Apparently small amounts of gold were smuggled out by workers under the tobacco in their pipes, and the use of brill cream in their hair was very popular, as any specks of gold on their fingers would come off their hands when they rubbed their fingers through their hair.

Ghostly stories told on an impressive display

  It is rumoured that there are still many ghosts of people from the gold rush era still haunting the various properties around Charters Towers, and some of  their stories are told on a very impressive display at the battery.

WW2 Ammunition Bunker

During WW2, Charters Towers had the ammunition bunkers for the army as it was considered that the Japanese didn’t have enough fuel in their planes to fly so far inland without running out of fuel on the way home.  These bunkers are dotted all around Towers Hill and now tell the story of how bombing raids were made on enemy targets.

Texas Longhorns

Just out of Charters Towers there is a station owner who has turned his attention to breeding Texas Longhorn cattle.  This chap is an Aussie but he seems to know more about the history of these cattle than the Texans do.  The cattle here are direct descendants of the millions of Texas Longhorns that walked the great trail herds from Texas in the late 1800’s, and this is the home of the largest herd of these cattle in Australia.  The tour of the farm was magnificent with Mick telling many a story along the way, some may have been true and others were definitely not.

Authentic Texan Chuck Wagon

    We started with smoko served from their authentic Chuck Wagon, consisting of billy tea and damper, backed up with Anzac biscuits and  homemade Chocolate Texas Brownies.  As there are no unrelated Texas Longhorn bulls in Australia, Mick’s wife Lynda went to vet school to learn how to artificially inseminate their cows.

She showed us through their “Love Shack” and gave us a detailed description on how the process is done.  They produce about 30 calves a year.  The farm also has Asian Water Buffalo, American Bison, Scottish Highlanders and African Watusi.

Percheron draft horses and wagon

The highlight of the tour is the ride on their covered wagon, drawn by 2 Percheron draft horses which takes you down amongst the cattle.  The pride of their herd is a steer called JR who made it into the 2013 Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest horns measured tip to tip of all cattle in the world.

JR was the world record holder in 2013 for having the longest cattle horns in the world

His horns are still growing and now measure more than 3 metres from tip to tip.

From Charters Towers we moved on to our northern most destination of Townsville.

Back on the road again in 2018

After three and a half years spent busily building a shed and house and putting in gardens etc., we started off again from Koondrook and traveled north through Deniliquin, Conargo, Jerilderie and stayed our first night at Narrandera.
From there we followed the Newell highway through Forbes and Parkes and stayed the second night at Dubbo.
Our third day on the road took us to Gilgandra where we left the Newell highway and joined the Castlereagh highway which goes through Gulargambone, Coonamble, Walgett and onto Lightning Ridge.
We covered all these areas on our previous trip around Australia, so we breezed through most of it with our mind set on getting to some warmer weather.
Most of this area to the north of Gilgandra is already effected by drought and all the little towns are doing it hard.  It is surprising what extent some towns will go to to keep the spirit alive during these hard times.  One of these very noticeable towns is Gulargambone which had recently run an art competition to paint various building around the town with murals.

Ghosts of Bullocks past sculpture

They have done a fantastic job which certainly brightens the town up.  Locals say that business is up and even the caravan park is booked out most nights.  The town got a grant and did the “Gulargambone Flying Ahead Sculptures Project” in 2004, which saw dozens of corrugated iron cockatoos being made and put up on poles at both entrances to the town as well as some in town.   
Another project just completed is called “Ghosts of Bullocks Past”.  This is a sculpture of 6 life size bullocks made with a steel frame and covered with recycled wire netting.  The bullocks are assembled in a team and harnessed up to a bullock wagon.  This sculpture is in a park right on the main road and just about everyone driving through stops to take some photos. 
This gives visitors the opportunity then to look at the other murals and get a coffee from the local 2828 cafe.

Lightning Ridge Caravan Park

Last time we were in Lightning Ridge, we enjoyed it so we decided to take a break from travel every day and stayed in the Opal Caravan Park for a few days, which is just on the outskirts of town.There are 2 very funny ladies who do a show every afternoon at the caravan park reciting bush poetry their way and telling some very funny stories.  A great way to finish off the day.

Glengarry Hilton Dining Room

We revisited the “3 Pubs in the Scrub” which are out at the Garwin Opal fields about 60 kilometres from Lightning Ridge.  The Glengarry Hilton does a great steak sandwich with enough chips to make us wish our grandson was with us to help us finish them off.

Glengarry Hilton old toilet block

You wouldn’t believe it but, in the middle of a drought, on the day we had to pack up to leave, it rained.  It certainly wasn’t a drought breaker but enough to get us wet while packing up.

With our minds still set on warmer weather, we kept heading north through Hebel, St.George and onto Roma where we stayed on a farm stay about 12 kilometres to the west of town.

Roma Big Rig Visitor Centre

As we drove in to town we noticed the sale yards and a sign to say that they do guided tours during the sale, which happened to be the next day.  Up early the next morning we headed back to the sale yards for the tour along with about 100 other like minded tourists.

Cattle at Roma sale Yards

  Who would have thought it would be so popular.  4,000 head of cattle were going under the hammer and we were told that this was a small sale.  Their record is 10 head short of 14,000 in one sale.  Judging by the activity today, the day they broke their record would have been pandemonium.  The guide told us that these sale yards sell cattle from as far away as the Northern Territory but mostly from within their shire which is 58,000 square miles in size.  That’s almost the size of the whole of Tasmania which is 64,000 square miles.  
Cattle are sold in the pens by cents per kilogram live weight.  The guide told us that the buyers can estimate the weight of the cattle to within about 10 kilograms.  Once sold, the cattle are herded through a series of well designed alley ways and gates to the weighbridge where they are weighed as a lot and the average weight displayed on a screen.

This one weighed 400 Kilograms and sold for $768.00

 Buyers can take a pick out of a pen and it was interesting to see this one come through to the weighbridge on it’s own. Must have been something special that this buyer wanted.  We came away thinking that we would need to know a lot more about cattle before attempting to do any buying.

Roma's biggest bottle tree

Roma is also home to the Queensland Bottle tree.  This one, which is the biggest one in town, was transplanted here as a mature tree in 1927 and is now over 100 years old.  These trees are known to live for more than 200 years.  This tree is 6 metres high, it’s canopy is 20 metres in diameter and it measures 9.51 metres around it’s trunk.
Moving on from Roma we traveled north along the Carnarvon Highway to a height of 466 metres over the Great Dividing Range, and down the other side into Injune and Rolleston and then onto the Dawson highway to Springsure, passing through some lovely rocky country along the way. 

Part of the Virgin mountain range

From there we followed the Gregory highway to Lake Maraboon which is about 25 kilometres  on the south side of Emerald.  
Hopefully our stay here will be filled with Red Claw, the Queensland version of yabbies.

View of Lake Maraboon taken from under our caravan awning