The last 800m to one of Australia’s most historic spots is the toughest part of the trek

The final 30-odd kilometres of unsealed road to Cape York are perhaps its roughest. Starting from Bamaga, one of five Indigenous communities strung out across the Northern Peninsula Area, a single-lane track plagued with potholes and bulldust cuts through tangled rainforests inhabited by one of the last remaining cassowary populations in Queensland.

The sign at Cape York, marking the northernmost point of the Australian continent.Credit: Zoltan Csipke / Alamy

The turn-back point for the less determined is at The Croc Tent, a roadside souvenir store stocking anything and everything related to the region, including crocodile snow domes and “Snappers”, a kind of male g-string that comes in one size only: XXL. Especially popular are garish, fishing-themed polo shirts that have been adopted as an unofficial uniform in this isolated part of the world.

Following a tricky creek crossing further along the track, motorists travelling almost exclusively in four-wheel-drives must pass the decaying remains of the Cape York Wilderness Lodge, which closed for renovations in 2002 and never reopened. From there, the end of the road is in sight.

Our final stop is a gravel clearing beside the sweeping sands of Frangipani Bay, just 800 metres from continental Australia’s northernmost tip. It has taken our Outback Spirit tour group nine days to reach this point after starting our journey in Cairns, more than 1000 kilometres south. But from here, we must continue on foot.

To make it this far, we’d travelled up the coast to Cooktown before turning inland across the Great Dividing Range. After departing the dripping wet Daintree rainforests, the remainder of our journey traversed savannah woodlands bordered by sandstone escarpments and crocodile-infested wetlands. While we were able to ride out the bumps and corrugations in the comfort of our rugged coach, thoughts were spared for those who preceded us.

The first European overland attempt to reach Cape York, an area inhabited by Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years, was led by Englishman Edmund Kennedy. Kennedy’s 13-strong expedition party left Rockingham Bay in 1848, aiming to establish a route to the tip so that a port could be developed for trade with the East Indies. All but three of the group perished and the expedition failed.

A further 17 years passed before two brothers, Frank and Alexander Jardine, made it all the way to the tip, opening a corridor for a telegraph line that would connect Laura, west of Cooktown, with Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait. After four years of toil and hardship, it was completed in 1887.

In 1928, two New Zealanders followed the telegraph line to reach the cape in an Austin 7 car. It took them 38 days, with quicksand, forest fires and an average of 25 punctures a day slowing them down. At night, the two slept in the open on a bed of gum leaves, wrapped inside a mosquito net.

It’s remarkably different to our situation – travelling in a vehicle that’s built for these tracks, then waking to birdsong in private lodges overlooking blackwater lagoons. But the last leg to the cape must be completed under our own steam.

The hike up and over a rocky headland halts beside a bullet-riddled sign overlooking Torres Strait. When Captain James Cook rounded this spot on August 22, 1770, it came with the realisation that the Australian continent was separate from the island of New Guinea. He promptly claimed the entire east coast on behalf of Great Britain. When we finally arrive at the Cape, it feels just as eye-opening.

The writer was a guest of Outback Spirit.

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