My monstrous, magnificent Cooktown adventure

Forget cocktails and poolside loungers, Susan Duncan’s love of Queensland’s tropical north is an altogether more brutal affair.

Harsh. Grand. Awe-inspiring. Monstrous. Unaccountably compelling. That’s how gold prospector, explorer and bushman James Mulligan summed up Cooktown in the early 1870s. Today, locals simply call it the last frontier. You need a bit of harsh, they tell you, to shrug off the dry. Even more to endure the wet. But once you’ve felt the pull, they insist, the tropics whisper in your ear forever. Irresistible.

For me, the affair began almost 20 years ago. But I’d be lying if I said it got off to a great start. My new husband, Bob, and I were on our honeymoon and camped on the sandy banks of the crocodile-infested Jardine River. To get there, we’d bounced along corrugated red dirt roads, navigated pitted creeks, winched a fallen tree from a bush track, and churned through deep drifts of sand, the backside of our 4WD swaying like the hips of a hula dancer until I was sure it would roll in a single fluid motion.

As a reporter for women’s magazines, I had been a five-star girl (at my employer’s expense, of course) and to me, the trip had been filled with filth and fright from the moment the first tent peg was hammered into the ground. After three weeks on the road, I hungered for a long, hot shower to scrub away the greasy black campfire soot ingrained in my feet, a soft bed with crisp clean sheets that

I didn’t have to shake to loosen uninvited guests,

a solid door I could shut firmly and quietly cry behind. But abandoning a man to a long, lonely drive home was a sinister way to begin our promised lifetime of commitment.

I struggled on and in the process conquered fear and anxiety, revelled in the great, golden, heart-stopping, tatty, dusty splendour of the dry season. Dazzling sunsets, pearly sunrises, rainbow rocks and red dirt, the bleached light of noon, evening shadows that melted into a dark blanket until we sat cocooned in a pod of campfire light, mug of wine in hand, our lips still tasting the lamb chops we’d eaten for dinner. Starlight. Moonlight. Raw. Uncomplicated. Seize the day.

We put-putted amid the heavenly scent of lilies while long-legged brolgas tangoed sensually onshore and magpie geese erupted skywards like flying dominoes. Even the sight of a muddy green spine stealthily rising and falling among the lily pads failed to dispel the magic. In the end, that 6000km road trip was an experience that forced me to redraw boundaries, stretch mind, body and spirit, uncover a resilience I never knew existed. Priceless.

Since then, like migratory birds, we’ve returned to Tropical North Queensland whenever the time is right to shake loose the cushy complacency of the every day. Find inspiration.

On various trips, we’ve huddled in our tent in pouring rain among the tall green cane fields of Tully, laughing because we’d naively set our campsite

in the wettest spot in the state. Surfed rutted coastal sand tracks to arrive breathlessly triumphant on

the pristine white sands of Wreck Rock, in Deepwater National Park. Just us and a lone fisherman to savour the tangy sea air. Negotiated the hair-raising twists and turns, the wildly unpredictable creeks and rivers, of the once notorious Bloomfield Track. Plinked a sticky ivory on a piano reeking of stale booze and ancient mould in the Lion’s Den Hotel in Rossville. A relic from the gold rush? If only keyboards could talk. The yarns that piano could spin.

We’ve swum in a waterhole at Trevethan Falls barely vacated by a thin brown snake. Camped on the banks of the Archer River, waving a stick to deter an unhealthy interest from crocs. Fallen into a country town cafe where a sign read: “If you let your children run wild, we will give them a double espresso and a puppy to take home.”

Stood awe-struck on the white sand tip of the continent, convinced the earthy scent clinging to a zephyr had wafted directly from New Guinea. Inhaled the routine guts, generosity and kindness that is the unsung backbone of this last frontier and hoped fragments might cling on. Time after time we witnessed the reverential fondness for the underdog that is the stuff of legends in the bush. Felt richer for every experience that pushed us hard.

But until now, we have never braved the challenges of the wet season. Who hasn’t heard the stories? Heat. Humidity. Rain like sheets of corrugated iron. Raging floodwaters. Broken roads. Wind that chisels the skin from your face.

Are we mad? Perhaps. But great journeys engage physically and emotionally, open spaces in your heart and mind you never dreamed existed. For whole slabs of precious time, you feel ageless. And ask any long-term Cooktown resident for the best time to visit, and they’ll tell you: “The wet season, mate. It’s magic.”

We travel the easy way this time. Flight to Cairns, a hire car, and a fishing and camping guide called Tom waiting for us in Cooktown to lead the way into the historic Palmer River gold fields where

we’ll make our camp.

“If you’d rather I didn’t bring a rifle, just say so, and I’ll leave it behind,” he says.

“What’s it for?” I ask.

“Feral pigs. Wild dogs.”

“Fair enough.”

Cooktown: Sleepy. Slow. Spacious. Gutters deep enough to paddle a canoe. Ragged white coastline. Green, blue, indigo seas. The weather is soft. A cool south-easterly strokes the back of our necks. The river gleams silver. Mangroves are a ribbon of shiny green. Behind us, Grassy Hill is swathed in snowy white clouds, luminous in the late afternoon sun. We stand on the banks of the river where James Cook beached his badly damaged ship for seven weeks to make repairs. It is impossible not to idly wonder how history might have unfolded if the Endeavour had been lost forever that fateful June day in 1770. Only a favourable tide and blind luck saved him.

Senses are tuned to shifting light, the movement of air, smell and sound. Thinking: Confronting a crocodile beats joining a queue at immigration and passport control. An enamel mug of strong billy tea in the wild slaughters a glass of bubbles jammed in a seat at 38,000 feet. And …Tropical Queensland in the wet? Who can guess what’s out there? One thing. I’ll know I’m alive.

Early the next morning: Down the smooth dry tarmac of the Mulligan Highway where grader grass, the colour of cut lime, rises higher than the car. Ahead, the granite boulders of Black Mountain shimmer like polished onyx. We have the road to ourselves. The landscape, awash with the hopes and dreams of fortune hunters past and present, is riddled with tales that make your toes curl if you care to read them.

Smoko at Lakeland Downs. Good coffee. Tom mentions the surrounding belt of highlands and their names: Misery, Sorrow, Poverty. Then: Surprise and Unbelievable. “Gold miners, mate. Straight to the point,” he explains. His legs and arms are a kaleidoscope of fish and coral reefs, a shipwreck, turtle, a conch shell on his elbow. Among the tatts, a nasty memento left by the tusk of an angry boar. The faint-hearted, he agrees, don’t last long in the bush. He is barefoot. “Shoes are for weddings and funerals, ” he says, flatly.

At the comfy Palmer River Roadhouse, the slate counter is exquisitely inlaid with a shovel, pick and pan, a sentimental nod to a punitive history. We’ll make camp on the site of a mine that operated until 30 years ago, Tom tells us.

“There’s a tin roof and a cement floor.”

Tom unlocks a gate, shuts it behind us. Removes a heavy canvas case from behind the rear seat. The men begin a conversation about the merits of one gun over another. I’d forgotten my husband was a country boy. Forgotten my father taught my brother and me to shoot when we were kids. It was a rite of passage back then. How quickly values shift from one generation to the next, how arrogant to judge those at the coalface from a safe distance.

A dirt track through a corridor of pointy termite mounds winds past abandoned camps and mining machinery. Tom stops the car. Reaches for the gun. Runs flat out across gnarly scrub. Stands still. Aims. Fires. A boar in his prime hits the ground. He checks it’s dead, returns to the car for a skinning knife.

“Good meat for the red claw (yabby) pots we’ll put out tonight. Could catch a few if the freshies don’t get there first.” Freshies? “Crocs. The ones that don’t bite.” Tom’s feet are bleeding. He’s oblivious.

This affinity with risk, the unspoken consciousness that death stalks the unwary, here in the minty-scented long grass of summer, it’s mundane. An ordinary adjunct to each day.

Later, I read the Cooktown Council once paid two shillings a head for pig scalps. A bounty that saved gold miners in the dry when there wasn’t enough water to work the mines.

Dusk: Birds belt out a final chorus under a verdigris sky. A blue wing kookaburra watches from the branch of a dead tree. The campfire burns brightly. That minty smell — stronger than ever — comes from a weed called Stinking Roger. It can be used like coriander.

Tom rigs a shower out of a hose and bucket. When the coals are furnace-hot, he cooks golden snapper caught the day before, makes a salad with pineapple. Pure Queensland. In the distance, the back hills of the Daintree Rainforest slip away.

We sit in our camp chairs, the three of us, locked in our own thoughts. Within sight, a large brown Brahman bull roars muffled warning to contenders for his territory. Just before bed, Tom tells us:

“We’ll go after gold tomorrow.” But the real gold is this moment in time.

The apostle birds crank up before dawn. Coals are stirred into life. Bacon sizzles on a cast iron plate alongside eggs. A strip of dazzling turquoise sky clings to the horizon below a band of dull grey clouds. There’s no sign of rain and the south-easterly works like an air conditioner. No flies or mozzies.

Over a cuppa, I read a biography of bushman

Sam Elliott, a miner known as the Lone Wolf, who eked out a living under conditions that would kill most men and almost killed him. Snake bite, rock falls, bushfires, scrub fever, isolation so intense it ended in poverty and madness for some: “ … crushed … 50 ton of stone for 43.5 ounces of smelted gold …six ton to clean up five and a half ounces … a

three ton parcel out of the mine returned three ounces of gold … ”.

Sam died in 1986, aged 75. He left his possessions to the Cooktown & District Historical Society on Charlotte Street where his massive pack saddle still smells of horse sweat and greased leather. Mounts couldn’t carry the loads they did then, he recounted, and men had to be mighty to survive.

Overnight, the freshies ransacked the crab pots. Oh well.

Our own fossicking efforts result in three minuscule flecks painfully extracted from two large buckets of grit and dirt shovelled from a spot Tom deemed promising. He chucks our hard-won haul back into the Palmer River. “All that work for nothing?” I feign outrage.

Tonight, we have company at the campfire. The husband and wife team who own the lease on the 300 sqkm property where we’re camped and a colourful local bloke who has spent the last 50 years searching for gold in his spare time. He is

bare-chested in Stubbies, flip flops on his feet, cap on his head. He looks like he doesn’t have

two pennies to rub together but he holds out three black cords connected to tiny horns filled with floating gold leaf: “Choose one,” he demands, in

an eastern European accent. “Nobody leave the Palmer with no gold. Take!” he insists. Tom whispers:

“Mate, don’t insult him by sayin’ no, or worse, offerin’ to pay for it.”

“Do you like to read?” I ask. He nods. “There will be a book in the mail soon.” And the deal is done.

Dinner: cooked in a camp oven for four hours. Crisp pork crackling, tender beef ribs, spuds and pumpkin. It’s clear the meat is as soft as ice-cream but

the miner can’t be persuaded to eat. “Not enough teeth,” he says, opening wide to prove the point.

Later: All quiet except for the bull. There’s a cow on heat and no other critter is going to get near her if he can help it.

Cooktown at high tide: “Any salties in the river this time of year?” “Mate, they’re everywhere,” Tom says. We step into his fishing boat. He points it towards mangroves on a distant shore. He and Bob jump out on a slim slice of red sand to cast a net for live bait. Two tosses and there’s enough for the day. No crocs. Not today.

When he was a kid, a neighbour told Tom’s

mum not to worry about his passion for fishing. “He’ll grow out of it,” she said. In his early 40s, he’s showing no signs. Tom makes us look like great fishermen. We catch Queenies, gold spot cod, mangrove jacks, a white tipped shark and a bull shark with teeth like razors. We throw them all back. The big barramundi, so powerful in the water, we keep. The chef at the bowling club has agreed to cook it for our dinner. Outside the shelter of the estuary, the open sea is a mass of fierce white caps. It’s too rough for reef fishing.

Last day: the Bloomfield Track winds through tree ferns, fan palms, past waterfalls, across creeks, alongside a thrilling coast. A flicker of disappointment that the drive was dead easy. There’s just 26km of unsealed road in the Daintree Rainforest left. We check the weather at home. Hotter than Cooktown. The airport feels rock concert loud and frantic.

On the plane: “We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“Next time.”

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Next month, author Fiona McIntosh explores the beauty of the Sunshine Coast.