Cooktown Crab Burrows

In the book, I mention seeing crab burrows as I’m standing on the beach near Cooktown. I thought folks might wonder what a crab burrow looks like and how you can identify one. Well, it’s quite simple, really—just look for the “crab balls.” There are species of crabs on this coast that live on the [...]

New Gold Mountain

When gold was discovered in California in 1848, it triggered a tremendous Gold Rush. A handful of nuggets were discovered at Sutter’s Mill, and soon, thousands of fortune seekers were flooding westward—a population surge so great that within two years, California had enough people to become a state. There were a number of lesser gold [...]

Green Island

One of the day trips I took while I was in Cairns was out to Green Island. Green Island is a coral cay, which means that, unlike the islands I visited farther south in Queensland, this island is not a mountain rising up out of the reef; it is actually part of the reef. As [...]

Cannonball trees

The Botanical Gardens in Cairns are wonderfully lush and filled with exotic flora. As with most Botanical Gardens, the plants on hand are both indigenous and imported. While I had seen bottle trees, sausage trees, and monkey puzzle trees in other parts of Queensland, it was at the gardens in Cairns that I encountered my [...]

Cairns

Cairns is a tropical paradise that is also a major gateway to exploring the rain forests of northern Queensland, the Atherton Tableland, and the Great Barrier Reef. So not a place to be missed. Cairns was my next destination after Townsville. The town sits on lovely Trinity Bay and is sheltered by surrounding hills. Tropical [...]

The Burdekin River

In my book, I mention crossing bridges over dry riverbeds as we drove from Charters Towers to Townsville. Below you can see the most impressive of these dry riverbeds. This is the Burdekin River, one of the most important rivers in Queensland. The Burdekin rises in the Seaview and Gorge Ranges and flows about 450 [...]

Henry the Prospector

Outside of Charters Towers, I met prospector Henry Weare, who told me he smelts gold and silver in his bare feet because the hot coals would ruin the leather if they fell on his shoes!
Yes, there is still gold to be found in Queensland. However, as Henry explained, it’s hard to find.
I think this photo [...]

Hook Island

Okay—my excuse is that I moved this last weekend, after 19 years in the same place. So I lost track of where I was going. Not that everything on this blog always has to be in order, mind you, but it would have made sense to have Hook Island right after Hayman Island. I visited [...]

Charters Towers

Next stop up the Queensland coast was Townsville. After seeing the sites in town, I headed to nearby Charters Towers, site of one of Queensland’s big gold rushes. Actually, Australia had a fair number of gold rushes—most of them in Queensland or Victoria.
What made Charters Towers particularly fun is that it hasn’t changed much since [...]