WILD & LONELY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3155, 10 August 1942, Page 6

WILD & LONELY

MOUNTAINOUS PENINSULA MAY BE BATTLEFIELD VAST LAND OF CAPE YORK With the Japanese intentions to overwhelm Port' Moresby, Papua, becoming more and' more evident —they were frustrated on'cc, in the Battle of the Coral Sea —war is drawing near to Cape York Peninsula, the wild, mountainous, spars'ely-populated northeastern extremity of Australia. The peninsula, with a'n area larger than Victoria, contains less than 1000 white men, writes -a special correspondent in the Melbourne (< Argus.” The reason, of course, is that Cape York Peninsula is—oi’ was' —still a land of quart pots and pack horses, of blackboys and horse b'ells —a land in which to reach the odd rough-and-ready cattlemen' or prospector of the interior you ride along brumby pads to the drum, of hoof-beats and the rhythm of 4 creaking saddlery, taking in your course bald-faced mountain spurs, virgin forests or rivers as they come.

There are practically no roads. One town, an old repeating station on the telegraph line running up the centre, a few cattle and mission' stations and a mining camp or two, and you will have all the habitation from the Cairns-C'hillagoe railway 500 miles north to Thursday Island —22 miles to seaward of Cape York itself. “The Peninsula” has not always been so empty.” To find out its history, you need to go to Cooktown, Queensland’s most northerly town—and the only one in the vast Cape York Peninsula. Ghoßt Of Foirmer Self

Despite -Cooktown’s two.-storiec hotels and! large buildings, you are not ashore in the mango-fringed! streets of the town long before you realise it is only a ghost of its former self- Everywhere are deserted! tropical gardens, in which 1 cows and goats roam. Many of the fine residence®, their walls still glorified with bougainvillea, can be rented! for half a crown a week, while one of the. four hotels was; actually offered 1 not so long ago for just 57weekly! e In the halcyon days of the last century, Cooktown was terminal port for shipping from the south, and as port and centre of the Palmer, the richest alluvial'gold field! on the continent, 60 miles due west —the population was thousands instead of a hundred or so. as to-day. A railway was constructed to Laura, andl in the wake of the gold*-diggers came 70,000 Chinese. Nobody knows what gold the field produced. But, the rush over, high steamship freights killed the sugar and coffee plantations, and though every sort of ore abounds in the peninsula, from wolfram to coal, Oooktown declined to the sun-baked 1 outpost it is to-day, depending principally on a little saw-milling and mining. Leaving Cooktown, the 900-ton onceamionth steamer Wandana enters a territory of her own, where for a vast expanse of wild coastline up' to Gape York and round to Normanton, at the bottom of the Gulf of 'Carpentaria, she is the only caller. Virgin bush mainly constitutes the interior of the peninsula. High, jungledraped mountains run along the eastern shore; the fall from these to the Gulf is gradual, interspersed with rank grass and poplar gums. From Normauton, on the Gulf, around the shore to Cape York there is not even a village—two mission stations near the mouths of the Mitchell and Batavia- Bivers being the only ■settlements. There is a small goldfield now on the Batavia Biver.

Some years ago we were overlanding with, horse® and pack horses from Ohillagoe, 400 miles north of Batavia River, when' after a fortnight we reached civilisatio.l1 —as w.e thought. — at Laura, the terminus of the leisurely train that ran once a week from Cooktown. Picture a railway shed, a ‘‘pub, ’ ’ >a store and 1 a police station without a lockup, and that is the place.

But what amazes the traveller is that leading north from here .across an area as large as Victoria is only one track —-a track following the telegraph line running to Cape York and on underwater to Thursday Island. But ion the ride .north there is plenty of interest, for the flora and fauna of Cape York arc the same as New Guinea, with tree-climbing kangaroos, giant brown snakes and cuscuss. Most wonderful of all are the myriads of birds a'nd their melodious songs of the bush. Up there you realise what denudation of timber and rabbit poison have done to bird life elsewhere.

Glistening-coated brumbies shake

theii’~head>9 skywards a® they trot gracefully past us, and one week-end we camped’ with a half-caste brumbychaser. Anyone is welcome in those parts. That night by the fireside the brumby-chaser explained his tactics. All brumbies, he said', run in circles up to 20 miles round, so before attempting to catch them “all you do is study closely their habits. Then one day you set the mob galloping, and doubling across the circle you intercept them at a chosen spot.

The more I think of that lonely peninsula the harder it is to realise that this area may be the first battlefield on the continent, and the old track along the telegraph line a military road. . . :