A very relaxed morning.
On the bike about 10am and tootle off northward on the Gregory Highway aiming for the Hervey Range road. I reckoned this would be a more peaceful if slightly longer road to Townsville than the main road.
About 40 km out of Charters Towers the highway crosses the Dalrymple River at a site once promoted as the capital of a putative northern Queensland state. Nothing is there now.
The area around the river crossing is very popular now with ‘grey nomads’ (elderly tourists) who park their caravans beside the road as they slowly work their way around Australia on a SAD (‘See Australia and DIE’) tour. I counted over 40 caravans in just over half the informal caravan park on the south side of the river. There was another, smaller site on the northern side as well.
Twenty kilometres further on was this road sign.
Signpost about 60 kms north of Charters Towers. The last property on the list, is ‘Cargoon’, which was owned by one of the instigators of Bush Pilots Airways, a remote area aerial service following a medical emergency in the 1950’s.
The wife of Bev Anning, of ‘Cargoon’ , had miscarried and was haemorrhaging but couldn’t get out because of the wet weather. A desperate call got Bob Norman to fly his Tiger Moth down from Cairns to get Vera out.
http://www.craigmostyn.com.au/history-1951/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Queensland
After several problems, including landing on boggy ground, downwind and uphill between stumps ending in a stand of trees, Vera saw the small plane and refused to get on board until shown it was safe. Legend has it that Bev (a portly man even then) had to get in and have the pilot demonstrate a takeoff and landing on the difficult airstrip before Vera would allow herself to be transported out to Hughenden. She was then flown out and all was well.
The next day the Tiger Moth got rained in back at Cargoon where Bev Anning and Bob Norman thought up the idea for Bush Pilots Airways.
The Annings eventually sold ‘Cargoon’ and moved down to a farm they called ‘Cardross’ next door to ‘Old Hidden Vale’ (now Peppers ‘Hidden Vale’ conference centre and wagyu stud) where I grew up from 1964 to 1992.
Vera used to put on the most fabulous Christmas parties at Cardross in the 1960’s and 1970’s while driving a little Datsun shoebox on wheels up the gravel road to Brisbane (back in the days when foreign cars were virtually unknown).
Her husband Bev meanwhile drove a huge two door Buick (that his daughter Molly managed to hang up both ends on a creek crossing while taking me and my love interest Janet back to her family’s farm) pursued various business and horse racing interests.
Great times!
I was getting sick of this riding on bitumen business when a row of street lights in the middle of nowhere heralded the Herveys Range road turnoff.
Contrary to the map, the Herveys Range Road is now all bitumen to Townsville and is being promoted as the alternative road train route for stock trucks. However (see tomorrow) while most of the road is road train ready, the actual range crossing down to Townsville is difficult for standard semi-trailers. Andrew (see back at Drumlion on 20 June) has driven road trains down this range and says that it is definitely on the tight side of difficult!
After a late lunch at a road builder’s memorial I crossed the Burdekin River at about 120 km from Charters Towers.
The bridge had no rails (few do up here to minimise rubbish being caught during the frequent wet season floods) so I was encouraged to keep near the road centre.
The river itself was quite pretty so I stopped to take a few pictures. As I was finishing I heard ‘he probably wants a coffee‘ drift across the waters from the verandah of a small farmhouse on the riverbak about half a kilometre away. I wish I had the presence of mind to yell back ‘double shot black with soy on the side please!’
