We left Port Douglas after our four-day visit and moved on to our next stop at Atherton, Soon after leaving the coastal plain (more sugar growing) the road climbed steeply through thick rainforest.
At one point, we came to.a lookout that gave us a view northwards towards Cape Tribulation. It was on the opposite side of the road on a tight bend but we managed to do a U-turn and made it across and back safely.
Our first notable town on today’s journey was Mount Molloy. The topography was now flatter and the eucalypts were again the dominant vegetation. We are now on the Atherton Tablelands where its rich fertile soil is prime agricultural land. Over 70% of Australian grown coffee comes from this area. We stopped at a cleared ‘free camping’ area for our morning coffee.
Mount Molloy is a tiny, historic, timber and mining town with few attractions. It has a huge pub – the National Hotel, a rusting and historic steam engine, and a graveyard which is the resting place for the hugely important explorer and prospector, James Venture Mulligan.
This old steam engine was used to power the local sawmill – part of a large and long-lived sawmill operation. The presence of large tracts of rainforest and the spread of railways in the Cairns hinterland ensured that in the early 20th century this region became the main sawmilling area outside South East Queensland. The timber industry was second only to mining as a driver for North Queensland’s economic development. Johnston’s sawmill, built on the site of a smaller sawmill and linked to the earlier copper mining activities at Mount Molloy, operated here from 1914 to 1963.
The biggest town that we encountered during our travels was Mareeba.It’s the largest town on the Atherton Tablelands and is the centre of the tableland’s agricultural activities. It is surrounded by coffee plantations, mango and paw paw farms, avocado farms, macadamia nut plantations as well as sugar cane fields and orchards specialising in growing pineapples, bananas and cashews.
On one street corner s the Mareeba & District Memorial Mosque. It was constructed in 1970 and has been Mareeba’s place of Islamic worship since then. Muslims from Albania started arriving in the district in 1930s to work in the sugar cane fields and later in the tobacco plantations. It is a memorial to the soldiers who have fought to defend Australia.
We accidentally came across the Mareeba cemetery and were somewhat interested to find that virtually all the graves were brilliant white. It appears that a group of local volunteers has been sprucing up the cemetery with a pressure cleaner, elbow grease and a lick of white paint to encourage a sense of pride in the town.
Between Mareeba and the town of Atherton is a unique war memorial near Rock Creek. It’s the site of the major WW2 hospital – the 2/2nd Australian General Hospital, laundry and medical stores site.
On one side of the highway, boulders have been placed in rows and each contans a plaque commemorating the various units that, during WW2, either trained on the Atherton Tablelands, or were posted here. I found one commemorating my father’s unit. I know he was here doing some jungle warfare training before leaving for Moratai and Borneo.
During World War II, the Tablelands area around here became the largest military base in Australia with camps at the towns of Tinaroo, Kairi, Atherton, Wongabel, Herberton, Wondecla, Ravenshoe and Mount Garnet. Rocky Creek was the site of the largest military hospital in the Southern Hemisphere — a 3000-bed hospital that treated over 60,000 patients from 1943 to 1945.
The hospital itself was locaed on the other side of the highway
All that remains now is the renovated recreaton hut and area theatre.
Atherton, our destination, is a substantial and attractive town with a very long main street. Both Atherton, the town, and the Atherton Tablelands were named after John Atherton, an early settler who, in 1857 when he was only twenty, overlanded sheep from the New England area of NSW to Rockhampton. He moved to the area in the late 1870s.
The town’s war memorial is different from the usual one seen in other towns. Rather than having a sculpture of a soldier standing in the reversed arms position, this one features a soldier encourageing others to go forward into the fight.
Many of the buildings along the main street look to be quite old with some in disrepair, like the old Grand Hotel.
However, the courthouse and police staton are in relatively modern buildings and are in good shape.
Our accommodation is at the NRMA Holiday Park. We have a compact, but still comfortable cabin, that is built in a nice park-like setting. We look forward to spending the next couple of days exploring this area
Gosh, the area has grown – of course it has ! When I worked in Mareeba, tobacco was being grown by the farmers…..more sensible now.
No-one told me about the war hospital or army bases.
What a lot of wartime history and your U-turn photo is superb. Well worth the effort!
My Dad went through there too. May not ever get there but now we know more of the history.