Yesterday, we drove from Ayr to Cairns on a wet and rainy day. This is one of the destination places that form the purpose of our trip to this area of Far North Queensland.
The weather alternated between drizzle and rain for most of the day, so we didn’t stop very much along the way.Perhaps, the rain helped us with our long drive. We travelled at total of 435 km yesterday which our GPS told us would take over 5 hours. I think that this may have been a conservative time but it meant that we had a longer day than normal. With fewer stops because of the rain, we actually made good progress.
We bypassed Townsville and continued north for almost 200 km until we reached Ingham. On the corner where the highway made a right hand turn, we found Lees Hotel.
For years it was accepted that Taylors Arms in New South Wales (which I visited on a previous 85 Transport Platoon Reunion) was The Pub with No Beer. It was the subject of a famous ditty which had been written by Gordon Parsons and sung by Slim Dusty. One problem: The song wasn’t written by Gordon Parsons and the true pub is apparently Lee’s Hotel, at 58 Lannercost Street, in Ingham.
The song was based on the poem A Pub Without Beer written by Ingham sugarcane farmer and poet Dan Sheahan. Sheahan wrote the poem about the Day Dawn Hotel, now known as Lees Hotel. In December 1943 when American servicemen from the 22nd Bomb Group passed through Ingham on their way to Port Moresby. They stopped at the Day Dawn Hotel overnight and, to celebrate their victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea (a rather dubious excuse as it had been fought and won 18 months earlier), drank the pub dry.
The following day Dan Sheahan, wanting a drink, rode his horse 30 kilometres to the hotel. He found that the soldiers had drunk all the beer and so he settled for a glass of wine and, as the story goes, he was instantly inspired to wrote a poem in the pub as he sipped his wine. The poem was published in The North Queensland Register in early 1944. Parsons was a folk singer/bush balladeer and he duly set his words to music. Parsons claimed that he did not know where the original poem came from. However, years later, Slim Dusty was in Ingham and he met Dan Sheahan. He was convinced by Sheahan’s story and was happy to acknowledge the true source of the song. Lee’s Hotel replaced the Day Dawn Hotel in 1960.
It was raining all along the way and this photo that I took shows just what it was like. The heads up display on the windcreen (bottom left) shows that we were driving at 100 kph with the cruise control in operation. Sugar is grown all the way north to Cairns and we crossed many narrow guage cane railways. We have seen some of this area on a previous trip and we will also be returning through the same places on our way south again, so we can catch up with more of the sights that we have mnissed on the way home.
At Tully, we found a very welcome pie van by the local show grounds so we braved the rain to buy a pie or two for lunch and ate them in the car. All of the big towns in this area have a sugar mill and this was no exception.
We had a few short breaks in the weather and one occurred in the litle town of El Arish. It might seem strange to come across a town with an Arabic name in Queensland but this one has an interesting history,
The town was founded in 1921 as a soldier settlement area. It was named after the city of Arish in Egypt where the Australian Light Horse saw action in December 1916 and which was later developed as a major base area with an allied hospital. The name was assigned by the Queensland Railways Department on 31 August 1922 and was the suggestion of the soldier settlers referring to a city in Egypt where the Australian Imperial Force engaged in the Battle of Katia in World War One.
The town has a typical Queensland pub, a large Memorial Hall and the old railway station buildimg is now a museum that tells the story of the town.
By the time we had reached Babinda, just south of Cairns, the weather had cleared and I was able to visit the Babinda Boulders. These are a series of large granite boulders in the Babinda Creek which have been worn smooth by tropical rains. They are a dramatic and beautiful sight, but one which is given much greater significance because of modern tragedies on this particularly dangerous and deadly stretch of water. Over 17 people (mostly young men) have drowned at The Boulders since the 1960s. They seem to have been held under by powerful currents.
We found a slight problem when we eventually reached our hotel in Cairns. We were given a standard room while I thought that I had booked one with a walk in shower. We are staying here for four nights and that room was quite unsuitable for Jill. We couldn’t change it as the hotel was full because of a Lions Club convention but we were able to move to a more suitable room this morning.
By the time that our new room was ready, it was late this morning so we decided to use our time in the rest of the day to visit the Aquarium. It’s a world-class venue for seeing and interacting with the incredible animals and eco-systems found only in Australia’s Tropical North Queensland – The Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics Rainforest. I am happy with some of the photos that I was able to totake but my camera settings were not quite right for some of the other exhibits.
