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Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998To: studio@toysatellite.org From: Don Pattenden <dpattenden@pegasus.com.au> Subject: Life in Herberton - Part Four
[NOTE:- I wrote the following (longhand) while still in Herberton, typed it when passing through Nambour en route to Brisbane (broke my train journey for a couple of days & had use of a a computer but not Internet connection) and finally sent it from Nambour having cycled there from Brisbane, commencing my long journey back to the tropics. It's a good feeling to be heading north at long last and I'll be sending off details of some of my recent adventures just as soon as I get a chance to type them up.] Continuing:- (Talking about the idea of taking the "Great Top Road" after Normanton rather than the sealed road via Mount Isa and saying that I've just about convinced myself) It will mean that I will miss out on seeing Mount Isa, but never mind, that's no great loss on all accounts. I can see it another time, on a future trip (an inland trip perhaps). The Top Road will be much more of an adventure and will take me through some very spectacular country, certainly very different from the country I've seen so far on the eastern seaboard. So my itinerary on departing from Brisbane (in about another week's time hopefully) will be something like this:- Brisbane, Noosa, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bown, Townsville, Cairns; always keeping as close to the coast as is possible, and departing from the main Highway at every opportunity just as I did on the Sydney-Brisbane leg. After Cairns I'll continue up the coast as far as Mossman (with a detour to Daintree) then take the inland road through Mount Molloy to Mareeba, Atherton, Malanda, Herberton. By then the Wet Season should be well and truly over so it will be interesting to compare the countryside around Herberton having experienced it from the start of the wet. After that I'll proceed onto Normanton and most probably the "Great Top Road" through to the Northern Territory. Incidentally, now is probably a good time to slip in some distances and some projected timings. My original itinerary is of course totally shot to pieces now. Even allowing for the unexpected interruptions, Melbourne to Brisbane ended up taking a lot longer than originally planned. One of the unknown quantities is the length of time I remain at places along the way. This is not always for the purpose of sightseeing (though it is often a valid reason for lingering) but sometimes for quite extraneous reasons. Whenever I reach a city or a major town there always seem to be a miriad of administrative things to be done, boring but necessary. Sometimes also I've had to wait for the weather to improve. Then again, sometimes it's been for reasons of money or rather lack of it. When the cash runs out before payday, life gets complicated. Some caravan parks have allowed me to stay for a few nights on the understanding that I'll fix them up on payday. Or on other occasions I've "bided my time" in a "freebie" camping situation (i.e. where the facilities were basic but there was no charge, or where the ranger didn't come round very often). When I was at Maclean, the so called "Scottish town" just outside Grafton, I decided to take a detour down to the Yuragir National Park because I was expecting it to be one of those freebie situations. Instead of an almost deserted camping sight as I'd hoped, it turned out to be quite full (school holidays) and the ranger was very much "on the ball". It was only $5 per night but there were no showers and only pit toilets. I scaped through OK (financially) but it wasn't really worth the detour. Except for one thing. The ranger helped me out by giving me a length of fensing wire (high tensile stuff) of which he had plenty in the shed. Up til then I'd been having constant trouble with my fibreglass tent pole; always splitting. I'm still using that same length of fencing wire as a substitute tent pole. Works like a charm. But I digress, I was talking about itineraries and how they have to be taken with a grain of salt. Things never seem to work out in practice as planned on paper. So the following has to be regarded as a rough guide. I'm basing it on a very conservative 250 km per week, that is 50 km per day (on average) with a two day break each week. Whether I keep to that remains to be seen, but if I do then the rest of my trip should work out something like this:- [Actually the limiting factor on my daily distance target always turns out to be hours of sunlight remaining after I've packed up, rather than the power of my legs. I'd be quite capable of riding much more than 50 km in a day if it wasn't for the sunlight running out.]
(If you're used to miles rather than km, sorry, you'll have to convert.) I haven't included any actual dates because it's still a bit unclear exactly when I'll be departing from Brisbane (some dental work to be done interalia) but you can see from the above that if I manage to get away, say, early March then my principle aim of reaching Carnarvon (i.e. exiting the tropics on the west coast) by November works, but only just. I'd hate to have to wait out yet another wet season somewhere, but, oh well, we'll see. Enough of all that projection. Let me get back to my current topic of Life at Herberton. More accurately, I have been staying on a property on Stannary Hills Road, 20 km north west of Herberton, and closer to Irvinebank than to Herberton. No walking down to the corner store here; the nearest major shopping centre is in Atherton, 40 km away. Irvinebank (10 km on a dirt road) has a post office and a pub and nothing much else. Even Herberton is pretty limitted for shopping; not even a supermarket. The area abounds in history though, having been the centre of extensive tin mining late last century (from the 1890s to about 1912). So 100 years ago it was a thriving community with a quite large population, around 20,000 in the entire Tablelands area. TO BE CONTINUED |