Three histories meet

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Mary Watson, Milbi wall, monument

In the story of Mary Watson, three Cooktown groups meet in a tragedy: European settlers, the Chinese and the Aboriginal people.

Mary’s husband set up a beche de mer fishing station on Lizard Island and took her to live there in a small cottage close to a creek with the island’s only fresh water. He and his partner went off in their luggers and left Mary and their son behind with two Chinese servants, Ah Sam and Ah Leung. A few weeks later a party of mainland Aborigines of the Guugu Yimmidir group made one of their seasonal trips by canoe to the island. They attacked Ah Sam, who suffered seven spear wounds, and Ah Leung was killed as he worked in the vegetable garden. Mary Watson frightened them off by firing a gun, and then set out in a cut-down ship’s water tank, used for boiling sea slugs, with Ah Sam and her son, hoping to be picked up by a passing boat. They drifted for a week, occasionally landing on reefs and islets. Mary’s final diary entry reads “No water. Near dead with thirst.”

When fisherman reported that the stone cottage had been destroyed and that fires were burning on the island, people thought that Mary had been kidnapped or killed. Mounted police and native troopers under Inspector Hervey Fitzgerald from Cooktown shot a number of coastal Cape York people, possibly as many as 150, in retaliation. Later there were claims that the people shot were not involved in what happened on Lizard Island.

The remains of Mary and her baby were found some months later among the mangroves on No. 5 Howick, still in the iron tank, but now covered with fresh rainwater from a recent tropical downpour. Ah Sam had died on the beach nearby. A concealed spring existed on the islet, but they had not found it. When the bodies were returned to Cooktown, a procession of 650 escorted them to their burial at Two Mile Cemetery, on the road to the Palmer River goldfields.

I found the details of Mary Watson’s story in Wikipedia in an article with “some issues” after my interest was piqued by an elegant and very white drinking fountain in Cooktown’s main street, a memorial to “the heroine of Lizard Island”, with a poem telling part of her story. I’ve quoted Wikipedia pretty well exactly. This story is also told in a section of the Milbi Wall.

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Cooktown history

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Aboriginal Cooktown, Captain James Cook, Chinese, gold

Cooktown does a great job of honouring the various strands of its history. The streets are full of information panels, statues and street art that draw attention to Aboriginal history; Captain Cook’s visit; the Palmer River gold rush and the flood of Chinese; and European settlement. The Captain Cook museum, housed in a beautiful old convent restored out of rack and ruin, has Aboriginal and Chinese rooms as well as Cook memorabilia.

The Aboriginal story is told on the tiled Milbi wall, created by Aboriginal artists. It begins with the story of the creation of the Endeavour River and proceeds in a long flow through the missions up to the present. The story also appears in footpath tiles, an image paired with words, and in word-panels and objects in the Cook Museum.

Women harvesting leaves of pandanus for weaving

Seasonal hunting and gathering

Captain James Cook is memorialised everywhere. He spent forty eight days in Cooktown strategising his next step when his ship, the Endeavour, ran aground on the reef. There is James Cook monument commemorating his landing on June 17, 1770, featuring kangaroo and wombat heads; James Cook statue; a cairn to mark the place where he beached the Endeavour; and in the museum the tree he tethered the Endeavour to and one of its anchors.

Other traces of white colonisation appear in a cairn dedicated to Edmund Kennedy, an explorer of the region who was speared in 1848; a statue of a hopeful miner with swag, pick and pan; and a cannon begged from the government in Brisbane to ward off a feared Russian invasion. The story of Mary Watson, wife of a beche-de-mer fisherman, told in another post, is also honoured in a monument.

When gold was discovered on the Palmer River, there was of course a rush to make fortunes. By 1877, an astonishing ninety percent of the goldfield population was Chinese (http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:205732/s00855804_1987_13_2_49.pdf) Cooktown acknowledges this huge Chinese presence with a sculpture near the wharf and a room of objects in the museum, including a pair of tiny shoes, not much bigger than a baby’s, to fit bound feet.

Footpath tile

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooktown,_Queensland

http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/qld/JamesCooktheEndeavourRiverandCooktown

 

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The huge and the minuscule

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boulders, Finch's Beach, sand patterns

I bounce along a bit of dirt road towards Finch’s Beach, splashing through mud puddles and hoping I don’t get stuck. I make my way along a track, past the yellow crocodile warning sign, and find a beach unlike any I’ve been on before. It’s not very big, contained by two headlands, one with forest reaching down to a rocky ridge, the other a tumble of big boulders. A huge rock in a pool looks like a sculpture. Other artists have been at work. The whole beach is a maze of sand balls, around crab holes, in a graceful variety of patterns. I’ve seen such patterns before, but not in such profusion, and I know well that such things are the enemies of photographic restraint.

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Botanic Gardens, Cooktown

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archaeology, benches, Botanic Gardens, Cooktown orchid, ponds, stonework

Three years after the first European settlers arrived in Cooktown, a botanic garden was proposed. By 1878 ‘Queens Park’ was a reality. Water was diverted, wells sunk, fountains erected, greenhouses and formal gardens constructed. It was the pride of the town and the centre of dignified recreation.

By 1896, money was getting a bit scarce, so townspeople could subscribe to the gardens, in return for a weekly bunch of flowers. Gradually, as prosperity dwindled, the gardens were ignored and reverted to weeds and shapelessness. In 1979, the site was cleared for an arts festival and signs of former splendour were uncovered. Cook Shire Council began the business of restoration and expansion. Some original plantings are still there and so is a lot of granite stone pitched channelling. Without documents, restorers depend on archaeology to show what the gardens used to be like.

As I ramble around I stumble across the circles of the old fountain, and stone channels and ponds. I visit the garden beds where flowers were grown to sell, and loiter near lily ponds. I encounter the Cooktown orchid, unfortunately behind wire, and the Vanilla orchid, unfortunately not flowering. The feeling is of parkland, and their are many invitations to sit: smoothly carved benches announce the name of the timber they are made of and encourage contemplation of the prospect.

 

Vanilla orchid

Cooktown orchid

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Cook’s Lookout

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Captain James Cook, lighthouse, Wahalumbaal Birri

The afternoon’s challenge is to drive up to the Grassy Hill lookout. When someone says “steep” now, I envisage the hills on the Bloomfield track. My mighty monster purrs its way up – twice! – and I see roughly the view Captain James Cook must have seen when he went in search of a vantage point to assess his prospects when his ship ran aground on the coral reef. I can’t begin to imagine his sense of wilderness: so far from home, no way of communicating, a damaged boat, the possibility of ending his life and that of his crew, here, in what was not yet Cooktown.

Cook’s is not the only presence at the lookout given his name, and certainly not the first. The Aboriginal story for the creation of Wahalumbaal Birri (the Endeavour River) is told on a plaque.

The third presence is a rather stumpy corrugated iron lighthouse. It doesn’t need to be tall, given the prominence of its site.

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A quick trip to Cooktown?

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ant hills, Mt Morgan, Mulligan Highway

At least that was the plan at a point considerably south. After all, it’s not very far from Cape Tribulation – up and back in a day with plenty of time for a good look round. Not so! The short route via the Bloomfield track along the coast is strictly 4WD. A sign at Cape Tribulation tells you of the difficulties ahead in no uncertain terms. It terrifies me so much I don’t even dare photograph it. The road is likely to slip from under you. The mountain is likely to slide down on top of you. The track can become impassable in any one of a number of ways. There are two hills that require serious expertise and the top range of 4WD capability. Not for this timid (wise?) traveller in a campervan.

The alternative is backtracking and travelling up the Mulligan Highway, 324 kilometres, away from the coast, with warnings this time about straying cattle. The cattle prove to be frilly-jowled brahmins preoccupied with their own business. The landscape is quite hilly once I twist up the range: smooth-humped rocky protuberance; Gormenghastian peak; waterfall of stone; rocky fingers reaching up from the bush to meet spectral fingers of mist; roadside grass pink and cream and gorgeous in the wind; and blossoming treetops, also cream and pink – eucalypt, melaleuca, callistemon. Once I reach savanna country there are plantations of small ant-hills like lightly skewiff inverted ice cream cones.

I stop briefly in Mt Morgan for coffee: I have a choice of instant or Mexican, and an accompaniment of f*** and c*** from a group of lads who screech up, burning rubber in a pair of utes, and order and eat hamburgers at the same volume. I don’t think Mt Morgan is on my list of Places I Want to Live, despite its picturesque industrial ruins and tiny flowers.

In Cooktown I find a spot in one of those rare camping areas that welcome dogs, and settle down for a few days of varied pleasures. I wonder how I can reduce four hours and 300 kilometres to so few photos and words, and decide that experience is much denser on foot.

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