FNQ again

 We've had ourselves a little holiday, flying up to Cairns and Port Douglas like we did last year, and much of what we did was only really of interest to ourselves, and to be honest much of it was the same as last year, swimming in the warm Pacific Ocean from Four Mile Beach and staying in the same holiday apartments as last year.

We did manage to get out to the Reef, to Low Island, to go snorkelling one day, which was a blast with great shoals of trevally, angel and zebra fish, and far too many to count little fish, almost like going for a swim in an aquarium.

Low Isles lighthouse

Some things were a little different of course, one night in Cairns we ate at Little Sister, a Japanese fusion restaurant that I don't think was there last year, and Port Douglas didn't seem quite as busy with a few empty shops on Macrossan St, the main drag

Plant growing through floor of empty shop

and this year, instead of going to the Daintree, we went further north to Cooktown where we stayed at Mungbumby Lodge, an eco resort once patronised  by David Attenborough, and where we'd stayed in 2014 when we took our own car up to Cairns on the Sunlander, the last time you could take your car on the train

To get there of course we needed a car. Last year the rental car lottery delivered us a surprisingly impressive Haval Jolion. This year we ended up with an MG ZS with a tad under 60k on the clock.

When MG's - the Chinese made models made by SAIC, not the original British sports cars - started to be imported into Australia, people were disparaging, just as they were about Korean cars when they started being imported twenty five years ago, and while I never drove one of the earlier imported MG's, I had a ride in one once or twice and it's true, they sounded a bit rough and noisy, but then so did a Hyundai Getz when they first appeared.

Not this one. Quiet, comfortable, yes the automatic transmission could have been a little slicker, but the little MG not only could rattle along comfortably at 110km/h on the road up to Cooktown, it took the dirt and gravel road to Mungumby in its stride.

It's easy to see why it was the best selling small SUV in Australia for the last two or three years, and indeed why the more established manufacturers are increasingly abandoning the small SUV space - they simply can't compete on price and quality, certainly the little MG ZS was better than both the Ford Focus SUV and the VW Taigo we had in Europe in 2023 and had just as much luggage space.

While at Mungumby we had a day out to Cooktown to see the Botanic Gardens.

Cook's Monument, Cooktown

In 2014 when we visited Cooktown was a tatty, end of the road sort of place, a little run down, but all the more interesting for that.

Post cyclone, they've tarted up the waterfront a bit, but it still has a definite end of the road feeling.

There's one little puzzle though.

It used to be said that in the 1880's at the height of the Palmer River gold rush, Cooktown council panicked over the threat of Russian invasion, and requested help to defend itself.

At the time, Cooktown was a significant settlement with steamship links to China, and a telegraph link to the south. If search for 'Cooktown' in digitised newspaper reports of the time, a lot of the overseas reports are bylined as 'via telegraph by Cooktown' or something similar.

After the Panjdeh Incident  there was a major panic that there might be war with Russia and that the Russian Pacific fleet might be used to attack Australia.

The story goes that the government in Brisbane sent the town an old Napoleonic wars cannon, something that would be singularly useless in the defence of the town against the Russian fleet.

Cannon and crest

and certainly there is a George III era cannon in Cooktown.

The Russians were certainly in the area, as were the Germans occupying part of what is now PNG, and since Cooktown was an important port for the Palmer River goldfields, worries about the defence of such an isolated community were perhaps not as silly as they first sound.

However, the sign by the cannon has changed. It's now described as a gift from Queen Victoria, and furthermore it claims that the worries about Russian invasion originated from Townsville 700km to the south, and that there is no record in the council minutes of the time of help with defending the town being requested from the colonial government in Brisbane.

What the actual truth is, I don't know. 

But certainly there is a report in the Queensland Times from April 18th 1885 that the Cooktown Council passed a resolution requiring the Mayor to contact the Government in Brisbane to see if they would cover the cost of evacuating the women and children in the event of a threatened Russian attack.

Certainly I can see that people might have been worried about the defence of the town in the 1880's given the isolation of the community, and might also have requested help from the colonial government to defend the town.