So now it is Saturday March 14 and we are finally spending a day on the beach in Australia. Emerald Beach is lovely. It is just a short walk from the campground to the beach, and the small town has a couple of restaurants, a small grocery store, and a few other shops.
After breakfast we walked north on the beach, barefoot and carrying our shoes. We crossed 3 or 4 headlands with stretches of beach between. After 2 – 3 miles, about an hour and a half, we reached the town of Woolgoolga, a much bigger town with lots of shops and restaurants. The first thing we wanted was a beer, but that proved surprisingly hard to find. The restaurants down by the beach were not licensed to serve alcohol, although they were BYO. This is a surprisingly common designation in the parts of Australia we saw. Finally we were directed to a tavern – these are almost always called hotels – which was still another half mile walk, but we quenched our thirst at last. We looked around for an Indian restaurant – the town has a large Sikh Temple – but the 2 we found were both closed. So we returned to the hotel for lunch and got a taxi to drive us back to Emerald Beach, where we finally had a swim in the ocean. The surf was actually a little harder than I liked, although Ron didn’t mind. There were a fair number of surfers in the water, who were fun to watch. We then swam in the campground pool. We decided that beach life was very nice. 16,500 steps today and no driving! It actually rained a little overnight, which reminded us to always put everything away.
Unfortunately, the next day we had to head back onto the road. We stopped for lunch at Byron Bay, the iconic beach town for the Gold Coast of New South Wales, full of surfers and New Agers. After a nice lunch we tried to get up to Byron Head, the farthest east point in Australia, but the parking lot was full, and we felt compelled to move on. We drove on into Queensland without ever seeing a welcome sign or anything. We skirted Brisbane and headed inland to the town of Toowoomba, up on the escarpment above the coastal plane. Drove 509 kilometers.
Monday morning we went out to Picnic Point for the view and had wonderful scones with whipped butter that seemed to melt into cream.
This picture shows that Toowoomba is at the center of it all.
We had come to Toowoomba to visit with a woman, Marie Cameron, with whom Ron has been in email contact about St. Eustatius genealogy. Marie’s ancestor Margaret Ann Moore Cameron was born on St. Eustatius in 1818, married in Guyana, then moved to Victoria and finally Queensland. She died in Toowoomba in 1918. So after our scones, we met Marie and her cousin Jennifer at Margaret’s gravesite for photographs. They then served us a nice lunch at Marie’s home, and we looked at old photos and talked about genealogy. It was particularly pleasant because we really had not been meeting very many Australians – Campervan people seem to keep to themselves.
After lunch we were back on the road again driving north through lovely pasture and forest uplands. This countryside seemed particularly empty of people, houses are miles apart and the towns we went through were very small. At the end of the afternoon we headed back to the coast, but luckily the slope was very gentle and not frightening like Waterfall Way where I was worried that our wheels would go off the edge of the road. We stopped at Maryborough for the night. We discovered that “Pokies,” which we saw advertised a lot, were not some kind of pie or something, but electronic poker games and slot machines. Drove 355 kilometers.
On Tuesday we got a better look at Maryborough, which turns out to be the birth place of P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books. She was born here, in the apartment above the bank where her father worked, as Helen Lyndon Goff. At some point when she moved to London, she became Pamela Lyndon Travers. So here is a picture of myself with Mary Poppins. I don’t think of her as being so short.
The town also has the biggest fig tree I have ever seen, more than 100 years old. Almost all of the green you see behind the palm tree is the fig. Perhaps, if you zoom in, you can see the trunk, which is huge. Figs also send down additional roots, which support the large spreading branches. The angel is on an ANZAC monument to WW1. Per capita, a much larger percent of Australians and New Zealanders died in that war, since there were fewer political consequences to putting them “in harm’s way.”
Coming soon: The town and beach of Agnes Water and finally – the Tropic of Capricorn!
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