Another day of driving today. We headed off early from Nambucca Heads and got a send off from a kangaroo with a joey in its pouch who was having breakfast in the garden of the B&B. Apparently the word kangaroo is derived from the Guugu Yimithirr word gangurru. Joseph Banks must have learnt this word from the Aborigines they encountered as he used the term “kanguru” in an entry in his diary in 1770. At the time they were in what is now called Cooktown, on the banks of the Endeavour River. HMS Endeavour was beached there for around seven weeks to repair the damage they sustained when she ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. Their first siting of a kanagaroo must have made them wonder what the cook had put in their coffee. It would have been quite unlike anything they had ever seen before.
The drive north was not quite as straightforward as yesterday, not least because of a road upgrade to the Woolgoolga to Ballina stretch of the road. Now, as whingeing poms, we do like to whinge about things but 155km of roadworks …. I think we are entitled to whinge about that! However, it wasn’t too bad and we made the journey to our hotel in just over five and a half hours with a short stop.
Once in Brisbane we met up with Jen and went out for supper to the Howard Smith Wharves – a new development under the north end of the Story Bridge. The wharves were built in the mid-1930s and were originally intended to provide relief work for workers who had lost their jobs in the Great Depression. The work on the Story Bridge started around the same time in 1936. The wharves acted as part of the port of Brisbane for many years, but were abandoned in the 1960s as the port moved out to the mouth of the river. Ships had got too large to easily negotiate the river and so its demise as a port had an inevitability about it. The wharves are now being restored keeping as much of the original fabric as possible and used as an entertainment and events venue.
Leave a Reply