2010/10 Australia trip - Seisia and Bamaga |
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Tuesday October 12th
We stopped at the Croc Tent on the way back to Bamaga and bought a few souvenirs. The young lady who owns the business apologized for the limited selection, but their season was almost over 
and she’d be returning to Brisbane to her other job at a hospital. She said that the track we’d driven was the worst in the area. We said we were glad to hear that! The croc outside the tent was walled off with a fence and surrounded by warnings not to get your hands too close. This is all to protect the crocodile, which is made of fiberglass and cost a lot of money!
We drove to Seisia and booked up for the ferry to Thursday Island and into the campground for a 
couple of nights. This time we splashed out for a kitchen shelter so we’d have some shade. We were careful not to park under the coconut palms as the beach was littered with coconuts.
We went shopping in the Seisia store and the Bamaga tavern. People in Seisia and Bamaga are not aborigines. They are Torres Islanders who moved to the mainland after their island was washed over by a high tide back in 1948. They look more like East Indians than aborigines. The aborigines live mainly in Injinoo and New Mapoon. The original Mapoon is further south near Weipa and the residents were evicted from there to make way for bauxite mining. Over time some of them have gone back to Mapoon, trying to revive the old community.
We had a couple of hours to kill so we drove out past the airstrip to the Jackey Jackey boat launch, but there was not much to do there as there were croc warnings all over. Our Cape York book gave the GPS 
coordinates of some World War 2 airplane wrecks in the area so we drove into the jungle looking for those. The Jackey Jackey airstrip is Bamaga’s airport today but during the war it was Higginsfield air base, part of Australia’s front line against the Japanese.
The first wreck, a Kittyhawk fighter, had almost disappeared with just a small pile of debris 
remaining. This big tree towered over the pile, split almost all the way through its trunk, and opening and closing in the wind. Deeper in, we found the Bristol Beaufort, a torpedo bomber, and the major pieces of the wreckage were still there. We could stand inside the fuselage and imagine what it was like to fly in a Beaufort. The DC3 passenger plane 
wreckage was close to the airport road and mostly intact, preserved as a memorial to those lost in the crash.
That night we celebrated our brief return to civilization with the Chef’s Surprise at Seisia’s restaurant..