2010/10 Australia trip - Thursday Island |
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Wednesday October 13th
We were up early to join the ferry on its trip to Thursday Island. According to one of the passengers there was a croc under the wharf just before the ferry arrived. This was where we’d seen the local kids swimming the day before.
There is a regular ferry service all year round, and most of the passengers on this morning were locals; a large number of those coming off the ferry were high school kids visiting the mainland for some kind of tournament. All the locals went into the inside cabin while we tourists who wanted to see the view sat outside and got even more fried.
It’s just over an hour’s trip and goes past a half dozen or so of the Torres Islands, some big enough to have communities but most, like those in the picture, too small. The water changed colour as we passed over reefs and sandbars. Navigation in these waters used to be very difficult. In fact, the area was the site of Australia’s worst ever sea disaster back in 1890 when the Quetta hit a rock and went down in the Strait.
The area was originally occupied by headhunters, then the Brits brought in missionaries, presumably to supply more heads, and it eventually became a base for the pearling industry, and an important administration centre and coaling depot for the Royal Navy. It’s had lots of colourful history and a mix of many cultures in a short time. In World War 2, first all the Japanese pearlers were deported and interned, and then, as the area was receiving bombing attacks by the Japanese, the whole population was relocated for its safety and a flood of Allied servicemen came in.
We’d signed up for the bus trip run by the Pedell family. The driver told us that most things are very expensive on the island as they have to come in by freighter from Cairns. She said it was the cost of living in Paradise. She took us up to the Green Hill Fort, built and armed to protect Britain’s coaling supplies from attack by the Russian Czar’s navy. There 
was a fear of Russian invasion; this was at about the same time as Fort Nepean was built to protect Melbourne’s harbour. From the top of the fort, we could see why Thursday Island had been chosen; it has a commanding view of all the nearby islands.
As well as the guns, still in place, it had a museum full of interesting relics from the pearling industry, the lighthouse, and the armed forces. I think Sandie and I could have spent hours in there but when you sign up for a 
tour, you’ve gotta go with it. Then we were off on a short tour of the island, ending up at the cemetery where pride of place goes to the memorial to the Japanese pearl divers, but the rest of the Torres Islander graves are also colourful and elaborate, as are their ceremonies.
We then had three hours before the ferry left. What we probably should have done is go back to the fort and see if we could get back into the museum, but we walked around town looking for 
T-shirts for the grandchildren and came to the conclusion that everyone had run their stock down for 
the end of the season. Thursday Island has “Australia’s Top Pub”, or at least its most northerly one, but it didn’t look too appetizing so we ate a somewhat unethnic meal, Ploughman’s Lunch in my case, at a motel restaurant with a young Irish waitress “just off the boat”. I don’t suppose there’s ever been a ploughman on the island, or even a plough.
After that there wasn’t much more to do in Paradise. We sat in the shade on the beach looking at all that gorgeous white sand and blue sea, but of course no one was swimming.
We took the same outside position on the ferry back and found that the return trip was a lot rougher with the ferry running head on into the trade winds. Sandie gets sick if she’s inside, so we got pretty wet, not cold of course but very soggy. A guy sitting next to me on the boat said he was in the Top Pub some twenty years ago when there was a riot, with the locals throwing rocks at the pub, only he was too drunk at the time to know why. He’d had to visit it again for old time’s sake, and this time he’d watched the Chilean miners being rescued.
Back on the beach at Seisia we were treated to this sunset and we watched the local fishermen coming in. We spent the evening with the couple that was sharing our kitchen shelter, interesting people. They told us that Brisbane was experiencing flooding, so we might have to replan our return route. They were going south like us but were hoping to get into the Iron Range area and then he was planning to go to Normanton to see the “Morning Glory” cloud formation that can happen there at certain times of the year.