Information about Yepppoon and the Capricorn Coast

I’ve decided to start a daily photos series going, for two reasons:

1. I haven’t got anything else to post about at the moment (well nothing that I want to write about) and that’s a bit of a problem because I haven’t updated Jylanization for over 1 month.
2. I think everyone likes pretty photos, and that’s a good thing because I can distract you from my lack of proper content :-).

Anyway, I’m going to try and post a photo from my area every day. A feature of Wordpress that allows me to save a group of posts and then publish in the future will help me with that. So without further ado, here is the first photo:

Looking down the Adelaide Park valley across our Dam. Taken on the morning of the 19th of June.

A few days ago we had to drive up to the Byfield State School so my sisters could do the nation-wide student testing. While they were doing tests, dad and I read the overview of the Federal Budget in the gardens just opposite, which are part of the Byfield general store. I also took some photos.

A really pretty flower in the gardens. I think I’ve finally cracked taking photos of flowers. I’d say the basic rules would be: Put the foreground in focus and make the background blurry, get real close in on the flower and try to shoot in sunlight!

On the way back from Byfield we also dropped in Red Rock National Park, which we’ve camped at before. It is known for being infested with mozzies, but because of the cool weather there weren’t too many around. The creek there is really pretty, although the rangers have fenced it all off because of crocodile sightings.

The next stop before home was Cooberrie Park, which is a wildlife sanctuary (a bit like Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast - Bindy and Terri have actually visited Cooberrie Park BTW) so that my sisters could get some rats from the owners. They will breed them and then give Cooberrie Park some of the babies. Anyway on the way out we nearly walked past a Tawny Frog-Mouth Owl, which was just sitting on the railing.

It didn’t fly away when we approached, and a staff member said that we could pat it! I think it had been hand-reared since baby-hood. Patting the owl was like patting any bird, except if you touched the Owl’s beak it would open up it’s mouth (which is really wide and yellow inside) and gives you a very gentle bite.

Patting the Tawny Frog-Mouth owl. It has really cute little feathers sticking up from it’s head as you can see.

This time looking very alert. Maybe it had just seen the rats :-).

Well, 2 weeks ago on Friday the 25th April my dad and I, along with some boat-owning friends of ours, went out to Humpy Island for a weekend trip. I apologise for taking 2 weeks to write about, but I have been busy and I did have to go through 300 or so photos of the trip, which meant that I kept putting it off. You know what I mean ;-).

Humpy Island is a National Park about 65 hectares big, and is located just south of Great Keppel Island. More info is available from this link.

I’ve decided to call this a photo essay because of the large amount of photos that I’ve decided to include. Also, just note that I’m not documenting everything we did on Humpy Island, like snorkelling out on the reefs, with and without a boat. The reason being that I didn’t take many photos of that (for fear of damaging or wetting the camera). I did see a turtle underwater while I was snorkelling out in the boat, however. I actually tried to chase it as well :P.

Friday : Arrival Day

On to the story. We got up at about 5:00AM on Friday morning, leaving home an hour or so later. The meeting place was at Rosslyn Bay Harbour, which is the main boat harbour for the Capricorn Coast, so we drove there and started loading up the boat we were going out on.

Once that was all done, we left for Humpy Island at about 6:30AM! There were 2 large tinnies and 1 boat going (which had already left Thursday night). We went in one of the tinnies and the other tinny followed behind us.

A view back looking at the Rosslyn Bay Hill. The tinny in the picture was following us. I love the morning light, it makes everything look really pretty.

Appearances are deceptive on the ocean, and the distance to Humpy Island was no exception. I would have though that it was only 7 or 8 kilometres, but I bought my GPS along and the real distance was over 19km! It took us about 45 minutes to get to the Humpy Island, we got a bit wet but it was a perfect day so that didn’t matter too much.

On arrival we unpacked everything from the boats and chose a camping spot. A funny thing that happened was that everyone was down at the beach but someone had left biscuits on the table, and the crows were tearing into them.

The beach, soon after arrival. The boat we came over on is the closest in the water.

The people who had come to Humpy on Thursday night won’t around when we arrived, so we just set up camp in the main camping area just near the path to the beach.

Looking in the other direction from above. The camping area starts just where the trees are. We originally had our camping spot just a little way in.

Looking straight up to the main campground.

After we had set up our tents and stuff I decided to walk up the hill and take some photos.

Looking down onto the trees and camping area. We were camping in the far left of the main clump of trees, later on we moved a bit out of sight to the left.

A wildflower growing on top of the hill. It looks a bit like a dandelion in my opinion.

A type of long seedpod attached to a swirling base of long, thin, and serated pieces of grass or leaves. I think they are nicknamed black-boys (now politically incorrect) because they actually thrive on fire and can be seen all covered in blackness.

I think these are the same type of plant shown in the above photo, just with a full crop of matured flowers.

After a few hours or so the people who had come the previous night arrived back. Two of my friends and I decided to go on the whole island walk, which basically winds its way around the island “hill range.” I’ve just included just a few photos below because I’m going to put in more photos from when everyone did the walk.

This is looking from the far side of Humpy Island towards the camping area on the island, and Emu Park in the distance. The little hills you see on the left is where the above photos were taken.

The main cairn on Humpy Island. Cairns are basically just piles of rocks that are added to by people who have made it to the highest point on the mountain, or island.

After we had arrived back from the Humpy Island walk, the Thursday night people then went for a walk around the camping area. When they came back they said they’d found a much better camping spot (about 50m away) from which the boats could be easily seen. We walked over and had a look, and decided that it was better than our current spot. Moving was comparatively easy; All we had to for some tents was pick them up, carry them, then plonk them down again.

The new campsite that we moved too. It was much more open and there were no other people camping in that area. It was about 50m from the tap.

Well once everything had settled down we basically stayed settled down until the beautiful sunset.

The beautiful sunset. This would be looking towards the Capricorn Coast / Yeppoon area, but I can’t identify the coastline accurately enough to be sure of the exact locations.

After the sunset had finished, my friends and I decided to sneak around the camping area and flash lights at people once we got up close. That’s probably about all I should tell you ;-).

Saturday : Full Activity Day

Relatively early on Saturday morning just about everyone in our group decided to do the island walk, which we (meaning from now on two friends and I) had done the day before.

These pretty wildflowers were located about halfway. The ant inside was a stroke of luck.

Some more wildflowers. I reckon this one looks a bit like a dandelion.

Another blackboy plant, this time all nice and green and without a stalk in the middle. This meant I could get a nice symmetrical overhead shot.

Once we all arrived back we mainly stayed around camp (with the exception of snorkelling out with the boat, see the top of this post) until late afternoon, when we walked up the hill closest to us to get some photos with the afternoon light.

Looking towards our camp (just underneath the first clump of trees along the shore).

A zoomed in view of the main sandbank where we fished and snorkelled from.

My two friends. I’m on the left. This is looking east from Humpy Island out into the great Pacific Ocean.

Sunday : Day of Leaving

Sunday morning was fairly lazy, we just had breakfast, went for another snorkel, and then started packing up. Packup up took about half an hour, once that was done we just threw everything in the boats and said goodbye to Humpy Island.

My last few photos of Humpy Island were taken from the back of the tinny as we motored away.

I took a few photos at Rosslyn Bay Harbour. This is the biggest hill at the harbour, there is another one just on the other side that has a walking track on it.

This is a bit of a funny photo, I think it was on top of a Fisheries building and it was a pole with 4 security cameras pointing in all different directions.

That just about wraps up my trip to Humpy Island. I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!

Yesterday we decided to try and find the Kanaka trail, which is a track that was built in 1884 by the South Sea Islanders, for the sugar industry in Yeppoon. This blog post gave me the idea to try and find it, but I only thought of doing it yesterday, so it was a snap decision!

The blog post linked to above gave links to a few sites, but I found http://www.aussieheritage.com.au/listings/qld/Yeppoon/SugarWagonTrail/1749 to be the most helpful. The page on the Aussie Heritage site gave some kind of geographical co-ordinates for the start of the trail, so I found a converter and converted the co-ordinates given into the type that my GPS could understand. Unfortunately I didn’t get to use them, because we found the trail by accident, although it was only a small section. By the time we’d walked and explored it thoroughly everyone was too tired to try and find the beginning, so that will have to wait for another time.

Anyway, I better start telling you how we find it. First of all we drove along the beachside road heading in the Farnborough direction, because I wanted to see if we could get to the co-ordinates that I found. After a bit of looking in the roads and streets up there, we decided to head back and walk up Meikleville hill (where the trail starts), using the track that goes up to the Radio and TV towers. I won’t tell exactly how to get to the access track, but I’ll give you a clue: It is on the western side of the hill. If you’re serious in climbing it just email me.

The top of the second hill, looking out over the ocean.

About halfway up the hill, the access track split into two, with the bigger track heading up to the top of the Meikleville and the smaller track heading off to the left along the ridge of the hill. Since we’d never been along the smaller track, we decided to go that way. The track continued on, and eventually we came out on the top of the hill across from Meikleville. I guess the geography is something like a mountain range, except in small scale. We never had to go down to ground level, instead we just walked along the ridge.

On the top of the second hill the smaller track split into two even smaller tracks, one going down the hill on the western side and other (which was very steep and narrow) going down the hill on the eastern side. It was at that point we decided to go back.

Now, when my sisters were coming up the second hill after me, they had seen a really rough shelter with old tarps, mattresses and cut branches. We had all come down the hill and were investigating this when I saw another track heading off, with a row of stones on either side! At this point we weren’t sure whether or not whether this was the Kanaka trail, but as we ventured further on and saw that the rows of rocks on either side were continuing, we decided that no-one would go to this much effort just for a walking track. A bit further on, we came to this large collection of rocks that confirmed that this was the Kanaka trail.

A definite sign that the track we found was indeed the Kanaka trail. All those rocks would have been at least a metre high.

A tiny bit further round the corner than the photo above.

Now for the sad part: Just 30 metres or so after the above photos we came out onto a block of land that had been all cleared and dug away. When we walked over to the other side to try and find the trail again, there were no traces. Today (Sunday) my mum was talking to some friends who knew more about the Kanaka trail and they said that the Capricorn Coast Historical Society had actually taken the developer of this land to court over the issue, but the developer had won :-(.

We came out onto a block of land that had been cleared. Try as we might, we couldn’t find any trace of the trail continuing around the hill. I think we’ll need a good guide for that!

After playing a while on the hill (think large rocks, kinetic energy and a steep slope), we walked back to the old tarps to try and go the other way. We found a little bit of the track, but after a while it petered out and split up. So we stopped looking, walked back down the hill, got in the car and went home. A short and sweet ending :-).

But this won’t be the end of the search. I’m going to get in contact with some people who know the track really well and we’ll probably do some more exploring in the near future. Stay tuned!