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!
UPDATE: Amazingly showcasing the abrupt changes of weather that are possible, the rain here has now (2PM) stopped and the sun is shining! I went and had a look at the intersection and water is still flowing over, but I could ride across. There are lots of those big, heavy, plastic roadwork blockades that have been washed down the creek, too.
This Sunday I went with some friends to the Rockhampton Heritage markets to help them with their macadamia stall. On the way back home we stopped in at the Alpaca farm on 444 Cobraball road, because they were having an open day (which we’d read about in the paper). We had known the people from previously, because the man runs a tiling business and tiled some of our house. They lived nearer to us until recently, when they moved into the new place on Cobraball road.
Just a note to everyone that I have already written a guest post about the creek at Kemp Beach over at 
