Bingil Bay, North Queensland...

Recently I commented that I had been sifting through photos on my phone and iPad with a view to clearing some storage space by getting rid of photos already used in the blog or other social media posts. And I have found quite a few 'future blog post photos' which will mean a bit of 'to-ing and fro-ing'; both in time and place!
So this post is going back in time to November last year and the place is North Queensland. In my mind, I had made 2016 the year of meeting up with longlost relatives and after meeting up with cousins in Western Australia, New South Wales and even my home city here, the year was running out and I still had to visit 2 cousins in North Qld. My cousin was quite concerned that it would be November when we finally got there; she warned of really, really hot weather and bad storms which feature at that time of year.
Yes it was hot (ish) but luckily there were no wild storms while we were there. On our first full day in the Innisfail area we had visited relatives of my dad's first wife for morning tea. The plan was that we should then have lunch at a favourite Cafe of my cousin. This Cafe was in South Johnstone.

We followed in our hire car and stopped behind my cousin's car, in the little main street. You could see the smoke stacks of the town's sugar mill...

We could also see that the Cafe had closed up and gone out of business.

Not to be deterred, my cousin took us to another favourite Cafe at Bingil Bay.

We sat at the side of the Cafe in a little covered area.

It was hot (ish) and I was absolutely entranced by the 'ceiling fan'...

Isn't that a delightfully vintage fan? 😃

As we waited for our order I noticed the public phone box near our table...how well camouflaged it was!

I had noticed a bit of purple in the decor and this extended to some outdoor seating near the entrance

😉.
What a fun place, and our salads were delightful too. 

The Malanda Dairy Museum and Cafe...

Recently I've been going through photo files on both my phone and iPad and have found quite a few photos which I've taken previously with the idea of using them in a blog post. Today's post is about our visit to the lovely town of Malanda last November, and of course using some of those photos.

 This town is on the Atherton Tableland to the west of Cairns in Far North Queensland. Cairns is in the tropics, but because of its elevation, the Tableland enjoys cooler weather. This meant that a dairy industry was a viable proposition and Malanda is very proud of its rich dairying history. Malanda Milk factory still produces dairy products to this day. Despite the declining number of dairy farms on the Atherton Tableland, the area produces a million litres of milk per week.

Outside the museum is a tableau representing those early pioneering days...small family run farms, milk churns rather than milk tankers, the little sheds where the filled churns  were placed ready to be taken to the factory, the farmer's children wearing old hessian bag rain 'capes' etc. ( I didn't grow up on a farm but those hessian bags were used for all sorts of things even in suburbia!)

Inside the museum there was lots to see...
The magpie pecking the foil top of the old milk bottles and drinking the top of the milk...I'd heard people talk about this when I was a child, but far as I know none ever stole our milk as the milkman brought it up on to the covered veranda...

To one side of the museum was an old red, wooden railway carriage...we had fun walking through that! And I took that photo of the ornate overhead luggage rack. Again, I'd heard stories of people climbing up and sleeping on those racks on long distance journeys...obviously a bit more agile than me! lol

There was old farm equipment adjacent to the carriage...all beautifully restored.

And from that side area of the museum, the modern factory was visible.

After a cuppa, we went through more of the exhibits.

During WW2 this area became a huge army base and this is reflected in the history of the area...

I never miss an opportunity to be photographed with statues...this soldier is dressed in the uniform of more like the time of the Vietnam war...

And of course there were thousands of US army personnel stationed in the area during WW2 and I just loved this tableau of 'milk bar' complete with a serviceman (airforce?) and an Aussie army nurse...and I 'pushed in' to get my photo taken with them. :-)

We spent a very pleasant couple of hours here.

 

The Golden Gumboot...

In a recent post I wrote about the signs that rain could be on the way, i.e. the 'visits' from ants and the green frog. Well it did rain last Sunday...quite a bit in some areas but by Monday, Brisbane was once again sunny and very hot.

All the talk of rain though, had reminded me of our recent trip to Far North Queensland. We had lovely fine weather during our short stay back in November, but the area has had lots of rain in recent weeks. Three towns in FNQ vie for the wettest town in Queensland; Innisfail, Babinda and Tully. The higher rainfall is the result of monsoonal rains and cyclones.

My cousin took us to Tully for a look around. It is a town 'built on the sugar industry'. And in a park there is a tribute to the early days of sugar...my dad started cutting cane in 1926 so I reckon the display with horses being used to cart the cut cane would have been like when my dad was a canecutter.

Many of the sugar mills in north Queensland have closed but the mill chimneys at Tully dominate the  skyline and it is very obvious that it is still a working mill! 

A big tourist attraction in Tully is the 7.9 metre ( 25.9ft) Golden Gumboot, which was erected in 2003.  This height represents the highest rainfall recorded in Tully and this was way back in 1950.

A couple of interesting points;- the floods that Tully experienced in 1967 and 1973 were caused by rainfall greater than 8 metres and Babinda has had even higher rainfall levels than Tully in the last 40 years.

So here are our photos of this tourist attraction...

Little me standing beside it to give an idea of its height...

A closer view of the frog details too...

My cousin has some favourite shops in Tully and we went to a few...a wonderful toy shop, a kitchen wares shop, a fish shop and a popular teashop/café/florist. Many of the stores had art deco frontages...just like Innisfail! I also took photos inside the café.

I loved those novelty clocks on display in the café!

That trip north...

I've previously written a post about my 'crochet hook' experience at Brisbane Airport when we flew to Cairns in early November. But since then I haven't written any posts about our 4 days up north. 

The reason for the trip was all about catching up with family rather than sightseeing, although on the second last day we did do a fair bit of the latter. 

My cousin Sarina lives near Innisfail and we had not seen each other since 1966. I looked liked this, but I don't have a photo of her at that time but she was 23.

Luckily though, for a number of years, we have communicated by phone and email. 😉

So you could say that this trip was mostly about the people DH and I met up with...

This is my 'big' cousin and her husband Len. Len got talked into having his DNA done recently and he is a match with both Sarina and I. It looks like the link between Satina and I is through my grandfather who was most probably a cousin of her father! ( we still have a bit/lot more to do to be able to put ourselves on each other's family tree) But the link with Len seems to be a bit further back.

We had arrived mid morning on the Monday and that afternoon Sarina took us to meet her friend Katie ( Caterina), whose cousin had been my dad's first wife.

I had taken my dad's old photos on the trip with us in the hope that someone might identify people in those pics.

You can imagine the frisson of excitement when Katie recognised herself and her sister...and then her parents!

So three more photos 'now have names'! 

The next day DH and I were driving to South Johnstone to meet up with my cousin when my phone rang. It was the son of a man who had come out from Sicily on the same ship as my dad. Mario and dad stayed best friends until my dad died in 1967. His son Sam and wife Teresa were driving from Tully to Innisfail to meet up with us...so we did a U turn and headed back to meet them. I had last seen Sam when I was 15. 

Once again those photos came out! And Sam was able to confirm that one of the photos was indeed his parents and him.

All too soon, we had to leave Sam and Terese to head off to South Johnstone to meet up with my cousin, but only after we exchanged addresses. 

Our next stop was to visit some more relatives of my dad's first wife. They were very welcoming and enjoyed looking at the photos I had of her from my father's collection. 

Because the older people in this group had not arrived in Australia until the 1950s, they did not know that their cousin had married my father in 1937 when she was a teenager. But they told me that counting her marriage to my dad, that made 3 times she was married! 😉

Then my cousin took me to visit another of her friends who had known my father...

This lady gave me the phone number of a lady who might know what village my dad was born in. I did ring this elderly lady when we got home, but she didn't know. 

So it had been a busy Tuesday!

Remembering...

Way back in July this year, I wrote a post about my friend Jenny who had just been diagnosed with MND (ALS). 

So many of you wrote loving thoughts on this post. The prognosis then was that she would 'have 2 years'. Sadly this was a trifle optimistic, and the disease progressed quite rapidly with Jenny passing early this month.
I was very sad, but I realised that life was getting more and more difficult day by the day for my friend. She had gone into a nursing home and in the last week or so of her life, breathing and swallowing had become difficult and she was in pain. So the fact that she slipped into unconsciousness one night, was transferred to hospital and then slipped away there the next day without regaining consciousness...it was such a blessing.

On the Sunday after Jenny's passing our group of friends met at one of her favourite coffee shops for our regular monthly coffee morning. We shared stories and tears. As a memorial to our friend we all put in $10 each to make a sizeable donation to be sent to the Motor Neurone Association in memory of our friend. 

The funeral was delayed until her son and his family could arrive from the UK and it was held last Wednesday. I was so disappointed that, as things turned out, I would not be in Brisbane as I was visiting family in Far North Queensland.
By a strange coincidence DH and I spent the day visiting memorials to his older brother and 10 others who perished in a plane crash to the west of Cairns in 1990. ( the passengers were all Councillors returning from a Local Government Conference in Airlie Beach, except for the pilot and a nun, Sister Nadia who was given a seat when one of the Councillors decided to drive home. How lucky was he?) 

The first one we visited was the memorial at Tolga on the Atherton Tableland. DH and I were guests when this refurbished memorial was unveiled by the then Governor, in May 2010 which marked the 20th anniversary of the crash.

Some photographs were called for; last time we were here there were too many people around to get some quiet time to read and photograph the plaque.

 

The next memorial we visited was in the Bicentennial Gardens in the town of Mareeba...

There is a memorial near the Cairns Council buildings but this visit, DH took me to the one in an old Pioneer Cemetery in Cairns. This memorial honours only DH's brother, who at the time of his death, was the Mayor of Cairns...

A nice little band rotunda...

And plaque...

Surprisingly, visiting  all these memorials was not a sad experience...rather it was quite uplifting due to the beauty of this area of Queensland.