A week at the Top of Australia
A week at the Top of Australia

A week at the Top of Australia

We’ve spent a week pottering around the Northern Peninsular Area, finding history, fishing (mostly unsuccessfully), camping on remote beaches and meeting new people.

The history of the Cape is fascinating – as is a lot of Australian history if it would only be taught properly in schools.

Indigenous people here traded, travelled, married, fought and generally interacted with other tribes in the Torres Strait and New Guinea, leaving a culture that is different to the rest of the mainland.

Thursday Island Torres Strait

Travel up the Old Telegraph Track and you see telegraph poles, telegraph stations, graves and other remnants of the first communication line to be installed to the Tip and across the Torres Strait.

Old Telegraph Track - telegraph pole

Throughout the Northern Peninsular Area there are ruined buildings, gardens, cattle yards, farm equipment and more graves evidencing the difficulty of trying to make English-style settlements in rugged and remote Australian rainforest.

The cemetery on Thursday Island is full of, mainly Japanese, pearl divers who lost their lives as they were required to dive deeper and deeper in search of elusive pearls.

Horn Island in the Torres Strait was Australia’s first line of defence in World War II and a site from which American bombing raids to Singapore and the South Pacific were launched.

Somerset Old Magistrates House

Much of this history is being lost, overtaken by the rainforest. Some has been researched and documented and there are excellent books around if you really look. But there is very little marking out and/or signposting of places of interest.

To find some things we’ve had to read the book, look for the site, read the book again and go back for another look. In a couple of cases we still haven’t found what we’ve been looking for.

The Cape is the sort of place where people come for a visit and stay forever, so if you’re lucky enough to start up a conversation with somebody who has been here for years you can get lots of information. They’re not really difficult to find, and lucky for us we found a couple.

We’ve also been lucky enough to strike up conversations with some local Indigenous people who know where the more difficult to find ruins are, but these are mostly inaccessible to those who don’t live in the community.

And we’ve only had a week here. I could spend a lot more time, but unfortunately responsibilities call (mainly the need to make money), so we have to head south again soon.