First a comment about Cooktown. It is a small fishing and holiday town with a population of about 2000 permanent residents. It is surrounded by mountains and the sea with the river flowing past the main part of town. Many of the houses are weatherboard and fibro but in the main street their are a variety of building left from the boom times. Our family lived up the hill from the main street towards where the rainforrest grows. The weather while we have been here has been extremely windy although not so bad today after a little rain last night. It is also a bit humid and hot in the sun but the breeze works wonders especially when in the shade. The locals have very limited shopping opportunities, however the IGA has most things needed but a trip to Cairns would be needed to buy clothing. There is a good feeling in the town and although there are many aboriginal people living in the town there has been no sign of drunkeness or shouting at each other that we observed in the Northern Territory and a number of aboriginal people are employed in businesses in the town.
We visited the botanical gardens this morning and after a walk around came upon the trail to Finch Beach which passed through a more open rainforest area with lots of stairs going down. The beach was fairly secluded and unspoilt with a river flowing into the bay at one end. After receiving information from some other walkers we decided to walk back along the road and avoided climbing up all those stairs. After a drink at the Vera's Cafe at the botanical gardens we visited their two galleries - the Charles Tanner which displays some of the wildlife of Cape York Peninsula and the Vera Scarth-Johnson gallery which is home to a collection of botanical illustrations by
Vera Scarth-Johnson and also prints by artists from the 1770s of local flowering plants. After lunch Lyn and I visited the locations of our great-grandparents house (which blew down in the 1907 cyclone) and our great uncle as well as the cemetery where we were able to locate the graves thanks to the plaque placed their by my mother's cousin. Our grandmother was Ellen and she was only 9 years old when both her parents died. It makes one sad to think her parents came all this way from Enland, lived in rather primitive conditions in Cooktown only to die so young and for him to have the worry of knowing he was dying with tuberculosis and his youngest child was only 7 years.
