The James Cook Museum in Cooktown

While in Cooktown we had to visit the James Cook Museum.  It was a must-see on our list.  I’d read that it was one of the best small museums in Queensland, so I was really looking forward to it.  So much history to take in here!

The museum is in an old convent built in the late 1800s.  Part of the museum is dedicated to the history of the convent.  I wish I had a picture of the staircases inside.  There was a sign with a quote from a former student talking about how only the nuns were allowed to use the main staircase.  There was a very narrow spiral staircase for the children.  It was the narrowest spiral staircase I’ve ever seen, and very steep as well.

We had an extra child along with us that day, which totally threw off my whole navigate-the-museum-with-kids game.  It was much harder to wrangle the kids with another one thrown into the mix!  She was a friend they’d made at the caravan park.

Another reference to the Queen’s visit in 1970!  She opened this museum, who knew?  They gave us a list of things to find, like a scavenger hunt, and this was the first thing on the list.

After visiting the mint in Canberra we love to see coins on display.  They actually had quite a collection at the museum, many older coins from before Australia had their own money, but I only have a picture of the more recent ones.

Lots to see!  This was a model of the Endeavour.  Or a ‘boap’ as TurboBug calls it.

The actual tree that the ship was moored to.  Interesting, isn’t it?  When the Endeavour left I wonder how long  it was before the next visitors came to this area who would have cared enough to mark which tree it was.

In 1971 they found the Endeavour’s anchor.  What history!  Captain Cook spent about seven weeks here while the ship was being repaired after hitting the reef. 

Some quotes about Captain Cook.  The children’s rhyme at the end is the best…

Captain Cook chased a chook
All around Australia
Lost his pants in the middle of France
And found them in Tasmania.

Upstairs I found a map of Aboriginal Australia- showing tribes/language groups and regions. 

Here’s a map of just Cape York.  Look how many different groups!

I loved this sign with the story of Captain Cook’s landing from the Aboriginal point of view.  They’d seen visitors before ‘But they were transients.  They did not intend to stay.’ They saw the ‘strange large canoe’ and  ‘considered that these boat people like others who came and went would not cause problems.’

I don’t know what the story was with these canoes, but aren’t they cool?

Upstairs they had heaps of things on display.  See those drawers at the back of this picture, off to the right?  Each drawer contained items, and they had drawers like this all over the place.  So much to look at.

Yeah, yeah, there’s a boat behind me.  But did you see my cool truck?  That’s what you want the picture of, right?

You could go out on the balcony and look out to the river.  By this time the kids were pretty much over the whole museum thing.

One last quick run-through downstairs and I found this diary entry describing Captain Cook’s first sighting of the kangaroo, ‘the full size of a greyhound and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail which it carried like a grey hound, in short I could have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking or running which it jumped like a hare or deer…’   Joseph Banks says ‘What to like it to I could not tell, nothing certainly that I have seen at all resembles him.’

An early sketch of a ‘kanguru’.

I could have spent hours here soaking up all the information.  Sigh.  That’s impossible with kids sometimes.  Okay, most of the time! 

Isabella Falls, Cape York

Cooktown is as far north as we are travelling on Cape York.  While it would be an adventure to go all the way to the tip it would also be quite a journey.  A dusty one, requiring a 4WD that we’d have to hire along with camping gear.  Or pay for a tour, but finding a tour for a family of six is difficult and pricey.  We’ve heard the trip takes something like twenty hours.  That’s a long journey to get to the sign that says you are at the northernmost point on the Australian mainland.  So, it won’t be happening on this trip.

At the visitor centre in Cooktown we asked about waterfalls in the area.  This far north you have to be careful of crocodiles, but there are some falls that it is safe to swim at.  About half an hour or so northwest of Cooktown are the Isabella Falls. 

The creek runs right across the road.  There were no crocodile warning signs here and they’d told us at the visitor centre that we could swim here.  We decided to play it safe and stick close to the falls just in case.

There was plenty of climbing to do and all the kids ventured onto the ledge at the top of the falls.  They stayed well back from the edge and didn’t freak mama out too much.

JitterBug lost his second tooth, right before his eighth birthday!  The adult tooth from the first tooth he lost has already grown up into the empty spot.  Still can’t believe that both my boys have been over seven and a half before they lost their first tooth.  The dentist is happy, though, since it gives their jaws more time to grow which means more room for adult teeth.  Here’s hoping at least some of them won’t need braces.  But back to the waterfall…

Does anything make a toddler happier than playing in water?

They all had turns in the various cracks and crevices and mini waterfalls…

This was just over the road and the water moved so swiftly, crossing the road and into the falls.  Much leaf racing and then shoe racing commenced. (Shoes were rescued before going over the edge!)

We didn’t venture in here.  No crocodile warning sign at the road, but who knows how far up the creek you’d need to go before you see one.  We saw quite a few vehicles crossing this creek headed in both directions, some towing caravans.

One happy kid after all that water play!

Here’s one of those crocodile warning signs, this one at a different point on the road.  ‘Crocodiles inhabit this area – attacks may cause injury or death.’  Nice.

And…a tattered American flag at the side of the road.  Not a current one, but one with only thirteen stars for the original colonies.  Weird and random. 

 

We did try to see other waterfalls in the area and we were hoping to swim in some waterholes, but our plans were foiled by rain and closed roads and a lack of signage on really long dirt roads.  The kids didn’t mind and were happy to go to the pool instead.  Honestly they’d be happy to go from the pool at one caravan park straight to the pool at another one, but their terrible parents make them actually leave the park at times and see all the things there are to see in this country.  ;)

Grassy Hill & The Cooktown Lighthouse

After Mulambin we drove several days in a row to get all the way up to Cooktown.  It was tiring, driving for several hours and staying for just one night at our stops along the way.  Cooktown is as far north as the sealed road goes, so this is as far north as we will be going on this trip.  The plan is to make our way back down the coast as far as Mackay, then we’ll head inland all the way to Uluru before going north to Darwin.

Cooktown is where Captain Cook came ashore after his boat hit the reef and needed repair.  They ended up spending seven weeks in the area.  Lots of history here.  We drove up Grassy Hill to the lighthouse.  You can walk up, too, and do a walk around town to visit all the historic sites.  We opted to drive up this hill.  This is the view from one side of the hill, looking down on the town.  It’s not a huge place, that road you can see with the buildings is the main road in the town. 

The lighthouse was very small, one of the smallest we’ve seen!

The area was revamped at one point with help from the community.  There are signs and plaques all over the place.  Including this seemingly random rock with a dedication to Captain Cook.

And this compass marker pointing out what lies in various directions.  I told the kids to point to their favourite.  SkeeterBug chose the Coral Sea, LadyBug chose Melbourne, JitterBug chose Tokyo.

TurboBug felt left out and needed a turn too.  :)

The community did well to make the area surrounding the lighthouse an attractive feature for the town.  The design on the walkway followed the circular path, making it look like a giant snake was painted on the path. 

Captain Cook himself climbed this hill, hoping to see a way out of the harbour without damaging his ship on the reef again.

Insert lovely random kid pics!

Mt. Cook is not too far away.  We stayed near the base of the mountain.  We didn’t do the hike since it was a four hour return.  With our four kids it would have been more like six or seven!

There were several signs like this around the area with journal excerpts from both Cook and Banks.

Joseph Banks journal 14th June: The Captain and myself went ashore to view the Harbour and found it indeed beyond our most sanguine wishes: it was the mouth of a river.

18th July: Indians were over with us today and seemed to have lost all fear of us and become quite familiar; one of them at our desire threw his lance; it flew with a degree of swiftness and steadiness that really surprised me, never being above 4 feet from the ground and stuck deep in at a distance of 50 paces.  After this they ventured on board the ship and soon became our very good friends.