Australia: Doing a wharfie at the top end

Cooktown has always been a frontier town and retains the raffish air of an outpost.

Day's end on the wharf at Cooktown. The setting sun shimmers on sandbars where the Endeavour River, having meandered through the mangrove forests of Far North Queensland, slips languidly into the Coral Sea.

Offshore, a stiff southeasterly wind pushes thunderclouds across the horizon. The wind raises the ocean into a grubby chop and sighs in the trees along the waterfront. But despite the wind, on this early August evening, the air still has the warm fragrance of the tropics.

Hank, Steve and Frankie are doing a wharfie. This traditional Cooktown pastime involves nothing more strenuous than turning up at the wharf each evening to fish, yarn and drink a cold beer or two as the heat of the day seeps out of the air. The wharf is the coolest place to be in Cooktown.

"Fishing's not up to much tonight," Steve says, offering me a beer. "Wind is stirring up the water too much."

A reef heron pecks at his pile of bait as we talk. Finding nothing to its taste, it stalks off with an air of indifference to another fisher perched on a nearby bollard. A couple of linesmen, armed with a chiller of beer and fishing rods, arrive in a muddy 4WD festooned with aerials and ladders. Frankie and Hank, both members of the unofficial Cooktown Wharf Rats Association, are swearing about the government. The western sky is molten with light.

Located on the lower edge of Cape York, the shark-fin shaped chunk of Australia which juts northward into Asia, Cooktown has always been a frontier town.

Recently discovered by property developers who see it as the next Port Douglas, Cooktown retains the raffish air of an outpost.

Derelict boats, half-submerged in mud, lie among the mangroves; wallabies hop about on the cricket pitch in the domain; crocodiles lurk in the tidal creeks which finger the edges of town.

From a distance, Cooktown is almost invisible. The town camouflages itself among the eucalypt hills, the rainforest and the inscrutable mangroves. There is no cellphone reception and while I suppose I could have found somewhere to check my email if I'd wanted to, it was easier to simply remain incommunicado.

Cooktown is the sort of place where you could disappear for a long weekend, a year or a lifetime. It's the sort of place where, if you asked a local if they had lived there all their lives, they would reply: not yet.

In June 1770, Captain James Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on a reef off Archer Point, a few nautical miles south of present-day Cooktown.

Despite throwing a huge amount of cargo - including drinking water and a cannon - overboard to lighten the vessel, it took Cook's crew three days to pull the ship off the reef. It was badly holed, and with all their fresh water emptied over the side, Cook beached the ship at the mouth of a nearby river to make repairs and replenish his supplies.

For the next five weeks, while the ship's carpenters worked on the hull, Cook and his botanist Joseph Banks explored the surrounding area. "I climbed one of the highest hills that overlooked the harbour," wrote Cook in his journal.

"The lowland near the river is wholly over-run with mangroves. There was some hope of a passage to the northward and had no hope of getting clear except in that direction for as the wind blows constantly from the S.E. it would be impossible to return southward."

While Cook scanned the horizon for a passage through the Barrier Reef, Banks collected a number of botanical specimens to take back to England. When he asked a local Aboriginal what they called the hopping marsupials he had seen, the man answered: gangaru. What Banks misheard as kangaroo entered the English language.

I see an assemblage of beards lined up along the bar as I step over a sleepy dog lying in the doorway of the Top Pub and enter the public bar. Ceiling fans stir the humid air. A pair of Aboriginal stockmen lounge beneath Akubra hats in the garden, their beers in the ubiquitous styrene stubbie holders.

I order a beer and a feed of barramundi and chips. Outside, the sun is incandescent, but here in the bar it is a few degrees cooler and the welcome is warm. I fall into a conversation with a pair of beards called Daveo and Simmo. We are soon ribbing each other in the time-honoured Aussie-Kiwi way.

"They're a very patriotic people, the Kiwis," opines Daveo, rolling a smoke with calloused fingers. "They'll do anything for their country except live in the bastard."

While I struggle for a suitable retort a fresh round of beers arrives and the conversation takes off on another tangent. Before I know it, the afternoon is gone.

Cooktown exerts a curious pull on anyone who is in no hurry to move on. I begin to arrange my days around morning beers at the Top Pub, an afternoon snooze in the shade somewhere, and doing a wharfie in the evening.

On my last day in town I take a few beers down to share with Hank and Steve. We yarn about the weather. The fishing still isn't up to much. The same wind that bedevilled Cook is still blowing the sea into a chaotic mess. One by one the Wharf Rats depart for home until I'm alone on the wharf. I sit against a bollard and feel the timbers of the wharf warm beneath me as the last drops of light drain from the sky.

Australia is full of long straight roads which lead to places like Cooktown. It would be easy to disappear one long weekend and spend the rest of my life doing a wharfie here or in any other place on the edge of the world. I should go and check my email but I open another beer instead.

* Fergus Blakiston visited Cooktown courtesy of Air NZ and Tourism Australia.

Cooktown

Getting there

Air New Zealand flies to Cairns from Auckland three times a week. Air fares start at $339 one way (excluding New Zealand departure charges). Visit www.airnewzealand.co.nz or call 0800 737 000 for more information.

Cooktown is 331km north of Cairns. The drive up the newly sealed Peninsula Developmental Rd takes four to five hours. An alternative route is via the 4WD-only Bloomfield track through the rainforests of Cape Tribulation.

When to go

Best time to visit is the dry season, which runs from April to November. The weather is generally hot and settled. Lagoons and rivers dry up and bushfires become a dominant feature of the landscape. During the Wet - December to March - heavy rains and cyclones deluge Cape York. Roads become impassable and rivers spread out to form vast lakes.Spectacular thunderstorms are a daily occurrence.

Where to stay

The Sovereign Resort Hotel (www.sovereign-resort.com.au)has comfortable air-conditioned rooms set around a tropical swimming pool.

For a different accommodation experience, try Mungumby Lodge (www.mungumby.com), 35km south of Cooktown.

This rainforest lodge has 10 wooden bungalows and a large verandah restaurant set on the edge of Mungumby Creek. The area is known for its unique botany, wildlife and birds.