Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/26

4 Rockhampton by the steam tender Dolphin, and for four hours we steamed down the Fitzroy River, which looked quite beautiful in the brilliant moonlight. Such nights in Australia are lovely. We anchored in Keppel Bay opposite to the Golden Shore Hotel on Curtis Island. At 4 a.m. the A.S.N. Co.’s s.s. Quirang arrived in the bay, and I at once boarded her and went to bed. She left at 6 a.m. When I emerged from my cabin I found it was blowing rather stiffly, and we were steaming close to the coast amidst picturesque rocky islands and islets. Captain M‘Lean was a pleasant, cheery, kind old man, but he and the passengers expressed the greatest wonder that I should be bound for Thursday Island, and evidently thought me “a freak” to want to go to such a place for pleasure.

We stopped at Flat Top Island about midday, it being only a small isle with a lighthouse. We arrived in Cleveland Bay and anchored off Townsville about 11 p.m. A steam tender took passengers and baggage ashore. A bar keeps large vessels from going to the wharf, and even the tender could only enter at high tide, so we steamed very slowly up the Ross Creek, and on arrival at the wharf a sailor carried my things to the Queen’s Hotel. The islands we had passed all the way up were beautiful, some very green and wooded with fir trees scattered about. The Whitsunday Group and Hook Island seemed desirable places. They are, however, just now useless for sheep, there being some plant that poisons them, so they are unoccupied save for some blacks.

I found the hotel very clean, and the meals both good and abundant. There is never anything niggardly in Australia about such matters. With a population of 9000, Townsville seemed a