Mission Beach and Paronella Park

From Townsville, the Bruce Highway stays inland for quite a while.  Not much to see but miles of cane fields, farmlands, periodically stopped by road works.   I took a detour to the coast to drop in to Mission Beach.  South Mission was the site of an early Aboriginal Mission, but these days is a hangout for trendy backpackers, looking to escape the busyness of Airlie Beach (that's my assesment, not from a tourist brochure).  There are some beautiful beaches (which you can't swim in at this time of year) and some cool bars.

Driving on a bit from Mission I came across Stumpy Jetty.  It was located in a beautiful little cove, with crystal clear water.  There were a few locals out fishing on the pier so I wandered out.  On the way I saw a MASSIVE Manta Ray swimming into the shallows, then criss-crossing the waves near the beach - I guess it was feeding on something - maybe jellyfish?

With a few clouds in the sky, the scene looking back from the pier made for a great black and white photo:

HERE's a couple more photos from the Mission Beach area.

From here it was onward and northward to a place called Paronella Park.   I had no idea what was there, or even what the place was, but I'd picked up a brochure and knew that a) there was something to see, and b) they had powered sites available for caravans.  When I arrived, I checked in and got a site for the van.  I was also in time for the last "day" tour, so after parking the van came back down to reception. 

The park was the dream of a spanish migrant Paronella back in the 1930's  who wanted to build his own castle in the hills and have people come visit.  After finding some appropriate land, which included a waterfall, he started to build his dream.  After many years building, he had created a magnificent park with castle style buildings that were used for dances, balls, weddings etc (complete with very early version of a disco ball), along with a cafe style build, changing rooms, bocce arena, and skating rink.  Back in the day it was a hit.  It was prior to the time of machine harvesting of the cane, so the area was chock full of labourers and their families who were involved one way or another in the harvesting and processing of the sugar cane.

He put the waterfall to good use and began generating power to run the place - it was one of the first places in the area to have a permanent power supply.   Today the generator has been refurbished, and still supplies nearly all the power needs of the park (in fact the surplus is fed back into the grid).

It eventually fell out of family ownership and in the late 1970's the new owner couldn't make a go of it, but also didn't sell it to anyone, so it was left to rack and ruin.  Given how quickly plants grow in this area, it because overgrown very quickly.

I don't know the exact chronology of the next couple of events, but in the late 90's it was used as a filming location for the Hollywood film Sniper with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane.  Around the same time, it got new owners who started to reclaim the buildings from the jungle and contacted one of the daughters of Mr Paronella, to try to re-capture some of the story of the place.  They still own it today, and are still working on restoring and saving many of the buildings.  One of the problems they face now is "concrete cancer" this is where the reinforcing steel within the concrete starts to rust and expand and then destroy the concrete.  They are going to have to put scaffolding up around some of the affected buildings to try to keep them intact.

Since I was staying overnight, I also had a ticket for the Night Tour.  This was less history and more ambience, with parts of the property being lit up with lights.  Although the tour was great and the place looked spectacular at night (especially the waterfall), there were two "natural" highlights for me.  Firstly, I got to see a colony of Bent Wing Bats up close - they are very small and cute. Secondly, I got to see a tree full of Fireflies all flashing at each other.  Unfortunately, neither of these I could get photos of.  But to make up for it, here's a photo of the waterfall at night...

And HERE's a few more photos from Paronella Park.