Love their crocs up in FNQ, they do. Warning signs to frighten swimmers in the murky, waveless beaches from Cairns to Port Douglas and tourist traps further north.

Glossy, scaly croc heads have bumped the handsome old cane toad from pride of place in souvenir stores. All the locals have a croc yarn for you.

Crocs walking the streets at night, crocs swimming between the flags on patrolled beaches, crocs roaming the sand – everything shy of crocs walking into the pub and buying you a Bundy. You’re miles more likely, of course, to be worked over by Uber drivers or stingers than crocs. Hence the beachside vinegar bottles rather than suture kits.

But stings and crocs, especially croc river tours with their rubber tree snakes make good fodder for the visitors, as do dinosaur and gem/crystal/boomerang/Bali junk emporiums. These and soaring skyrail gondolas, rugged gorges and waterfalls, deep black tunnels, trestle bridges and rickety trains hundreds of nose-bleed metres above anything.

Old stories of cave-ins, roughhouse cliff-face pubs, deaths working the Kuranda railway, nasty bankruptcies, politician waterfall parties round out the chief spiels. But in between a couple of bearded dragons, rusty tuba and piano skeleton pub decorations at Kuranda, I spot a soaring tailplane among the jungle ferns and sprawling fronds with yet another story of weirdness.

Metal corroded, battered and choked by tendrils and vines, it’s attached to a lichen-covered fuselage half buried under branches and shadow. Its broken windows reveal a derelict metal ribcage and perilous floor structure you’d do well to avoid.

 

Turns out I’d seen this plane before, on the windswept plains of Mount Cottrell half-way between Werribee and Melton a few decades back. It was in better shape then and propping up an unremarkable Aussie movie doing a poor job of emulating the Indiana Jones/Romancing the Stone flicks of the day. Wrote a yarn on it that I can barely remember.

The 1986 flick was called Sky Pirates and starred John Hargraves as a Lieutenant Harris, an Indy lookalike in more trouble than a Werribee duck, fighting off bad guys while chasing a secret power source “shared by people who built places like Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids”.

Lots of swashbuckling, rip-roaring, exotic, hang-on-to-your-seats stuff. Airfights, explosions, fedoras, leather jackets, hot co-stars, Jones-style truck fights, brassy music and wise-cracks – “Hey! That’s my plane”. Even the voice is similar.

The movie plane crashed on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the box office, sadly, but its real story was rather curious. It’s a C-47 DL built in 1942 which arrived in Brisbane the following year with the US Air Force. Christened Geronimo, it was handed over to Oz after the war, refitted and overhauled, and worked as an ANA carrier until becoming TAA’s first plane to take to the skies, in 1946, then East West Airlines and finally Trasmar until 1981.

The film crew grabbed it in 1983, dragged it around the countryside, and it eventually wound up in some 50-odd pieces in an FNQ scrapyard before being donated to Kuranda heritage interests.

Not the only odd aviation story out Melton way. Used to be an old DC3 sitting in a paddock that carried Winston Churchill to the famous Yalta Conference of 1945 with Stalin and Roosevelt. And Harry Houdini completed the first powered air flight in Australia next door at Plumpton in 1910. Then there was aviator Jimmy Melrose, who came to grief in 1936 when he crashed at Melton South.

Geronimo’s fate was also ignominious in that Sky Pirates gave the old C-47 a sex-change/name-change to Miss Fortune for the movie. Bit of a disappointment but not the only one I met in FNQ.

Roaming up to Port Douglas in search of the Iron Bar, a rusty, corrugated structure I think was set up by a couple of Geelong blokes yonks back, I wanted to catch its famed cane toad races. I was saddened to learn they’d been a casualty of Covid.

Long way to go to be let down. Bit like hearing the Colac Ferret Cup’s been cancelled. Or the Meredith Gift nude sprint. Or the old Meredith Jump Club’s Beer Hunter and Kick the Flaming Avgas Can contests. Or the Inverleigh Dachshund Derby. Cockfights at … oh, did I say cockfights? I could go on but maybe best I don’t.

Just saying, it’s a bit sad when the advertised event – saltie, toad, aviator, film – fails to deliver. And I reckon Miss Fortune might have put the mozz on things. Just one more FNQ croc …

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 23 August 2022