Cooktown

Introducing Cooktown

The springboard to the untamed Cape York Peninsula, Queensland’s sleepiest port town sits at the mouth of the croc-infested Endeavour River. The townsfolk who plough Cooktown’s main thoroughfare, Charlotte St, in dusty 4WDs with ‘easy does it’ bumper stickers but are not afraid of hard work, and equally not shy of a ‘smoko’ – say from ­October to June.

Things boomed quickly back in the late 1880s transforming the hamlet into a thriving hub of 4000 (twice the current population). Cooktown is now enjoying something of a resurgence courtesy of the Cooktown Development Rd getting sealed in March 2006, making it accessible in the Wet – good news for game fishers from San Francisco to Tokyo who rent ‘millionaire’s fleet’ boats in the hope of snaring a legendary black marlin offshore. Apart from top-notch fishing and reef access, this small town with a big heart offers personalised tours, wetlands ripe for bird-watching and long, lonely beaches.

Cooktown can claim to be Queensland’s first nonindigenous settlement, however transient. From June to August 1770, Captain Cook beached his barque Endeavour here, during which time the expedition’s chief natura­list, Joseph Banks, collected 186 species of Australian plants from the banks of the Endeavour River and wrote the first European description of a kangaroo.

Race relations in the area turned sour a century later when Cooktown was founded as the unruly port for the Palmer River gold rush (1873–83), where fortunes were made – and drunk – swiftly. Battle Camp, about 60km inland from Cooktown, was the site of a major battle between Europeans and Aborigines.

Last updated: Apr 17, 2009