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31 hours of a moving postcard

Memories of riding Queensland’s historic train, The Sunlander

By JJ Rose

A TRAIN DRAWS around the corner, dramatically heavy and ponderous, and pulls into arguably the Sunshine Coast’s buzziest little town, Cooroy.

This train, The Sunlander celebrated more than 60 years on the 1067mm standard gauge tracks running between Brisbane and Cairns in 2014, when it was retired.

As it lumbers into the quaint little station – all weather-board and cream and red paint – the sun rolls just off the horizon like a gold coin, and 60 years seems a drop in a timeless bucket.  That’s how I remember it.

I was supposed to be there as it left grand old Roma Street Station in the heart of Brisbane, but traffic snarls on the Bruce Highway from the Sunshine Coast held me up. Sitting here on the dusk-time platform with the smell of diesel in the air the sound of creaking carriages in my ears, I'm kind of glad of that.

The Sunlander lends itself to country moments under vast blue skies, to sunsets and chilly bush afternoons. Travel was meant to be this way.

My cabin speaks of history. The old emergency pull handle is embossed with a warning ‘Penalty for misuse $10’. Next to it another newer sign reads, ‘Penalty for misuse $3000’.

There’s 60 years of inflation.

A label over the rubbish bin advises ‘Dry Refuse Only’. Who discards ‘Refuse’ any more?

A tongue and groove panelled cupboard, a creaky wooden stow table, a hand basin that looks like Nan's old enamel pots, and a smell of age, recalling images of men in hats with fags dangling from John Brack faces and of gloved and purse-lipped women herding unruly kids in their Sunday best. My parents, my family, ghosting down the corridors. 

Life on the rails

Outside the window, things probably have changed a bit more. Sixty years ago, Cooroy was more country than town, Brisbane had less than one-third the population of today, The Queen had just been coronated, Hillary and Norgay had just climbed Everest. As the many markers along the way remind us, Telstra was once the PMG (which stood for Post Master General), and sugar cane was a major crop, not a reminder of an industry’s decline.

Heading north, the darkness envelopes the scenery. A brighter flurry of lights outside the only window herald a big centre as the 'Landerlumbers to a halt. A gentle lurch to stop. Still and silent.

Dinner conversations over gourmet meals in the restaurant car tail off with the change of atmosphere.

“Where's this?” is heard, and other dinner guests offer guesses. Eyes peer into the gloom through the glass, searching for clues. But there’s only rail yard junk, weeds in the spotlights and simple houses off in the darkness with hints of life through curtains. Does it matter where we are? We are here: On The Way.

Good morning, Mackay, Proserpine, Tully …

Night passes and Mackay reveals at first light, roos framed in dawn haloes outside town. Spreading morning reveals shadowed fields dipped in sunlight, rimmed by mountains.

Breakfast features Proserpine through the windows, with its sugar mill filling the view, heaving into life, the incense of sugar processing rising from huge stacks. Caged carriages of burnt cane, like dark limbs, are jostling and waiting in the pure light of 7am.

Cane is everywhere, stalks three and four metres high, crowding into almost every view, dense ranks of sweetness waving in the unfelt breeze. The mauve flowers that signal harvest time rise above the grassy leaves like the quills of arrows darted into the crops from a distant bow.

One square meter of sunshine soaked cane yields enough sugar to fill around seven 2kg bags of supermarket product. Most of the country's 4000 sugar farmers are here, lining The Sunlander route. Hanging on.

Once a booming industry it's now worth less than one percent of Australia's total output. Some mills, like Proserpine, are gearing up for another season. Others, like the one at Tully, are in pieces, gaping holes and spilling machinery, like the carcasses of former giants eviscerated by economics.

Morning tea, we cross the Burdekin, more rivers than river, divided by hectares of silt. The bridge is bigger than Sydney’s ‘Coathanger’ and our rattling progress scatters some water-birds who leave pock-marks on the mirror surface as they lift off. Ayr is a line of molasses storage carriages on the adjacent tracks.

Through Bowen, with its lines of mango trees, and by lunch we’re in far North Queensland’s biggest centre, Townsville.

With afternoon sun blasting into the cabin, Ingham and Cardwell offer beach glimpses, providing a view to the beaches that bore the brunt of cyclone Yasi in 2011.

The little beach-side town of Home Hill seems populated by caravans and Winnebagos more than people, and some of their occupants stand white-legged and thong-footed, gazing at the passing train like it was the high point of their day. A royal wave seems appropriate.

It’s all about the journey

As the afternoon closes in, the sub-tropical vegetation thickens into tropical, leaves are bigger, fatter. On the central coastal plains, lone trees seemed to deter closeness, arboreal loners.

As the tropics gather, trees seem to invite everything to grow on and around them. The plains trees are unsocial old bush cockies and the tropical trees are gregarious hippies. Each environment seems embodied by the people it attracts.

It's a relief to glide into Cairns Central. Yes, it's been a long time locked in a moving cylinder – I could have flown the same trip 16 times by now – but the weariness is from actual travelling, not from the annoyances of travel, like airport queues and grumpy flight attendants.

It's a rare thing to have the feeling you've moved through large pieces of time and space at something approaching an appropriate speed, being able to walk about, feel the sun, get a bit of air and enjoy an endless view at more or less ground level.

The food is superb, the conversation interesting and you’re presented with what is essentially a 31-hour, 1700km-long postcard all the way.

Flying home is a rush back to reality. Ironic that being in the air brings you back to earth. With a bump.

We fly over the route we’ve just come and are poorer for missing it. I am fortunate I just have, but there's still so much to see. Maybe next time.

Epilogue

Sadly, The Sunlander no longer runs this exotic train route between Brisbane and Cairns (in this archival story, JJ Rose joined the journey from the still quaint station of Cooroy in the Sunshine Coast hinterland). The Sunlander’s 1953 launch came to a much-lamented finale for historic train lovers on December 31, 2014. But all is not lost for avid rail travellers. The route, on new upgraded track, is nowgraced by a faster and more comfortable tilt train,the Spirit of Queensland. And the passing postcard scenery? Well, it remains pretty much the same.

 

#ends 

Singing Woodford festival's praises ... and that's not all, folks

Writer JJ Rose camped out for five days at Queensland’s annual Woodford Folk Festival, not expecting to like it too much. In spite of a few ‘outdoorsy’ challenges for him and his family – and an unfortunate ‘crowd coward’ moment, plus missed opportunities – Woodford’s ‘folksiness’ and intimate musical performances (well, even though in 2019 the festival had 2000 performers. 35 venues and 438 acts) compellingly won the Rose family over. 

FOR SOMEONE who takes to camping like a pelican takes to the desert, five nights at the Woodford Folk Festival loomed as a daunting post-Christmas event.

Amid various early disasters, I thought about heading home after an hour. I’m glad I didn’t.

If you’ve never been to Woodford, it’s hard to envisage. Some 30 venues, hundreds of retail stalls and eateries, a kids festival, something like 100,000 people turning up over six days between December 27 and January 1 each year, wall-to-wall entertainment from morning to well into the night. And the cantankerous Queensland summer weather.

All crunched together on a plot of land called Woodfordia, about a one-hour drive north of Brisbane.

The most difficult-to-imagine aspect is that it works.

Sure, we can overstate this. It’s only a few days etc. But all of us have seen how massed humanity can go ugly. Woodford, at least from what I could see this year, never did. Rules were sensible and common sense was in abundance. It’s a credit to all.

OPEN AIR OF ENTERTAINMENT

But, yes, it is a cultural festival, not an experiment in political philosophy. So what about the actual entertainment?

I probably saw about 40 acts at this year’s Woodford. Most were good, some were very good, one or two were truly memorable. A few were disappointing.

Personal highlights were Christine Anu with her – for me – tear-jerking set of pure voiced stunners. After days of rain she sang Sunshine on a Rainy Day and the blue sky broke through the clouds – I kid you not – and the rain only intermittently returned after that. 

Neil Murray played Bill’s Bar, a small venue perfect for his intimate approach, and I felt I knew him as family (so much so, I spontaneously waved to him when I saw him packing his car to leave. He waved back).

Kate Miller-Heidke was delightfully kooky and listenable, like an opera singer with Tourette’s. I caught her evening set at The Grande and couldn’t believe what I was hearing, both the acrobatic voice and the in-between-song profanity – a story about farting with nerves while playing with the Violent Femmes the night before – making her one of a kind. Quirky and fabulous.

The Cat Empire rocked the Amphi and introduced my 11 year-old daughter to the delights of being on shoulders (mine) in a mosh pit. When they stuck to playing actual songs, the Empires audience buzzed and bounced. When they indulged overly in drum solos or in clever musical tricks, they seemed to lose us a bit, milling instead of moshing.

Christine Salem and band tattoo’d New Year’s day with pulsating African tempos. A native of La Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, she and two amazing drummers hammered a largely listless and hung-over New Year’s Day crowd – although some brave and possibly still partying souls braved the dance dirt in front of stage – at the Concert. It was unfortunate scheduling as she was better than the sleepy vibe in the tent suggested. The drumming alone near blew my head off. 

Tibetan Tenzin Choegyal was a ubiquitous presence, somewhat colonising the major folk venue, The Folklorica. Both on his own and with other musos, memorably a fusion session with celloist Katherine Philp, his voice and passion lifted the roof. He sang the mountains and the plains of Tibet, and its pain and strength into being.

Shigeru Yomei Nakajima played memorising shakuhachi that drew me in as I wandered in an early morning search for caffeine. I had to stop and take it in. His breathy runs and the fanning, tumbling melodies had me back in the Zen hostel I stayed at in rural Japan many years ago. 

Brilliant all.

Honourable mentions too to Mia Wray, Dance Masala, Pocketlove, Kylie Auldist, Mr Percival, Delhi 2 Dublin, The Brisbane Celtic Fiddle Club, Sam Okoth, Tunesday Irish Ensemble, Darren Middleton, Fred Smith, The Mr Spin Show, Andrew Veivers and finally, AziMbira Zimbabwe for having both a nice act and the cutest kids at the festival.

CROWD ‘CLOUD’ OVER NEW YEAR 

Nakho and Medicine for the People accompanied us for our New Year’s Eve (NYE) ring in. I found them disappointing.

The potential is there, though, and my wife and friends who caught them the night before, when I was elsewhere, raved about them. They too felt they fell short on NYE.

But, part of the problem was that my daughter at her first real NYE gig got pinched hard by some unknown dickhead behind us and we had to shuffle from our hard-earned prime spot to the back, her in tears, as a result. Certainly didn’t help.

Bertie Blackman at the The Amphi too (and I am a fan) failed to work for me, her set sounding a little tired and dated.

While on the subject of NYE, the three-minute silence is one of the most stunning innovations I have come across at any event for a long time.

At 11.30pm on NYE, the whole Woodfordia ship and all who sail in her stop, and all is quiet. Candles are handed out and lit.

Those images of tens of thousands of people scattered across a vast complex remaining respectfully silent, seraphic faces shimmering in the flickering light, crickets chirruping into the silence and at a half moon parting the clouds like curtains, will stay with me forever.

Despite this, Woodford's NYE scheduling seemed a little off. Lots of contemplative, meditative acts and relatively few bona fide party acts in the early hours of NYE seemed an odd choice.

Placing someone like Christine Salem, say, on New Year’s Day, not the night before, or Pocketlove, seemed an opportunity missed.

I expect the earthy ochre tones of the Tjintu Desert Band and Kylie Auldist’s Bamboos-style soul riffs made the Songlines venue the place, perhaps, I should have been for NYE.

The Amphi’s Hogmanay shindig, fashioning a mix of Celtic acts like Shooglenifty and indigenous supergroup Tjupurru and the Bulldawadda, may also have hit the money.

Maybe I just got it wrong – first timer error perhaps. 

ITS A FOLK FESTIVAL, FOLKS

It’s handy to remember Woodford is supposed to be a folk festival.

While acts like say, Paper Lions (think 5SOS with Canadian accents), Husky or Sticky Fingers may push the folk genre out of a shape most of us could recognise, the vast bulk of the acts – music, dance, info sessions, circus, vaudeville, spoken-word and so on – could be roped into a folk culture corral.

As such, it is perhaps unfair to expect a rock concert or a dance festival.

Looking at its folk chops, the festival is to be respected. While the balance was perhaps weighted too much to African, and Middle Eastern vibes (this particular festival was co-sponsored by the Moroccan Government, which may explain a bit), with Asian acts, for instance, few and far between, the program is incredible.

It’s a list of such range, depth and quality unlikely to be found anywhere else in the world. 

It’s overwhelming. It’s gruelling. It’s long. And it’s camping.

But there are scant negatives to take out of my first Woodford experience. I’ll be back.

 

ends