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 19th June 2026: Joined the Peddells tour again at guide Christine’s invitation to enable us to go into the museum at Green Hill fort- full of memorabilia dating from when the fort was built in 1893 due to a perceived Russian threat up to the time it was abandoned in the 1930’s. There was also reference to the 51st light infantry regiment- the Sarpeyes and their role in WW 2. We then had a coffee and savoury at MA - KAi before heading back to Island Stars to inquire about the painting I like with pictures of the totems of the various islands incorporated into it. I bought it and it turned out to be painted by Joey’s brother. joeys helper advised us to have a crayfish toastie and said he would prepare it for us if we came back at 12.15. Meanwhile, Friday is Flower day on TI, so I visited a flower dress shop-Mona’s- and bought a flowered dress for me and one for Frances. We returned to Island Stars for our delicious crayfish toastie, then hung around. For a while  bank at the no...
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 18th June 2026: we had a slow start to the day as it was raining! We had a coffee plus quiche/frittata at MA-KAi then headed for Island Stars where there was no info about the painting I was interested in, but we finally met Joey and we were able to join an Outback tour group to watch a cultural dance performance. Joey takes young boys, especially those who are a bit wayward and teaches them about their ancestry and to be proud of it and he teaches them traditional dances. They meet twice a week for instruction and he has put at least 40 dancers through his trainee programme. They have performed elsewhere in Australian and overseas. They were great! They performed dances of welcome , dance representing their knowledge of winds and knowledge of the tides and dances according to which island they came from, and they taught the audience a simple dance.The rhythm and singing were wonderful! We then decided to walk to Lions lookout (2 km) which had been the site of lookout and gun plac...
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 17th June 2026: breakfasted at the Wongai Hotel on muesli fresh fruit and yogurt then Vanessa Seekee picked us up in her van and we collected the other members of the tour, all from Outback spirit. Many of the tour including Nic & I had fathers who fought in WW2 and Vanessa’s first task was to look everyone’s relatives up on some sort of data base she had access to!  She then took us to King Point where we saw an anti-aircraft gun placement sandbagged area with a place for the aircraft spotters, and an underground plotting room using “the Predictor” to determine where in front of an enemy aircraft’s path a shot shot be aimed. These structures have been archaeologically excavated by a team led by the Seekee’s. We saw areas in the bush where stash’s of aviation fuel were hidden and a restored zigzag slit trench. There were 5000 Australian and American troops on the ground on Horn Island in 1942 from a number of different battalions and regiments including the 880 strong Tor...
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 16th June 2026: left the Jardine Motel and went on the 9.30am Peddell’s Thursday Island tour. We visited the cemetery to see the graves of the at least 600 to 700  Japanese Pearl divers.who dived between 1878 and 1941, mainly dying from the bends. We saw the grave of Bernard  Namok who designed the Torres Strait’s flag. We saw the Wongai tree, with berries used in herbal medicines. We then headed up Grass Hill, where a power outage meant that we were unable to visit the museum, however Christine our bus driver and guide told us many interesting things about TI. We then caught a Time and Tide ferry over to Horn Island. We walked to our Wongai Beach Hotel where we rested for a while then headed for the Museum as a preliminary to tomorrow and history tour with Vanessa and Liberty Seekee. It was a fascinating museum about WW 2 on Horn Island and the role of the principally Islander Light Infantry division -810 volunteers out of total population of 3000.. We ate at the hotel ...
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 15th June 2026: up early to move our Prado and caravan to the guest car park and meet our driver at 6.45am. He was a member of staff at Punsand Bay - a Chilean who had been working there for 4 days! However he drove the roads well to Seisia to drop us off at the ferry to Thursday Island, a trip that took about an hour on calm aquamarine waters!  We decided on a coffee and croissant and met a nice couple Ellen & John from Brampton Beach visiting their son John and his wife Eliana who live on TI with their 2 boys. John told us about an historical tour run on Horn Is called “In their footsteps” run by Vanessa Seekee , which we will do. We dropped our packs at the Jardine Motel and then went  the Gab Titui Cultural Centre to learn something of TI culture and history. There was an exhibition of photographs by a Japanese geographer and anthropologist Professor George Ohshima 50 years ago when his team did an extensive cultural and geographical survey of the all of Torres S...
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 14th June 2026: had a relaxed morning with time for breakfast, a coffee and to watch Insiders. We set off for the Tip of Cape York, stopping at the Croc Tent at the Pusand Bay turnover to purchase some Cape York Merch in the form of T-shirts and shirts. We then took the Pajinka Road to the tip of Cape York through the wonderful Lockerbie Forest- a mixture of dense tropical rain forest with areas where trees had been thinned out ? For cattle grazing in the past. We saw horses, 3 wild pigs and several scrub turkeys along the way. The Lockerbie Forest is special because it contains certain species of vegetation, butterflies and birds otherwise only found in New Guinea, whose antecedents must have come from Gondwana times when there was a land bridge between PNG and Australia. From the car park there was a 700 meter walk over rocks to get to the very Tip of Cape York. On the left were extensive mudflats and mangroves when the tide was out and on the right rocky steep cliffs. It was ve...
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