Leaving Godwanaland

Walking the Tongariro Crossing and being able to hold and turn the pages of Cook’s journal describing the Atlantic shore of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were the highlights of my last two weeks downunder.
The Tongariro Crossing is one of the world’s great walks, 19 kilometers across the volcanic heart of North Island New Zealand. It was a long, exhilirating day climbing steeply to craters, passing steaming turquoise lakes, descending scoria slopes, being swallowed in cloud and then a long descent through the tussock grass and southern beech forest to a welcome shuttle back to the hotel. It was also a great personal achievement as 12 months previously I was progressing slowly and sometimes painfully through physiotherapy for my broken ankle.
Then it was time to return to Australia, say my farewells in Adelaide, visit friends in rural New South Wales and head for Canberra, a capital city like no other I have visited. It is completely planned and dedicated to being a national capital, nothing else. The Parliament Building makes a grand statement presiding over all the other buildings of national importance in a parklike setting beside a lake with black swans. It was in one of these, the National Library that I set foot, hoping to see Cook’s journal from the Endeavour and read the account in his own hand of being reef wrecked at Cape Tribulation where I had been six months earlier. But it was not to be, the journal is there but not accessible to the general public. I had to make do with a plasticised and incomplete facsimile. As I was leaving I expressed my disappointment to the librarian who told me that they had some Cook originals that were available for perusal. And it turned out that they were earlier journals from his 1762 visit to Atlantic Canada when he was a mere Lieutenant. So there I was reading his account of Halifax Harbour, Sambro, Canso, Cape Breton, Placentia, Bay of Bulls, Cape Broyle. It was thrilling and will add to my appreciation of future explorations in these places whether on foot or in a kayak. I realised I was ready and eager to get home.
There was also a pencilled note on tides on a slip of paper on the back of which was a request to Cook from a Mr Caddy to bring 2 quintals of fish home from St John’s “if he has room enough without pushing his people to an inconvenience” This was dated 1765 and was a recent acquisition from an antiquarian bookseller in London.

My last stop was at Cook’s Landing, a national park on Botany Bay. Botany Bay is south of Sydney and is the site of Sydney’s airport, an oil refinery and various other industrial installations. But the landing site is a delightful park with an interpretive trail which includes an acknowledgement to the Aborigines who consider this event to have been the beginning of the end for them. And of course there are monuments to Cook, Banks and Solander, the latter being recognised through the efforts of a group of Swedish Australians at a much later date than the Cook and Banks memorabilia. And there is a grave of an Endeavour sailor who died while the ship was anchored in Botany Bay.

Time to leave with memories galore on many levels, but it is the flora of both Australia and New Zealand that are etched forever on both my visual and olfactory memory.