Hervey Bay

We were planning to stay a few days in Rainbow Beach and soak up the sun and sea, but it rained all night and the morning broke dark and overcast. Without the beach, there really was not much else to do, so we moved on. The next port of call was to be Hervey Bay, but to get there we had to pass through Maryborough.

Maryborough used to be the second biggest port after Sydney, and was a thriving hub. There are many historical buildings in town, and one area has been fully restored to its former glory, and set up as a historical precinct, with museums etc. Despite the miserable weather, we got around to a few of these museums, and even managed a few sodden photos. If the weather had been better I would have enjoyed spending most of the day here, looking into various nooks and crannies.

Maryborough's other claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of PL Travers, who wrote 'Mary Poppins.' Apparently she was quite an accomplished lady, as well as being quite tough and stubborn. This is brought out in the recent movie "Saving Mr Banks" (I think, I haven't actually seen it,) about her interaction with Walt Disney. When the movie first came out, a preview was screened in Maryborough for all its residents, for free, before it hit the cinemas.

The other thing about the town was the number of old "Queenslander" houses. These are lovely, grand, rambling houses, built high to survive the frequent floods. Apparently every now and then they are opened to the public, and I think would be quite a spectacle. And Maryborough has streets full of them, one after the other. Overall it was a grand elegant old town, and deserved more time. But the weather was so bad we just couldn't give it its due.

So we moved on to Hervey Bay. We were told it never rained much there as Fraser Island protected it from rainfall. Whether this is true, or whether the weather had just rained itself out, by the time we got into Hervey Bay the rain had stopped. It was still dull and grey though.

Hervey Bay is a strange town, not having a town centre as such. It has about 15 kms of coast line, and there is an esplanade that runs the whole length of it. Along this road there are little groupings of shops and cafes, interspersed with holiday apartments, every few kilometers, almost forming towns within a town. The bigger shops (Bunnings etc) and larger shopping malls are a few streets further in, but also forming a long, thin strip along the length of the town.

It is hard to see why Hervey Bay ever developed as a tourist hub as its beaches are really not very nice. They are what's called 'tidal' beaches. This means when the tide is out there is about a kilometer of flat muddy sand before you hit the water. The water itself is very flat and calm. The two days we stayed here the weather remained miserable, so we never really tried it out. But it didn't look very inviting, so no great loss really. We spent the time buying provisions and catching up with our homework (yes, three entries published from Hervey Bay.)

One of it's claims to fame is whale watching (at the right time of year.) So it had not one, but two, big whale statues - one at the community centre, and one adorning the marina.

GeorgeY's bit

Maryborough is a nice inland town, with so much water to dump on visitors. Being indoors was a good alternative, and for one combined fee you get a pass to 3 different museums (or musea, for the Latin connoisseur). We visited the Bond House Museum, the Custom House Museum and the Military Museum. At the end of the day we left Maryborough with an inflated sense of Australian history, and headed to the famed Hervey Bay.

Hervey Bay is a long esplanade with a few streets behind it, mostly for services and shopping precincts. The Esplanade runs along about 5 or 6 beaches (Point Vernon, Pialba, Torquay… Urangan, all the way to Hervey Bay Marina, which is nice.) Each beach is serviced by a strip of beachy shops offering the usual restaurants, cafes, pizza and take aways, alongside specialty shops specializing in odds and ends and nothing specific.

To perfectly cater for holiday makers there are tours and activities, and some water parks for the young, and skate parks for the brainless. One thing I kept noticing throughout Queensland is, unlike Victoria, bicycle helmets seem very optional, more of a status symbol, hence hardly seen. I wouldn't jump to the explanation that there is nothing much to protect here, but the traffic posters on roads had more focus on the use of seatbelts in cars. (Since when? )

Each one of these beaches have the same grey sand, waveless waters, and long tides. The sand is very dark, muddy, and unappealing. Between one beach and the next, there is a gap in shops and high density accommodation, that starts again the next 500 meters, and so on. The marina, in contrast, was different and more appealingly designed.