Is it any wonder that on a cold and windy day like this morning my thoughts turn to warm and sunny Queensland in general, and in particular to my old favourite haunt Kuranda west of Cairns?
My very first holiday after coming to Australia in 1965 had been to Cairns - hitchhiked all the way up, and came back by REDLINE Coach - and during my caravanning-working-holiday in 1979/80 I temporarily lived and worked in Mt Isa, Mackay, and Brisbane, and thought myself settled when I finally accepted a permanent job in Townsville where I first lived on Magnetic Island and then at Cape Pallarenda.
Then I heard the call of the wild and was off again, first to Papua New Guinea, then Saudi Arabia, then Greece. The lure of the tropics stayed with me during all that time and I returned to Townsville in 1985, but as they say, "You can't step into the same river twice!", and so I ended up in the Deep South, first Sydney, then Canberra, and now "Riverbend".
In late 2003, after we had had had several prospective buyers and one firm offer for "Riverbend", I took another trip to Kuranda to see what property we in turn could buy for ourselves in tropical Far North Queensland. As I wrote then, "I arrived at Cairns airport after a three-hour direct flight, jumped into my hire car, a cute little Hyandai Getz, and drove the short 25 kilometres into the mountain ranges behind Cairns to Kuranda, the Village in the Rain Forest. Checked into the Kuranda Hotel and enjoyed my first cold beer of the day. Later I went for a stroll up the main street of Kuranda and passed the Faraway Tree Building which I remembered from the real estate website as being the location of the two strata-titled flats for sale in town. As I looked around the building, a voice from above bailed me up. No, it wasn't God but Marshall, one of the tenants, who works at "The Ark" and who wasted no time in familiarising me with all the local gossip and introducing me to the only owner-occupiers in the building, the retired couple Pat & George Mcfarlane." [read the rest of the story here]
Well, one of those units in the Faraway Tree Building, which was on sale in 2003 at around $160,000, has come up for sale again - click here. Here's its sales history: 2007 $160,000; 2016 $159,000; 2017 $170,000; now $187,000. That's the fickle Far North Queensland real estate market for you: high in 2003, and not much higher seventeen years later!
In the meantime, I've had a large bowl of porridge, drank a large cup of hot lemon & ginger tea, and I am now sitting by the blazing fireplace. According to Robert Browning, God's in his Heaven and all's right with the world, and my thoughts of escaping to Queensland are receding.
