2020-03-01_Australian_Geographic

94 Australian Geographic

We’d thrown surf boards into a campervan on top of

sleeping gear, camera equipment and a portable type-

writer, and had already surfed our way up the coast for

two weeks, darting into the hinterland to document the

h ippies. We rea l ly had to m a ke some m i les towa rd s Ca i r n s.

But instead, we were driving along a corrugated,

untarred road two hours outside a place called Agnes

Water, which wasn’t on my map. A ll we knew was that

it was on the coast, not far from the curiously named

Town of 1770, which sounded just weird enough to

attract hippies.

We pu l led into the ca mping g round at Ag nes, pa ssing

the general store with a lone petrol bowser out front, an

hour before dark. Peacocks strutted past the row of tin-

roof shacks that faced the beach, a communal barbecue

pit smouldering outside. We rented a shack for $2 a night

and quickly unpacked the boards. Beyond the sand we’d

noticed an idyllic point break with

shoulder-high waves peeling along its

rocky rim...and no-one riding them.

The next three days saw us surfing

the point with, at most, three or four

others, sharing the catch and bottles

of rum with the fishermen who were our shack neigh-

bours. Never saw a hippie, never got to the Town of

1770, but Agnes owned a piece of my heart, and, more

than 40 years later, it still does.

“M

AY 24, 1770 IS the most notable date in

the history of Queensland,” declared

Professor Francis Cumbrae-Stewart,

in an address to the Royal Geographical Society of

Queensla nd in Br isba ne in 1925, “ for on that d ay, on the

banks of Round Hill Creek, the British first set foot on

what is now Queensla nd soi l.” From th is rather pompous

speech, which made no reference to the Meerooni people

of the Gurang nation who’d lived in the area for centuries,

was built a campaign that eventually resulted in the

handful of holiday shacks being called “Town of 1770”,

a name that’s still often mistaken for a postcode.

I

T WAS 1978 and we were on the kind of assignment

freelance journalists don’t get anymore. A magazine

had given me a month to drive from Sydney to Cape

York with a photographer to find the New Age hippie

communes that had sprung up after 1973’s epoch-making

Aquarius Festival in Nimbin.