A place I spent a many a day running around on the beach as it was my playground for a few years, it was so strange to see this place I grew up all those years ago.
It was the Mid 60's and life was good we lived in the van park around the corner from the bluff and it was a big park in those days more than 10 vans out not like know only two.
There were no fences or dunes out front it just dropped to beach and the sand was a lot dryer in that tide did not come up that high.
I see my old friend the rock is still here a lot more exposed than I remember and I near drowned getting to it one day, if not for a man walking past I thought I was gone.
As you see from the photos it has changed for the good in some ways the foreshore is great for small kids to play out of the ocean and picnic tables for family's about the whole area, stuff that was not here when I grew up.
It will always be a special place for me, I went to school here only for a few years but I remember it was pretty good. I got a new sister from the hospital while we were here, and got to live in a house for a period at Cooee Bay for a time while Dad rebuilt the van bigger before we moved down the coast towards Brisbane.
The fishing which was a main stay every weekend was good and the causeway was the best spot to go, caught many a fish here but it's so changed from then van park is just a tiny thing now and I don't thing it has much life in it.
Anyway below are a good number of photos taken while here enjoy
Dave
It was the Mid 60's and life was good we lived in the van park around the corner from the bluff and it was a big park in those days more than 10 vans out not like know only two.
There were no fences or dunes out front it just dropped to beach and the sand was a lot dryer in that tide did not come up that high.
I see my old friend the rock is still here a lot more exposed than I remember and I near drowned getting to it one day, if not for a man walking past I thought I was gone.
As you see from the photos it has changed for the good in some ways the foreshore is great for small kids to play out of the ocean and picnic tables for family's about the whole area, stuff that was not here when I grew up.
It will always be a special place for me, I went to school here only for a few years but I remember it was pretty good. I got a new sister from the hospital while we were here, and got to live in a house for a period at Cooee Bay for a time while Dad rebuilt the van bigger before we moved down the coast towards Brisbane.
The fishing which was a main stay every weekend was good and the causeway was the best spot to go, caught many a fish here but it's so changed from then van park is just a tiny thing now and I don't thing it has much life in it.
Anyway below are a good number of photos taken while here enjoy
Dave
Low tide and I mean low. Damm got to stay out of the shot.
My Rock as a kid, it hated me
Yeppoon, a coastal town, is 30 km north east of Rockhampton. It is thought that the name was derived from an Aboriginal word describing a place where waters join, perhaps a reference to the mouth of Ross Creek and Yeppoon inlet.
During the early 1860s much of the coastal country around Yeppoon was acquired by the Ross Family, including the Taranganba pastoral run taken up by Robert Ross, now a 'southern suburb' of Yeppoon. Twenty miles inland, in land-locked Rockhampton, citizens seeking relief from the heat looked to the coast. Emu Park and Spring Head (a natural spring near the Yeppoon railway station) were proclaimed the town of Bald Hills in 1868, and later renamed Yeppoon. Township lots were put up for sale until 1872, but pastoralists and farmers continued to dominate the area. By 1882 there were just seven buildings in Yeppoon, mostly holiday cottages and a hotel. The hotel stimulated travel and local business. With expanding farm settlement and mining activity at Mount Chalmers and Carwarral (between Rockhampton and Yeppoon), the nascent town's popularity began to increase. A provisional school opened in 1885, and the town's first state school in 1889 (the buildings of which are listed on the Queensland Heritage Register).
Later in the 1880s there was a telegraph connection, a second hotel and the Yeppoon Progress Association was formed. The association published a local guide in 1891, mentioning three hotels, a school, a church and several storekeepers. By the 1900s Yeppoon had emerged as a service town, a dormitory for miners and farm workers and a holiday resort. A railway line from Rockhampton opened in 1909.
A Methodist-Presbyterian Church was established in Yeppoon in 1889, followed by a Church of England in 1912. The Catholic community relied on visiting priests until a church was erected in 1918. Two years earlier, the church had opened a primary school and St Ursula's College. Not to be outdone, the Church of England opened St. Faith's girls' school (1923-1968). Pugh's Queensland Directory (1924) recorded four hotels, a railway station (1909), four cafes and refreshment rooms, numerous storekeepers, an ice works and Yeppoon Fruit Growers Ltd. The Yeppoon Fruit growers and Local Producers' Association was formed in 1923.
Early fruit produce, often apples or strawberries, was marketed locally or sold to mining communities. In the early 1940s tentative steps were taken to develop a tropical fruit industry, and in the 1950s pineapple growing expanded with direct supply to the Northgate cannery in Brisbane. Tropical fruit growing, promoted by a Cairns-based industry body, expanded rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. It had been known for years that the hillside soils, accessible once the scrub was cleared, were fertile, and post war mechanical clearing aided the task.
TOURISM AND THE IWASAKI RESORT
Railway travel to Yeppoon fostered a local tourist industry. Sunday outings ensured regular patronage of refreshment rooms and beach facilities. Off shore, North and Great Keppel Islands had basic cabin facilities, and in 1945 the Great Keppel Island Tourist Company set about developing the island's tourism potential. By the 1970s Yeppoon could be described as the largest of several small tourist settlements on the Capricorn coast, 'dependent on fishing, tourism, some pineapple farming and federal government benefits ... a small backwater in need of paint in parts' (Viviani et al., 1980). Passenger rail services ceased in the 1970s. Pineapples have been transported by truck since 2004 and in 2007-08 the branch line was dismantled.
In 1971 it was announced that a Japanese syndicate headed by Yohachiro Iwasaki was acquiring hundreds of hectares of beachfront land at Farnborough, just north of Yeppoon, for a resort. Farnborough was a community of farms and orchards, where sugar growing had been tried in the 1880s until the Yeppoon Sugar Company's mill had gone into liquidation in 1895.
The Iwasaki project caused great controversy, with an anti-Japanese display mounted in the front yard of the local RSL to coincide with the offical beginning of construction in June 1979. Perceived State Government connivance in the scheme fuelled discontent. On Saturday 29 November 1980, the day of the state election, a bomb exploded at the Iwasaki Resort.
Two men were charged (and subsequently acquitted). Nevertheless, the project proceeded, and local landholders savoured windfall gains by selling sites overlooking or near the resort. The end result was the Capricorn International Resort, owned by Iwasaki but managed by Rydges, which although scaled down from the original proposal, had a golf course, wetlands tourist attraction and an outsize freshwater swimming pool.
