Midge Point, Qld

Midge Point we were assured, was not named after sandflies and thankfully there weren’t any. That’ll teach us for laughing every time we had passed this way.

We thought 3 nights would be nice and stayed for 7.

There’s a takeaway store, a tavern and a lot of well mown lawns, a few hundred neat holiday houses with tractors out front and tucked into paperbark bushland is an oasis of a Caravan Park.

We had a large grassy site with views across paperbark and palm studded lawns to the beach. Overhead the kookaburras laughed, shy wallabies grazed, and we could hear the sea. The wide flat beach stretched forever, and islands dotted the horizon. If you’re a paddler it’s a very long walk out to the surf even when it’s nearing high tide.

This is a fishermen’s paradise and around the fire pit the regulars have their favourite spots we felt a little like the new kids in school. Especially as we don’t fish. But they were a happy bunch, and everyone had a story of a big Mackerel that didn’t get away.

Standing on that enormous beach I watched the fishermen retrieving their boats by tractor. The beach so shallow that they would come in as close as possible, send a bloke overboard to wade to shore and walk all the way up to the high tide mark where the tractor was waiting, start her up and drive across the beach. Then he’d reverse it into the sea as far as possible. The boat would then be floated onto the trailer, and everyone would be dragged home across the beach. We can only hope that they caught plenty of mackerel.