Standing at the end of Arthur Street you might have thought of heading off down Bergin Road, looping back along Alice Street and returning via Ross River Road, but Cranbrook Primary was a good twenty years in the future. Cranbrook, regardless of the Hermit Park Bus Service Aitkenvale via Alice Street service was still definitely the back blocks.
Head up Nathan Street towards Aitkenvale Primary School and you’d have a similar option at Albert Street. Reach the intersection with Ross River Road and you’d have two clear choices. Head straight on, past the school on your right and a small housing subdivision on your left and you’d find yourself at the end of one of the World War Two airstrips that dotted the landscape southwest of Castle Hill.
Today’s commuters, as they whiz along Nathan Street and Dalrymple Road probably wouldn’t have given it a thought, but fifty years back you could pedal along Nathan Street past what was left of the hangars and maintenance buildings that housed and serviced the aircraft that operated out of Townsville’s airfields some twenty years earlier.
Eventually, should you have your eyes set on going as far as you could, you’d reach the current airport at Garbutt, heading through the china apples that dotted the landscape currently occupied by the city’s light industrial belt.
My memories of this are rather hazy, but I do remember riding as far as the Garbutt traffic lights and I suspect the route had me veering off Dalrymple Road along Pilkington Street well before the Dalrymple Hotel started operating.
Alternatively I may have skirted round the back of Gulliver along Cambridge Street, passing the hangars that Defence Department housing and Cyclone Althea took out of the equation around the turn of the seventies.
Or maybe, having headed over that way more than once or twice, I used both.
Back at the intersection of Nathan Street and Ross River Road the alternative, assuming you weren’t heading straight on and the right hand turn that would take you back past the Kingsun house set in the middle of the block that was soon to morph into Nathan Plaza was a little too tame, your only option was to turn left and head out past the Monastery and the Aboriginal Reserve, though beyond that there wasn’t much of interest apart from the old airstrip that ran past that one teacher school at The Weir.
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