Almost every creek had a low level bridge at the time, but I don’t recall too many cases where the detour was quite as ludicrous. The present bridge came into operation shortly thereafter (at least from what I can gather).
Turn off the highway down Calen’s main street, past the remains of the pub that burned down in March 2012 and you’re on the right track to get to Camerons Pocket, the venue for the Wintermoon Festival, on the northeastern edge of Eungella National Park around eleven kilometres from Calen.
There’s a substantial educational presence at Calen (Calen District State College, a combined Primary and Secondary school), but just six kilometres up the road you’ll find another educational establishment at Pindi Pindi, a primary school tat dates back to athe establishment of a Provisional School in 1928. Pindi Pindi State School took over at the beginning of 1931 and had its numbers boosted in 1963, when schools at Rise and Shine and Wagoora were closed. Rise and Shine looks to be in the back blocks towards the ranges, but Wagoora’s just a bit further along the highway, midway between Pindi Pindi and Yalboroo, where there was another school that dated back to 1927 and was, at one point, the southernmost school in the old Northern Region of Education Queensland.
Interestingly, the address of the school in Yalboroo is given as Wagoora, which you’ll recognize from the preceding paragraph, and goes to show how many tiny rural schools there were scattered across the countryside in the days before every family had a car. Yalboroo School appears to have gone the way of so many off its peers and appears to have gone belly up art the end of 2000 (evidence here).
There may well have been schools further along the road at Cathu (turn off to the left to head to Cathu State Forest) and Elaroo, but the next substantial settlement is Bloomsbury.
Turn off and head down to the coast at Midge Point and you’ll find one of the multitude of quiet spots beloved by locals along the northern coastline that fly below the high profile tourist radar, but if you head on to the much higher profile Laguna Quays you’ll find the resort, which once had a workforce numbering 230, including twenty greenkeepers, a sixty-room golf lodge, eighty-one condominiums and villas, a racquet club, lagoon and a seventy-berth marina, closed in February 2012.
From Bloomsbury the highway doglegs around a range, passing localities named Mowo and Noonah, with Kunapipi Road, which takes you back to Laguna Quays joining the highway just before the O’Connell River, which played its own part in the resort’s demise.
For years I’ve been intrigued by the fact that crossing the O’Connell transfers you from the Whitsunday Council’s realm into the City of Mackay, but it was only when I started digging for information for this little project that I realised we’re looking at an arrangement that dates back to 1880, when the Pioneer Divisional Board was established, stretching from the O'Connell River all the way to to Cape Palmerston, on the other side of Sarina, with a city council in Mackay stuck in the middle.
The Divisional Board became Pioneer Shire in 1903, Sarina Shire was sliced off in 1912, with Mirani Shire separating the following year. The old Pioneer Shire was merged with Mackay City Council in 1994 and, in a neat twist, 2008 saw the whole of the former Pioneer Divisional Board merged back into a Mackay Regional Council.