I was back in town outside the Historical Society by a quarter to ten, and a careful walk around the displays revealed a wealth of detail that filled in gaps in the memory and added fresh detail that'll come in useful if and when I decide to have another go at the frontier violence that followed the settlement of Cooktown.
I could have taken extensive notes, but opted, in the end, for hard copies of a couple of the Society's publications (Cooktown through the Years, Peninsula Pub Crawl and The Rail to Nowhere) that'll do a far more thorough job than an hour's hasty scribbling could possibly deliver.
The bloke looking after the door, Jim and the women who were working away inside delivered very welcome news regarding the fate of the Cooktown newspapers I'd perused back in the mid- to late-seventies which I assumed would have fallen to pieces long ago.
I was reading them in the old Bellevue Hotel, across the road from the Queensland Parliament and once home to the rural representatives in the state legislature. The building had been demolished in controversial circumstances during the Bjelke-Petersen era, and I had a sneaking suspicion those runs of the Cooktown Courier and the Cooktown Herald might have ended up in the rubble.
Fortunately, however, they seem to have survived and have even been microfilmed. there are apparently plans to digitise the microfilm at the National Library in Canberra, though one doubts a couple of files of Cooktown newspapers are very high on the pecking order.
As far as the Historical Society Museum is concerned, at $5 admission it's cheaper than the James Cook, and being relatively light on for Jimmy Content (and quite rightly so, if there's only so much display material relating to the Endeavour you'd expect to find it in a central location) it's able to go into a fair bit more detail about individuals and families.
If you're interested in the history, in other words, do the James Cook first, decide whether you want further information, and if you're even slightly inclined to tick that box head straight for the Historical Society. It really is very good.
From the Historical Society Museum the next items on the agenda were an appointment with a washing machine and a tumble drier and lunch. Both of those seemed best tackled in the vicinity of the Fisherman's Wharf, and after depositing the laundry in a machine and depositing four $1 coins in its innards we set off for Gilld and Guttd for a round of fish and chips consumed at a table overlooking the river mouth with views across to Cape Bedford.