easty said...cisco said...easty said...
Coming from Tassie, I love mangoes and bananas! Favourite would be a particular custard apple I had in Cooktown once - still remember the taste. Apricots from my tree are pretty tasty too.
That would have been a "sour sop". We had a big one at Cedar Bay (just south of Cooktown) and it took three of us a couple of days to eat it. Yummm.
You lived at Cedar Bay? I stayed there twice when kayaking past, in '91 and '94 - there were the remains of gardens still there, plenty of starfruit from memory. And pigs.
Nice place!
I didn't live there. I visited there for a week in 1974. At the time the place was a grazing lease attached to a tin mining lease up in the hills for grazing the "collier ponies" used in the mine.
The lease was owned by a character known as "Cedar Bay Bill". He had a shack at the northern end of the bay with surrounding gardens. When I visited in 1974 he was in his 80s and had been there for 40 odd years. I visited and chatted with him one day and found him to be quite pleasant and very lucid. By then he had retired from mining activities and spent most of his time reading. He would take his boat up to Cooktown now and then to pick up his pension money and buy a few supplies.
A friend in Mt Isa recommended I go and see the place. At the time there were also several " hippie communes " at the bay. Then at the age of 24 and an ex R.A.N. sailor, I was in search of free love and free dope and a place to veg out.
The police in Cairns would raid the place fairly regularly with the cost of a raid about $24,000 which would nett about $2,400 in fines which were hardly ever paid anyway.
Old Bill really loved the place and was being pestered by the hippies for him to sign the lease over to them before he died. Bill told me that he thought it would be better if he signed over to the national parks. He did this in the mistaken belief that national parks would take better care of the place than the hippies.
Back then there was a line of coconut palms from one end of the beach to the other the seeds of which must have been carried there by a cyclone originating in the Solomons many years before.
From your photo it looks like it is very much overgrown from when I was there. Bill told me that when he first was there the plain of the bay was all open savannah country and the jungle was only up in the hills.
National parks in their ignorance said "They are not native." and I believe removed them all along with all of the tropical fruit trees Bill had cultivated around his shack.
There were no pigs in the bay then either. They had to be hunted up in the hills. It is not only the pigs, cats and dogs that have gone feral up that way. There are heaps of feral humans up there too. C'est la vie.
It really is a beautiful place and if national parks had any brains they would build access to it and manage it as a camping paradise but now that they have let crocodiles breed out of all proportion, it is probably not a good idea. I would be very wary of kayaking around that country.
Cheers Cisco
But most fresh fruit really including tomatoes straight off the vine 
