SW Timber Creek Rest Up Timber Creek, Northern Territory, Australia
By 3bear on 10-Sep-13. Waypoint GA6615

Sir Augustus's tea break

This cache marks the site to which the schooner Tom Tough travelled up the Victoria River in 1855 in search of Timber - hence the name of this tiny dot on the map " Timber Creek". We travelled 15kms further down the highway to the north-west and after a short walk from the carpark found the boab tree famously carved in 1855 marking one of Augustus Charles Gregory's campsites while he was undertaking his tremendously successful great northern Australian expedition. What is amazing is that if you had done the same carving into a Eucalypt or or other hardwoods, the bark would have surely grown ove r it by now, as it has done at Burke and Wills Dig Tree near Innaminka in South Australia. It's as if it were just carved by it's engraver!!

It is also here that you begin to come across the stories of the AIF outposts set up to patrol northern Australia's vast coastline and tributaries at the height of the war with Japan in 1943. Amazing to think how scary it was getting for Australia as the Japanese pulverised their way through Asia, including the impregnable island fortress of Singapore in just a few months.

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