Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

For the past ten days we've been exploring the towns of Hervey Bay, Maryborough, Tin Can Bay and Rainbow Beach on the Fraser-Cooloola Coast.

Our first camp site was in Maryborough, which includes among its claims to fame the birthplace of P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins. There's a Poppins-themed museum in town and a mural featuring characters from the book painted on the wall of a car park.

A bit less magical is the Achievers' Walk - a series of plaques mounted on the gutters honouring the region's achievers. Parliamentarians, judges, surveyors and the like. A bit odd but we don't judge.

Hervey Bay is just down the road from Maryborough, with Fraser Island and migrating whales just off the coast. We've done a couple of day trips to Hervey Bay and quite like the place. We were excited by the prospect of walking the length of the Urangan Pier which, at 868 metres, is one of the longest in the country. Construction was completed in 1917 and the pier was used to transport sugar and other cargo to deep water ships. We were less excited by the "Dogs Prohibited" sign and we had to be content with looking at it from the beach.

From Maryborough we moved a little further on and set up camp at beautiful Tin Can Bay, where we've had a quiet and peaceful week enjoying the white sandy beaches, abundant bird life and the nightly howls of dingoes.

Apparently there's a population of dingoes in the bush adjacent to the beaches and campgrounds. Fortunately we haven't stumbled across any in our daily walks, but the Labs are hyper-alert each night in case an opportunistic dingo should attempt to help itself to their food barrel. It's a brave dingo that comes between a Labrador and her kibble.

Surprisingly, to us at least, there's also a lot of brumbies in the area. When I think of brumbies I think of the high country. The Man from Snowy River and all that. But there's a very large, and problematic, population of brumbies here so I decided to find out a bit more about them.

Horses first came to Australia with the first fleet (perhaps munching on a bit of sugar cane to pass the time?) and as the colonies grew, more horses of various breeds were transported here to help settle the land.

It's believed that wild horses got their collective name from a bloke called James Brumby, a sergeant in the NSW Corps and landholder at Hunters Hill. In 1804 he abandoned the horses he was unable to re-home when he sailed for Van Dieman's Land. When the authorities asked the neighbours who the free-roaming horses belonged to, they said "Oh, they're Brumby's". Sounds plausible.

There's now an estimated 400,000 brumbies in NSW, Victoria, the NT and here in Queensland. For an animal that wasn't originally suited to Australia's harsh conditions, brumbies have evolved and adapted to their environments extremely well. For example, the Kusciousko brumbies have shorter, stockier builds better suited to snow and steep terrain than their Fraser Coast cousins, who do better with sunnies and board shorts.

Here's a mixed bag of photos from our time in this neck of the woods. None of brumbies or dingoes unfortunately, but we did get one with Mary Poppins, so that's super.