After our cruise in the Whitsundays, we took a train to Townsville. Towsnville is a rather big city, but not so touristic. There, we have been helping Thalia in her garden. Thalia is a young woman (half greek, half german) living in Australie for 10 years now. She lives in a beautiful old queenslander house in South Townsville. Last february, a cyclone hit the area and broke a few things in her garden. Thalia doesn’t have much time to do it herself as she’s working at the university in Townsville, so we were here to give her a hand (mowing the loan, weeding, pruning trees, etc.).

This experience was a bit different than the other ones because we were really autonomous and alone during the day. Thalia also found us 2 bikes which we could use to visit around. We went on the strand (Townsville esplanade), visited the Reef HQ aquarium, climbed the castle hill which has a great view over the city and Magnetic Island, etc.

And of course we spent a lot of time chatting with Thalia who worked as a psychiatrist in Townsville before she worked at the university. She worked with a lot of aboriginal people, and could share with us her knowledge about their culture, but also tell us more about their sad recent history (since the “white” arrived in Australia) and all the traumas that it causes to them and how it goes from generation to generation. In north Queensland, we meet a lot of aborigenes, but the perspectives for these people seem very limited in the cities as most of them are prisonners of alcohool and other types of drugs…

Like we said above, Townsville is facing an island called Magnetic Island, our next stop. We will tell you more about it in a few days!