This week, our Travel pics series is I for Innisfail. For Saturday, we feature one of the last ‘original’ ‘Art Deco buildings in Innisfail (although even that’s a bit of a stretch) Allan Maruff House currently houses the Johnstone Shire Library – and commemorates Dr Maruff, an Indian-born medico, local councillor, and tea-plantation developer who moved…

This week, our Travel pics series is I for Innisfail. If the Water Tower (featured earlier this week) is one of the most visually striking symbols of Innisfail, then the Johnstone Shire Hall is the other. Built in the 1930s, using depression-era unemployed and costing a then mammoth £50,000 ($4.6 million in today’s money), the Shire…

I’m sorry – I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It was just before Christmas last year, and I was in Innisfail taking photos of some Art Deco buildings when I saw these signs. I’d seen them before, when I worked in Innisfail as a young radio DJ more than 30 years before – and I couldn’t help…

This week, our Travel pics series is I for Innisfail. One of the problems of being a small town in the shadow of a larger, more famous regional centre is that you are .. well .. in the shadow. And Innisfail is in just that position. It’s a lovely town and it has a proud history…

“What do you mean this is the wrong Geraldton? The charts show this is Geraldton – what am I supposed to do with all this cargo?” In 1910, the town of Geraldton, in Queensland, changed its name to Innisfail – after a wayward cargo ship arrived carrying cargo for the port of Geraldton in Western…

This week, our Travel pics series is I for Innisfail. Innisfail’s a small township about an hour south of Cairns in Far North Queensland, which styles itself as “Australia’s Art Deco Capital”. In 1918, Innisfail was slammed by a cyclone that killed around a hundred people. So bad was the damage in Innisfail that fewer than…