On Saturday 15th January 2022 Colwyn Campbell will celebrate her 80 years young birthday. To mark this important occasion, Colwyn’s Paluma friends and family will host a birthday party to be held at the Rainforest Inn, commencing at 5.30 pm on the day.
Please come along and join your friends and neighbours in wishing Colwyn a Happy Birthday.
Please bring a plate of food to share.
All welcome.
The perfect Xmas gift giving…….!
Photo courtesy of Peter & Jan Cooke
The native hydrangea (Abrophyllum ornans) is a small understorey tree (up to 8m high) or shrub that is endemic to Qld and northern NSW. It can be found in rainforest gullies and streams or regrowth areas from Batemans Bay to the McIlwraith Range NE of Coen in Cape York. The Genus Abrophyllum belongs to the family Rousseaceae, which is restricted to New Guinea, Australia New Zealand and Mauritius.
The scientific name refers to its attractive leaf and is derived from the Greek habros (splendid) + phyllon (leaf) and the Latin orno (adorn).
The bark of the native hydrangea is grey or light brown. The alternating leaves are ovate with pointed tips and finely serrated edges (up to 2ocm long and .8 cm wide).
Small perfumed whitish yellow flowers develop in branched clusters from October to December and the unopened buds can resemble true Hydrangea flower heads (although the two species are not related). Flowers develop into distinctive purple to blackish berries about .5cm in diameter.
A. ornans is cultivated as a garden ornamental, valued for its handsome clusters of berries, or as an indoor plant. It is easily propagated from cuttings or fresh seeds. It is also considered a useful plant for restoration along rainforest edges.
There is a tagged specimen of A. ornans (white tag # 26) on the H-track at the bottom of the slope down from the start at Whalley Cr.
Text by Jamie Oliver
Photos (unless indicated) by Russell Cumming on Flickr
Last Saturday night (11 December) the residents of Paluma celebrated the last Social Event for 2021 with the annual Tropical BBQ held at the Community Hall. The event was well attended with locals catching up for a yarn and a beverage before the Christmas period. Everyone bought along their own meat for the BBQ which was expertly cooked by the King of the BBQ – Don Battersby. Paluma’s cooks put on a splendid buffet with an impressive array of fine salads and other delicious foods. A special treat was a platter of fresh prawns compliments of ‘yours truly’ who happened to win a $50.00 voucher from Cleveland Bay Seafoods, courtesy of a Lions Club raffle ticket sold by the one and only Les Hyland. The dessert bar was astounding with cheesecake, pavlovas, chocolate tart, mangoes and ice-cream. I think everyone ate way too much, but who’s counting calories. It’s Christmas time!!
The attire for the night was definitely ‘tropical flair’. It was great to see everyone embracing the theme with their loud tropical and Hawaiian shirts, sarongs, thongs and Santa shirts. Tropical flowers adorned the tables and one attendee decided to wear her tropical garden on her head!
Speaking of flowers, the other important theme for the evening was all things gardening. Lynn announced the winners of the Paluma Annual Garden Competition which was held in late November and judged by two members of Bunnings staff. Congratulations go to Nick and Glenda for again taking out the Championship Trophy Prize of Best Residential Garden. The competition winners are outlined below, courtesy of Lynn Hyland.
1. Best Residential Garden in the Village – Glenda and Nick Van Rynswoud. Perpetual Trophy winner. The Judges enjoyed immensely the guided tour of such an impressive garden.
2. Best Non-Residential Garden in the Village – Gumburu. A well planned environment with some rare species to be found in the garden.
3. Best Acreage Garden – Bobbie and Glen Parker. Such a serene ambience and they loved the collection of miniature potted gardens.
4. Highly Recommended Village Garden – Michele Bird. The atmosphere created by the hanging baskets looking out onto the garden was wonderful.
5. Most Unusual Plant Specimen – Anne Bruyere’s “ Rainbow Gum“. Such a wonderful specimen of such a rare tree. The bark was highly coloured on the day of the judging.
Bunnings donated $200 in Vouchers and the ‘Alison Evans Trophy’ was engraved with the winners name for 2021 which was the 25th year since the Garden Competition first started in Paluma.
Here are some selected photos from the evening, with apologies from this author for not getting around to everyone on the night.
Text by Michele Bird & Lynn Hyland. Photos by Michele Bird.
Barry Smith, our weekday rainfall recorder has kindly provided the Paluma rainfall figures for November 2021. The records show that rain fell on 24 days of the month and the total was just short of 240 mm. That’s a decent drop of rain in the build up to the pending wet season.
The community thanks Barry for his ongoing work in recording the daily rainfall at our new BOM recorder at the Village Green. Peter Cooke has recently stepped up as the regular weekend recorder and this is also greatly appreciated. We look forward to some big rainfall totals now that December has arrived!
A reminder that the final PDCA Social Event for 2021 will be the annual Tropical BBQ to be held at the Community Hall on Saturday 11 December at 6.30 pm.
Please bring your own meat for the BBQ and the PDCA will supply the salad.
The Bar will be open with the usual low cost beverages on sale.
Tropical attire is a must so please wear your most colourful tropical shirt, shorts, skirts, frocks or jocks. There will be a free drink for the most colourful and suitably dressed patron.
Come join your friends and neighbours to toast the silly season and the end of the year in our tropical paradise. See you there!
The judging for the Paluma Garden Competition will take place this coming Wednesday 1st December 2021.
Two staff members from Bunnings will be escorted by members of the PDCA and will be visiting the gardens of Paluma to decide on the winners in the Annual Garden Competition.
Should you not wish to have your property entered, please contact Lynn Hyland before Wednesday (Phone: 4770 8681).
The winners of the Competition will be announced at the PDCA ‘Tropical BBQ’ to be held on Saturday 11 December at the Community Hall.
Lynn Hyland
From Councillor Margie Ryder:
Townsville City Council is committed to providing and maintaining $5.4B worth of community assets consisting of water and wastewater networks, bridges, drainage, roads, waste management and spillway maintenance.
Paluma Dam spillway infrastructure maintenance works are ongoing that will see the delivery of protection barrier installed to the foundations of the dams spillways bridge.
Works are now at the stage for the construction of the new protective concrete barrier ‘slab’ that will be poured onto the existing surface. These works will require a convey of concrete trucks that will be using the Paluma Dam access road which will cause traffic delays.
Council will have traffic management in place; however, dependable on weather conditions the unsealed access road to the Dam including the Paluma Dam campgrounds may have considerable delays on the day of concrete pouring.
The Paluma Dam, Concrete Pouring works are scheduled to commence on Thursday, 02 December 2021 and are expected to take one day to complete.
Please be advised that the concrete trucks will be operational 7am through to 2pm. Normal traffic conditions will return post 2pm.
Townsville City Council Update on their Website
Although the rainforest around Paluma is extensive, covering over 42km2, it forms a narrow north-south band that changes to eucalyptus dominated sclerophyll forest as one travels east down the range or west towards Hidden Valley. The border between rainforest and sclerophyll forest is not fixed, and some studies have shown that the rainforest is slowly expanding and encroaching on the ecologically important sclerophyll habitats that host a number of important species of plants and animals. Late last century there was concern that rainforest expansion might be an ecological threat to adjacent forests but more recent work shows that the rate of expansion is very low, and current climate predictions for destructive cyclones and increased bushfire severity in the region suggest that rainforests are the more threatened of the two habitats.
Some evidence of past rainforest encroachment can still be found along some walking tracks, where there are huge old Eucalyptus trees that would have germinated in open forest have survived the fierce competition for light that characterises rainforest habitats and now stand as anomalous reminders border dynamics. This series has already highlighted two sclerophyll trees that can be found near rainforest margins (Eucalyptus grandis and Syncarpia glomulifera). A third species is the Messmate (Eucalyptus cloeziana).
The track down to Triple Falls from the H-track has some magnificent old messmate trees in an area just adjacent to open forest at the crest of the escarpment. This tree is endemic to eastern Queensland and in ideal conditions can grow to 55m in height. The lower trunk has rough flakey or fibrous bark, but is smooth on the upper trunk and branches. Leaves are lanceolate to ovate 0.2-1.3cm long. Flowering occurs has been recorded in December and January. The mature gum nuts are globose to hemispherical, 0.4–0.7 cm long, 0.6–1.1 cm wide.
Messmate has been logged over most of its range and is now cultivated in plantations. It has been imported to Africa and is one of the more important general purpose hardwood plantation trees in Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The species name (cloeziana) was chosen in honour of Francois Cloez, a chemist who originally identified the chemical cineole as the major constituent of eucalyptus oil.
Text and photos (unless indicated) by Jamie Oliver
Jack Appleton has had a big week!
Jack is one of Paluma’s youngest residents, but he is soon to spread his wings and move to the ‘big smoke’ at Ingham.
We recently posted that Jack was finishing his Year 12 studies at Ingham State High School and he had taken out two awards in his final year. Last Thursday night Jack celebrated his Valedictory Dinner with his colleagues and family at the Ingham Shire Hall. The red carpet was laid out for the students with the teachers welcoming each arrival by opening their car doors and posing for photographs. Some students arrived in flashy hot rods and one arrived on a tractor (of course, it’s Ingham!). There were speeches, a special dinner, dancing and lots of photo opportunities.
The morning after the Valedictory Dinner (last Friday) the school hosted a breakfast for the students and their family. There were more inspirational speeches and fun awards for students and teachers. The breakfast ended with an outdoor assembly where the rest of the school made a guard of honour as the Year 12 students left school for the final time.
Jack hasn’t wasted any time in gaining employment. He had several interviews even before he finished school and he was snapped up by Wilmar. He begins his Boilermaker Apprenticeship on 31 January 2022 and he will be based at Ingham for the four years of his training.
Jack has been celebrating ‘schoolies’ in Cairns with his friends over the past week. We wish Jack all good luck for his new career at Wilmar and we hope he comes home at every opportunity to Paluma. If you see Mum Jennie give her a hug, because she is trying to come to the realisation that her ‘Little Jack’ is all grown up. She misses him already…..!
Text by Michele Bird With Photos and Information Courtesy of Jennie Robinson