Egg watch ... a tour group watches a turtle nesting on Mon Repos beach.

In one crowded day in Bundaberg, Keith Austin sips rum before lunch, takes an aviation history lesson and watches the cycle of life under a full moon.

If you drive into Bundaberg from the south, a sign welcomes you to the city and proudly reveals this was the home of Bert Hinkler. Who? Who? There are no signs to the Bundaberg Rum distillery that I can find but there's a sign about Bert Hinkler?

I'd never heard of the bloke but a few hours later I'm puzzled that nobody has made a movie about his amazing, blazing firework of a life. And I've gained an appreciation for Bundaberg Rum - which, for a single-malt man, is damascene in its implications.

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A few hours later, on a warm evening under a ghostly full moon, a giant loggerhead turtle calmly squirts a hundred or so ping-pong-ball eggs into a shallow hole on Mon Repos beach, to the north of Bundaberg, where Bert Hinkler's story began in the baby years of the 20th century.

But first, that distillery. The turtles might be the main attraction but missing the Bundaberg distillery tour would be like going to the Black Forest and not having the gateau.

The city was named in 1867 by jamming together the Aboriginal word "bunda" (elder) with the Saxon suffix "berg" (mountain). The district of 112,000 people sits at the tail end of the Great Barrier Reef, and Mon Repos beach, 14 kilometres from Bundaberg, has the largest and most accessible mainland turtle rookery on the east coast of Australia. Loggerhead, green and flatback turtles come ashore to lay their eggs here between November and March each year.

It's also surrounded by sugar cane farms - the first Bundaberg sugar mill was built in 1872. A major by-product of sugar refining is molasses - an overabundance of which led a group of sugar millers to an ingenious solution in 1888, when they established the Bundaberg Rum distillery.

That dark syrupy liquid is piped underground direct from the mill into the distillery and stored in several molasses "wells", which are the first port of call on the distillery tour.

Read the original here:
Bert, Bundy and biology