Important Aussie Sign Stolen
”Some low-life tourist has taken it, it's a bloody disgrace”
The sign identifying the most northerly tip of mainland Australia has disappeared and tourists are being blamed.
It had stood for 20 years at the top of Cape York from where visitors could look out over Torres Strait islands.
But on October 1 or 2 it was stolen, with the thieves sawing off the base of a post attaching the sign to a drum of concrete and pushing the drum into the sea.
A resident of Seisia, a camp site close to the top, said yesterday: ”Some low-life tourist has taken it and it could be as far away as Western Australia by now. It is a bloody disgrace.”
He said police had alerted all the stations “down the track” to Cairns, more than 900km away, to keep an eye out but nothing had turned up.
Peter Papadopoulos, a Sydney tourist who fulfilled a lifelong ambition to make the trek to the top, said he assumed the thieves were “souvenir hunters”.
”My wife and I walked to the spot to discover the bottom of the base was sticking out of the water,” he said.
”Later a family told us that they helped the police pull the concrete base back out of the water.”
A Cairns police spokeswoman asked anyone with information to come forward.
”The sign was donated and had stood there for more than 20 years,” she said.
A cardboard sign temporarily identifies the spot with the words: “You are standing at the most northerly point on the Australian continent”.
Four-wheel-drive owners have collected stones from the tip of the cape to make cairns, apparently in an attempt to leave a mark from their visit.
There is also graffiti on the rocks and piles of rubbish emptied from vehicles.
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