Cooktown tropical timber house

This 85 square-metre elevated timber house sits on a breezy rise in Cooktown, the small far-north Queensland town at the mouth of the Endeavour River where James Cook beached the Endeavour in 1770. The build is tropical vernacular: hardwood posts, timber walls, banks of louvres on every elevation, a full-width verandah for the dry-season evenings, and a steel roof over a fully insulated ceiling. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a sleep-out on the verandah end, an open kitchen-living area and a lock-up storeroom underneath for fishing gear and a kayak. The block is planted with mango, coconut and paw-paw and has a rainwater tank in addition to town water.

Cooktown is remote by design — it is the last real town before Cape York — and that remoteness is what keeps a solid house under $360,000. The population is about 2,700, the community is a genuine mix of Guugu Yimithirr traditional owners, fishing families, cattle people and tree-changers, and the town has a strong arts and history culture around the Cooktown Museum and the annual Discovery Festival. Freehold title and standard Queensland conveyancing; foreign buyers require FIRB approval and pay additional foreign acquirer duty. Insurance carries a cyclone loading and the wet season, roughly January to March, is genuinely wet.

The water is the reason to be here. The Endeavour River, seven hundred metres downhill, is barramundi, mangrove jack and mud-crab country, with a boat ramp and a public jetty. Finch Bay and Cherry Tree Bay, both a short drive or a walking track through Mount Cook National Park, are quiet sand coves with clear water — swim in the stinger-free months and take local advice on crocodiles, which are part of life this far north. Offshore, the northern Great Barrier Reef sits closer to the coast than anywhere else in Australia, with charter boats running to Ribbon Reefs and the Three Isles for some of the least-visited coral on the planet.

The town has an IGA supermarket, a bakery, a hardware store, a hospital with resident doctors and RFDS support, a P-12 state school, a pharmacy, a library, a couple of pubs including the historic Sovereign Resort and a growing café scene. The Sunday markets and the Botanic Gardens' café are local institutions. Fuel, freight and groceries cost more than the coast further south — that is the honest trade-off for remoteness.

Access: Cooktown Airport has scheduled flights to Cairns (about 40 minutes) several times a week, and the sealed Mulligan Highway makes it a four-hour drive from Cairns via the Atherton Tablelands. The coastal Bloomfield Track through Cape Tribulation is 4WD and dry-season only.

This is a house for someone who wants frontier Australia — reef, rivers, rainforest and space — rather than convenience.