Machans Beach, north of Cairns , North Queensland , is an area where journalist, editor , historian and publisher Glenville Pike, his mother and her cousin , referred by him as aunty Dorothy , lived on and off over the years, at times unexpectedly visited by author Xavier Herbert out for a jog . They returned there after Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin on Christmas Day 1974, his mother dying soon after in Cairns , aunty in Mareeba . Photographic study by Abra .
