Limping South

We thought the motorhome fixed, so headed south in the rain hunting elusive cassowary at Etty Bay, a peaceful tiny beach paradise just a breath away from being discovered and exploited. We were happy to enjoy it before that happened.

We explored the Ingham wetlands, which we had missed previously, and discovered further on a wonderful free Council stopover site at Home Hill which put many caravan sites to shame: modern, clean, immaculate. It was a pleasure to stay there.

Our next port of call was St Lawrence, where my grandmother, Rose, grew up and went to school, though the very school she attended and where she received many school prizes, has now burned to the ground destroying records and much history.

The old picture theatre cum town hall cum Fossey's General store survives still, a marvellous piece of history, standing proud in its rust tinged corrugated iron shield as it attempts to brave more years.

We chatted with some old timers at the pub who told us where my grandmother lived with her dad, step-mum and their family. We tracked down the spot, tucked away in a clearing in a patch of tall trees in the back of town. They must have been happy here, they were frequently involved in many of the early community activities in town.

My Danish great grandfather, Niels Pedersen and his second wife, Elizabeth, were buried in the St Lawrence cemetery. Their graves are still well marked there today.

From St Lawrence we had to coax our motorhome to Rockhampton where our trip came to a stubborn end, when the motorhome's cylinder head finally spewed its last gush of steam, refusing to go a kilometre further.

Thanks to RACQ we were able to slot it into a garage with a Mercedes repair team, stay a few nights in a motel to ensure a successful outcome, then hire a sedan to get ourselves back to Brisbane, finishing our jaunt in unexpected ways.

There we waited and waited for the mechanical issue to be finally repaired and resolved, as local parts had to be ordered in from abroad. And that took many months. So, as it evolved we had a quick finale to our short northern adventure.

Ingham Wetlands

Etty Bay in the gloom

Home Hill free stopover

Ingham wetlands

Rockhampton historic building enroute to the garage

Historic hall, theatre and shop, St Lawrence

Neils and Elizabeth Pedersen in St Lawrence cemetery

Sunset over St Lawrence wetlands

Syrup, damper and sugar slaves

We have been in and around Innisfail for a week, now, waiting for a part to arrive for the motorhome from Melbourne.  Despite that, we have been busy, even though most of the time it has been raining.   We’ve been learning about growing banana and sugar in the tropics, soaking up what stories and history we can in the time that we have.  

We were not allowed in to any actual banana plantation at the moment as most, here and East Palmerston, where we have been staying, are in a biosecurity lockdown of sorts, attempting to stop the spread of disease, but we were able to see banana plants in various stages of growth — many, with coloured translucent plastic bags over the bunches protecting them from bats, birds and flying foxes, but still allowing sunlight to penetrate hastening the ripening process.  

We discovered much from a group of Ukranian workers living in wooden plantation houses along Pulloms Road, surrounded by the bananas they have planted and nurtured.   They were on their day off but full of smiles, quite happy to talk about their work, and their time in Australia.  They had been here two years already, and were able to stay longer as their boss had acquired visas for them.  They seemed keen, though there were ten in one house and more in others further down the winding road.  They were young men.  It was a day free from work.  They looked happy enough to us. 

But, our history of using cheap labour from across the seas for banana and sugar growing has not been a happy one.   Particularly for the workers.  The Chinese are a case in point and we have been exploring their plight for weeks now, especially in the gold fields up here.  

The others, of course, are the South Sea Islanders.  Or “Kanakas”,  as the early colonials pejoratively called them.  They were ‘recruited’ to do the work that early settlers could not, or would not, do.  Though, some would argue many islanders were kidnapped, or “black-birded”,  as there are tales of workers from the islands wearing chains here, their ankles permanently scarred from dragging the ball as they moved from one plantation to another.  Hardly willing labour.  

From 1863 onwards,  recruitment ships were sent from our eastern coast to the islands — including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomons, Fiji and New Caledonia, with all sorts of goods and wares, labelled ‘trade’.   Every recruit who signed up to return by ship to Queensland as a field labourer was allowed to present his family and friends to receive presents from the trade laden ship recruiter.  There was a limit, of course.  Up to a value of one to three pounds was seen as sufficient.  Giving presents, they were not called bribes, was ‘a standing rule of the trade’. 

“A typical gift (trade present) consisted of 400 sticks of tobacco, 3 axes, 2 dozen fish hooks, lengths of fishing line, 4 knives, a belt sheath and knife, a pair of scissors, clay pipes, a dozen boxes of matches and some cloth”.  [Manning Clark, historian]

The recruits had to sign a work contract, an agreement. Most couldn’t, of course, as they could not read or write, so placed their finger print on a document that was binding, though it is doubtful how much any of them might ever have understood about what was entailed in the doing.  All they likely saw were the presents their family and friends were being blessed with.  How could the blessing not continue?  They could hardly have comprehend what lay ahead of them.

Their work in the sugar fields involved clearing the rainforest and scrub, digging out the roots, ploughing the furrows, planting the setts, cutting and loading the harvested cane for processing. For twelve long back-breaking hours each and every day.  When you remember, that in their island lives they looked after their gardens: plowed when nature demanded, planting just enough for themselves and their family.  Not large expanses on a commercial basis.  

Typically, those recruited, were paid around £6 a year, often only at the end of their contract. They were given weekly rations, but their rations were as variable as their employers’ temperaments.  As rations they received: 

“…potatoes and pumpkin and damper and black tea.  They never got jam and syrup and things like that [as rations].  They worked for nothing.  They got very little money, and just the food….They had things to buy…You had to pay nine pence for a shirt in those days.  Jam was cheap and they [ones with families] used to buy a tin and live on that.  They found syrup was good with damper…and this was our daily diet. Syrup and damper.”   [Esther Henaway at Ayr, ABC, The Forgotten People, 1979]

Many of them died here.  There were no hospitals for them, no doctors, no health care.  Along with their depleted health from poor rations, the germ pool with its unusual European diseases, was lethal for many.  The death ratio of Islanders to Europeans was 4:1.  

Arguments over the presence of South Sea Islanders in Queensland caused chaos in the press and in politics for long decades.  Folk from New South Wales complained about the idle vagrants coming south from Queensland attempting to take their jobs.   Then, with federation in 1901, power lobbies finally enacted legislation to stop recruitment, and to deport workers who had been recruited.  Libertarians cried foul, so loudly and so long that the old, the weak and the needed, were allowed to stay.  But, some 9,000 were shipped home.  Barely 1,000 were allowed to stay.  

Some forty years of ‘sugar slavery’ had finally ceased. Mal Maninga, as it happens, is a descendant of one of those who was allowed to stay. One hopes that the lives of the Ukrainan banana workers that we are recruiting these days is a happier and healthier one.  

I remember, though, coming across dozens of Polish fruit workers in Scotland not two years ago. Their living conditions were a mind-numbing scenario. They were stacked on top of each other in a field of static caravans surrounded by barking dogs, mud and uncut grass. Not one of them was smiling. We felt we had come upon a prison yard,  and were quickly shunted out of there by the overseer.  So, it is hard not to be concerned. 

Camped in the old East Palmerston school yard, where a darling friend
went to school

A hill overlooking a banana plantation near Josephine falls

The bags tell us when to harvest, our Ukranian workers told us

The workers built their own grass huts to live in while here

A recruitment ship loaded with workers

Josephine falls.  Just a few kilometres away.  I hope our Ukranian workers can make it this far on their day off.  True rainforest, especially on a wet day!

Art Deco and Ah Buks

Innisfail is a treasure trove of Art Deco shop fronts. If only someone would write a brief history and put it on small information plaques in front of each shop it would likely create a traffic jam of tourists in town ready to walk the walk, so lovely are most of them. For when there is a tale to tell tourists will come. 

And it might help make up for the town’s hey day, just after Cyclone Larry, when tradies came in droves to repair the cyclone damage and stayed so long that the town began to count them as permanent residents, thinking the good times had rolled in, and so built too much, too soon. 

Then, when all the workers went away, as they eventually do after such disasters, Innisfail was left with a surplus of shops in their arcades and along their street fronts. Which will take time to fill, so, the more tourists the town can attract the better, I think. Along one of these streets, our education on the Chinese population in the Tablelands continued. We found a beautifully cared for glossy red Chinese Temple, though these days it is non-denominational and anyone is welcome to enter and bow to their god. 

Its history is touching. It is called the Lit Sing Gung temple. It was built for the Ah Buks: the elderly Chinese folk who arrived in this country called the New Gold Mountain as young men, to make their fortunes, but did not. 

Failing to do so, meant they believed they had failed in their duty to take home to China wealth and good fortune, so, in this foreign land this temple became their refuge. A reminder not only that they were in self-imposed exile, but a reminder, too, of what home was like, as the candles, the joss sticks and the symbolic paper money, are so singularly Chinese. As are the artefacts that decorate the interior of the Lit Sing Gung temple. Many date back to the Palmer River gold rush days, around 1886, when they arrived in the country covered in gold leaf. In and of themselves they are very likely museum pieces these days.

Many Chinese, of course, became important merchants here. At one stage nearly a third of the population was Chinese. After the gold rush, many worked as labourers building the sugar tramway from the mill to the harbour, a lot died from swamp fever in the process. 

Others cleared the rainforest and established the banana industry in the hills, only to have to move on when the Europeans moved in to grow sugar, as Chinese were not, then, allowed to own land. No matter how well they had developed or nurtured it. Behind the red temple in the back of Innisfail there was a set of small rooms where a dozen or so Ah Buks lived out their days in Innisfail, until the 1940s when the last of them died out. Ah Buks, who believed they could not return home empty-handed, as that would bring dishonour to their families. Such a tragedy.

Simple Art Deco frontage

A corner Art Deco

Side by side

Stylish frontage

 

Lit Sing Gung temple

  

Ancient artefacts

People meeting people

In 1899, Jim Potter’s daughters ran a school in a tent and on the veranda of their home in Mount Garnett for the mine workers kids. Their dad, Jim, was the manager of the mine. I love this tale, because my great aunts many times removed, led by their sister, Elizabeth Prudence Letitia Burt, did the very same thing when Sydney was merely an insignificant little port on a shipping map in a remote part of the world that was still often called Terra Australis. They used their home as a school, even a boarding school, when it became necessary. Education was important to such people. They offered it to kids who needed it when this country was barely an embryo. 

In August of 1899, Jim, though, had had enough of the verandah on his Mount Garnet property being used by all and sundry. He determined it was time for a formal school. The need had been sufficiently well established, he argued, to his daughters. He pointed this out to the department by mail, too, humbly requesting that a provisional school be built at Mt Garnett before too much more time had elapsed. And, surprisingly, it did not take long for some action. Barely four months later, a humble high-set school was well under construction on five acres of land facing the only street in the hamlet. 

A friend I know taught here, decades later. This is the school, he told us, where he learned to teach. Where half the kids were descendents of European settlers; the other half were children of indigenous folk. These kids taught this man what matters most in any education system: how very special each and every child is. To this day he remembers that lesson. To me, nothing is more important. 

Mt Garnett is an education in giving. The people in this town could not have been more helpful, and we were merely passing through. 

Two ladies, chopping down trees in a park, were doing it simply because the job needed to be done. They didn’t wait for the council to do it. They went out and did it when they could. The shire workers will discover it is done whenever they turn up with tools to do it. Done. Finished. Fait accompli. 

By two special local ladies who knew how to wield saws and load branches onto their trailer and have it done within the week. And, who remembered our friend, the teacher. One remembered him well. The other said her brothers drank with him at the pub. It is a small world. 

So small, as it happens. Another lady we spoke to turned out, by chance, to be the great aunt of our son-in-law. We had no idea any such relative even lived in this town. We were just chatting. She is ninety-four, going on ninety-five, and as sharp as a tack. Until recently, she has driven herself down to the Darling Downs to visit her family each year, seeing relatives enroute, catching up. This year, her driving has been restricted to the community. Which does not stop her one whit. Here she is, volunteering her time to keep the Charity Shop open in town. She is doing it for others. Asking nothing in return.

At the Tourist Information Centre, which doubles as the Heritage Centre, we asked if anyone knew our friend from way back when. The lady in charge of the centre that day, another volunteer, did not. She had only lived in these parts for a decade, she said. But she knew someone who might. So she phoned him. And he certainly did. A fellow who had lived here all his life, who hopped in his car at her beck and call, and was with us in mere minutes. 

A lovely man. He had once owned and run the local store which had been previously built as a Jack and Newell store, and these stores were as important in North Queensland once as the Burns Philp stores were in Papua New Guinea when we lived there. They were the hub of the community. He remembered our friend from way back. From his first year of teaching. Even more clearly he remembered our friend’s sister, "a beautiful girl", he recalls, who came to local dances on weekends with her brother. Because that was the entertainment in those days. That was how people met people.

And Mount Garnet folk still operate in exactly the same way today. Keith's wife, for one, has written histories of the local communities, and decorated them with historic photographs, and placed them in public spaces, like the Heritage Centre, and the store, for travellers to read. How very special they all are. 

Mt Garnet school

 

How lovely are these loos at Mt Garnet.  Looked after by the locals.  

Bev and Marie, two amazing volunteers

 Mrs Lucey's pub, where an echidna lived under the stairs.  

Hello, Dolly!

This is the store that Keith ran for 40 or more years.
Even now you could eat off the floor it is so well cared for.  

   

By land and by sea

Two bulls and seven cows were the first cattle to arrive in Australia with Captain Phillip and the First Fleet in 1788. The herd rapidly grew and today there are many millions of cattle, but only about 25,000 in the North Queensland Tableland area, on just over a hundred dairy farms. 

The first cattle brought to the Tablelands came overland from New South Wales by pioneering families. The trip took over 16 months and many cattle affected by tick enroute did not make it. The ones who did, and their offspring, were called ‘overlanders’. After that, most cattle came by steamer up the coast until the area could sustain its own cattle needs. These became known as ‘boat cows’. 

After milking, milk was taken to the front gates in the olden days by farm horses dragging a wooden slide loaded with the milk cans for collection. Later, many used their trusted Fergie tractor to carry the cans, often with the help of their kids who would wear corn sacks over their heads to protect them from the morning mists so common up here. Some carried their cans by bicycle. 

The Chinese who stayed in the Tablelands after the gold rush days often called on these early dairy farmers, as hawkers. Many Chinese leased portions of land from selectors and farmers and by hoeing between the stumps of trees, successfully harvested fresh fruit and vegetables, even such crops as peanuts, which they delivered right to the farmer’s front gate. Some Chinese became storekeepers, and others, working long and hard hours, eventually held a monopoly on the maize production in the tablelands. 

Among the many European pioneers to the area was the English family, who, after selecting a heavily timbered river flat block in the tablelands as their portion, set out from New South Wales with a herd of cattle in 1908. Part of one of their selected blocks was later resumed, and eventually became the township of Malanda. The descendants of their original cows are still on the English family property at Malanda and progeny have been shown at the Malanda Show since it began in 1916. Next year will mark 100 years of their involvement in dairy showing in the district. 

The family had vision as well as initiative. When the railway announced plans to extend the line to Malanda, Jim English and his sons realised that accommodation for visitors who came by rail to the region would be needed so they set about building a hotel in Malanda. They took axes and saws to their own timber from the land they had selected. They sent these logs along to their friend who ran the local sawmill and had it milled into lumber. Another friend built the hotel. 

Today it stands as a strong testament to all of them: the largest wooden building in Australia. It is huge and it is beautiful. And it is amazing that no fire, in all that time, has damaged even a portion of it as it has so many others hotels in the north. 

The hotel occupies a large piece of the best corner block in the town and almost the entire structure is of gorgeous red cedar. The craftsmanship of the construction is as evident today as it was when it opened in 1911: true and straight and skilled. 

Guests from Cairns arrived by train for the opening and danced the night away, and when the return train left at 8 o’clock in the morning, others were still dancing on the balcony and in the ballroom. 

What is even more astonishing is that the hotel is still owned by the descendants of the family who built it. That, too, is remarkable. 

That same family built the town’s movie theatre, along the same lines: massive, wooden and unique. It even had sway back cornsack seating in the front rows in the early days. Today, the cinema stands majestic still as the longest running cinema in Australia. Quality construction, again. Built to last. 

Malanda is a small old fashioned country town, but its history lives and breathes: in its dairy herds, its amazing wooden buildings, its families dedicated to craftsmanship, care, and their community.

Old Fergie dragging the milk can on the slide to the gate

 

Dairying has been happening here for a century or more

Hotel in Malanda

The largest wooden building in Australia

Elegant porch occupying best portion in town

Beautiful craftsmanship 

Virtually a ballroom at the bottom of the beautiful stairs

Iconic retro movie theatre 

What dwells in yonder rainforest

We left the sugar growing region of Mareeba with its tasselled cane tops waving against the blue sky and headed into country that was more dairy oriented, dotted with large tracts of remnant rainforest. 

And here we saw a tree kangaroo, which was so exciting for all of us. We have seen their cousins before: rock wallabies, most recently while we were on Magnetic Island, but this tree dwelling marsupial was a first for us. He hung out on a branch so high in the top layer of the forest canopy that we had to crane our necks to watch him. Here, the quiet little fellow unwittingly put on a brilliant display of tree kangaroo behaviors for those below, as his long pendulous tail swung distinctively below the leaves and branches. He ate a mango with his front paws, nibbling at it most delicately. He climbed higher, hugging the trunk like a koala, using his strong hind legs to inch up further while his arms kept him safely and squarely in position. He showed how well he could jump, leaping skilfully from one strong branch to another, albeit after much careful consideration and a good assessment of lurking danger. 

No fool this fellow. The overseas visitors who came to see the Curtain Fig scored a double whammy as the tree kangaroo was sighted on the same boardwalk. Which caused quite a sensation and gave everyone a big thrill.

The Curtain Fig, deeper in the rainforest, is a piece of nature’s artwork. Here, a strangler fig toppled a tall tree in the rainforest. This first host tree fell on top of another forest tree at an angle of about 45º. The strangler then hollowed out the second host tree, holding it straight and tall in its roots. Between the two trees, he slanted one resting on the tall straight one, the strangler fig sent its roots straight to the ground searching for soil and water. The resulting mass of roots is like a waterfall of fine fig root filaments falling straight to the ground like a curtain. Hence the name. It brings tourists by the bus load.  

As does the pretty town of Yungaburra, which appears quite trendy with its colourful hanging baskets and pretty painted shop signs. Its lovely wooden pub so appealed to a group of quad bikers returning from a trek to the tip of Cape York, that they took a well earned bit of rest and relaxation in this green and gracious setting. 

We stayed the night at Lake Eacham, a prettier lake in a prettier setting would be hard to find anywhere. The road into the lake is thick with rainforest, grown incredibly tall with all the rain that falls here. 

Luckily, our time has been in the sun. But, about two o’clock in the morning, the temperature did drop to around 2°C as a cold spell blew in from the south, and Miss Bec was not at all inclined to poke even her nose out from under her warm covers.

Sugar tassels

We love sugar cane country

Long tail, so high, ready to jump

Curtain fig

Yungaburra park

Hotel at Yungaburra

Lake Eacham without too many tourists

Road to Lake Eachem, tall rainforest trees

  

Chilly little miss

Black sapote icecream and mango wine

We found Sapotes! There were only seven pieces all up in the Mareeba markets, but we were chuffed as we have been on the lookout for them since we saw them in a travel show on the area. The stall holder had two different kinds of Sapotes on their unpretentious little table and we bought both and had to wait four days for them to ripen. These are the Black Sapotes. When you open them they are a bit like persimmon, and mixed with icecream they taste a little like chocolate with a tang of chilli, though after all that searching it is not something we will want for dessert very often, we have since decided. 

The marketeers also had white eggplants, which we had to try. These are more subtle than the purple, but still with that lovely eggplant flavour we enjoy so well and can be cooked in so many different ways. In other stalls we found pomolo, pitaya, custard apples the size of soccer balls, and Asian greens so crispy, crunchy and clean it makes you realise how old even the freshest supermarket vegetables that we buy really are. This produce comes straight from the field to the market. Our motorhome was groaning with produce by the time we’d finished shopping and it was easily one of the freshest food markets we have visited anywhere.

We chatted to a young Chinese market gardener and his grandpa who had been growing different oyster mushrooms from scratch. Actually, grandpa had contract growers working for him all over North Queensland so he had likely cornered the mushroom market in the region with orders coming thick, fast and firm. The pair had completely sold out of every type of mushroom when we came upon their stall and were packing, early, to go home, though interrupted all the while by customers who were obviously disappointed that they were too late to buy.

They told us how they grew their mushrooms: they started with a sawdust mix in a plastic bag, then put in the spores and simply allowed the mix to work its magic. This is the remnant of a block of oyster mushrooms that had been the display on their market table. Even their display block had been heavily harvested by keen customers not wanting to miss out on their weekly order. 

Mareeba has the best Heritage Museum in any country town in Australia that we have ever visited. And it is run by volunteers in the main. Amazing the work volunteers do in these country towns around here. They have set up ‘rooms’ of displays on the early beginnings of the area, the gold industry in the region, the timber industry, and the wetlands: with endless looping videos one of them has put together of bird calls, birds nesting types, and bird behaviours, beautifully filmed and edited. They have built life size models of early shops using corrugated iron and timber to illustrate the early days: saddlers, butchers, ironmongers, done up with signage of the times. And have collections of machinery and memorabilia all brilliantly labelled and immaculately maintained. A wonderful museum. We went back three times in the time were in the district and still have not seen it all. 

We drove out to Mareeba’s wetlands, a man-made wet area of lakes and creeks that has become a bit of a bird watcher’s paradise. Here we found an aviary of very rare Gouldian Finches being bred for release back into the wild. Seventy were released into sensitive habitat areas just last year, so the breeding program is working well.

We also saw several Jabiru, a lovely stork-like bird which is only found in these northern regions. A graceful and very pretty bird. 

Then we called in to Australia’s first, and possibly only, mango winery in Mareeba and, though I am a merlot fan, we loved every wine they produced: the dry, the medium, the sweet, the sparkling. We came away with their mango liqueur which we could not resist, along with a delicious limoncello. 

And given that the Nastasi family’s roots are steeped in Italian ancestry we have no doubt this is a home grown and authentic recipe. Just using cellar door sales the Golden Pride winery is regularly chomping through every mango it can grow, as well as employing over 150 pickers in season. We were fascinated by their heavily pruned mango trees. Once a year they have a close shave which cuts them low on top, with their sides trimmed like a four sided cube, making it easier to pick the lower fruit. A very expensive process one of the family said, but well worth it. 

The weekend we were in Mareeba was, by chance, their Rodeo weekend. The only other Rodeo we have ever visited was the Calgary Stampede, so long ago we could barely remember what it was all about, so off we trotted to spend a sunlight afternoon on the bleachers, watching the bruises and broken bits that result from calf roping and bulldogging, bullock riding and buck jumping. 

My nephew does this for fun. Such regular body punishment occurs during these events that I fear for him in his old age. Surely these riders will all be arthritic or crippled by then. 

And if that doesn’t get them early then the rodeo fare surely must: deep fried pluto pups the size of tree limbs. Giant potatoes cut in long swirls hreaded onto sticks, dipped in batter and salt and doused in hot cooking fat until they are crisp. Pyramids of empty pop cans along with endless Eskies of heavy beer. Hot pies oozing with artery clogging meat and fat chunks. Topped off with the Rodeo Show Bags overflowing with giant chocolate bars for dessert. 

Not a fresh apple within cooee. Let alone a bottle of water. And the little ones begin training for this at eight while riding the farm’s poddy calves. I fear for them, too.

   

Scarce black sapotes 

Such fresh greens

Oyster mushrooms galore

Mareeba's Heritage Museum

Gouldian finches in aviary in Mareeba's wetlands

Dozens are released into the wild every year

  

Jabiru

Rodeo

Bronco jumping at Mareeba

 

Relaxing between events