Syrup, hot damper and sapotes: 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.