Syrup, hot damper and sapotes: 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.