Maryborough

Maryborough is the place people drive through on the way to the tourist and retirement town of Hervey Bay; but there’s much more to it than that. Maryborough is one of Queensland’s most interesting towns.

The CBD contains a collection of wonderful historical buildings: hotels, banks, and the Customs House and Bond Stores that attest to the old colonial town’s importance as a port.

Looking up Wharf Street past the Courthouse Hotel

Maryborough’s engineering history, too, is fascinating: its metal casting, ship-building and vast railway workshops.

The old Engineers Arms Hotel, on the street leading to the railway workshops

Not much can be seen of all this now. Of the once huge Maryborough Flour Mill, which in 1892 is said to have been capable of producing 75 tonnes of flour a week, only the 1915 gateway arch survives.

The flour mill before demolition *Photo: “Dominion Flour Mill, 20 March 2019”. Facebook.com/photo*

Ship-building yards and foundries sit derelict.

Walkers Ltd Engineering, founded in Maryborough in 1867, was one of Queensland’s greatest and most dynamic companies. In its time it built trains and sugar mill machinery. It built barges, navy patrol boats and landing craft before the shipyard closed in 1974.

Minesweeper: “HMAS Maryborough under construction at Walkers Ltd, Maryborough, Qld” *Photo: http://www.navy.gov.au*

In 1873 the company also built what is claimed to be Queensland’s first locally manufactured locomotive, the tiny “Mary Ann”. If you’re in Maryborough on the first Sunday morning of the month you can see a replica of Mary Ann in action, buy a ticket from enthusiastic volunteers and take a ride behind her, puffing along the riverside and through the park.

The replica “Mary Ann” ready to take on passengers, 2023

In 1896 Walkers began building locomotives in earnest, over time constructing over 500 steam locomotives, 230 diesel and electric locomotives and many carriages. The company continued in engineering manufacture for well over 100 years.

The vast railway workshops near the CBD have in recent years been employed in servicing and refurbishing Brisbane’s suburban trains; even after 2022 when the Mary River flooded the town and the works.

Queensland’s regional cities are all built on rivers that flood. The Mary River is no exception, with its sources in the rain-filled hills of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, 290 kilometres to the south.

In January 2022, with a flood looming, the town built a temporary levee to protect the CBD. The levee failed when water came up the stormwater drains. Late in February, the river flooded again, and this time it worked, although many homes and businesses outside the levee were inundated with stinking water and mud.

Both sides of the flood levee, Maryborough, 2022 *Photo: abc.net.au*

The Mary River has flooded the town many times, most recently in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2022. The Woolworths Supermarket on the edge of the CBD was flooded twice in early 2013, and after the 2022 floods the shop remained closed for ten months. Images of the 2022 flood can been seen on Flickr:

Maryborough takes its history seriously, and not just as the birthplace of P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins; although even Walk/Don’t walk signs in the CBD show her famous creation.

Bronze Mary Poppins in central Maryborough

The citiy’s many museums and fine old buildings also attract visitors, and so do its war memorials.

Most spectacular is the $5 million Gallipoli to Armistice Memorial. Completed in 2018, it includes hardwood replica boats, filled with red flowers, drawn up along a supposed shoreline. A life-sized bronze statue walks ahead: Lieutenant Duncan Chapman, a Maryborough man named as the first Australian ashore at Gallipoli.

Start of the Gallipoli to Armistice Memorial

A garden walkway crosses the top of the park along Sussex Street, with sculptures, inscriptions and audios taken from the letters home of local servicemen.

Beyond this modern memorial is a massive granite column surmounted by a marble Winged Victory, erected in the 1920s to honour local men who served and died in World War One. It’s always sad to see these old “Great War” memorials, knowing that another terrible war was on its way. And many more after that.

In other parts of the world, spectacular memorials commemorate the courage and suffering of people defending their country against invaders, such as the famous London statue of Queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the conquering Romans. Her land was taken, the people enslaved. Boudica was flogged and her daughters were raped.

On Mount Zalongo in north-western Greece stands a massive monument of a row of dancing women. These were the women of Souli, who famously danced themselves and their children off the edge of a cliff to their death, rather than face capture and humiliation by invading Ottoman troops.

“The Monument of Zalongo” *Photo: greece-is.com*

Indigenous Australians have no tradition of monumental sculptures. There are few public memorials to their resistance to invasion and the loss of their country; but in Queens’s Park, Maryborough, is a depiction in bronze of bare footprints, scattered leaves and bullet-pierced wooden shields.

The message on the accompanying plaque begins with a greeting in the local Butchulla language, and continues with a plea for respect for all those who fought and died for their country.

“Butchullam bilam, midiru galangoor nyindjaa

Ngalmu galangood biral and biralgan bula nyin diali!

Wanya nyin yangu. wanai Djinang djaa

This memorial is dedicated to Butchulla men who died defending Butchulla Country. It remembers those who gave their lives in conflicts caused by colonisation of this country from 1788.

It serves not to attach blame or guilt, but to recognise what took place and honour those Aboriginal men who lost their lives.

Pause for a moment and picture what this area may have looked like when Butchulla ancestors occupied this land – a perfect location beside the Moonaboola (Mary River).

Until the bombing of Darwin in 1942, Aboriginal men were the only Australian men to give their lives defending their country on Australian soil.

As you stand here today, please reflect on the sacrifice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in defending this Country. We don’t know all their names, or where or when they died, but we are certain Butchulla warriors put up a fight in defence of their beloved Country. Those who gave their lives will never be forgotten.” (Abridged.)

History records that many Butchulla people died in the Wide Bay Area and on K’gari Fraser Island, both defending their homeland and in the massacres that took place quite openly from the 1840s onwards.

From the 1860s, Maryborough was one of Australia’s busiest immigration ports, and wool sugar and gold were shipped out from its wharves. It was also an entry port for Pacific Islanders brought, in the evil practice known as “black-birding”, to cut cane: work considered too hard for white people. Once Federation came, with the White Australia Policy, most of the Islanders were deported.

Pacific Islanders Monument, outside the Customs House, Maryborough

The early wealth of Maryborough shows in its many spectacular old houses. Some of them still show a detail that I’ve only seen here: the front of a timber house is painted, plus a metre or so along the sides, and the rest is left brown – oiled or treated another way. Evidently paint was an expensive commodity when they were built.

Just a couple of Maryborough’s fine old houses

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, manufacturing jobs in Maryborough have fallen in recent years, while the greatest increase in employment is in the service industries: health care and social assistance, retail jobs and education.

However, the Qld government has announced an initiative that it is claimed will bring 800 full-time manufacturing and other jobs to the region. Once again, Maryborough will be building trains. A massive investment of funds will see 65 six-carriage trains built in a new factory being constructed at Torbanlea, 25 kilometres northwest of town.

“Torbanlea train manufacturing facility” *Photo: TRM Projects*

It’s good to acknowledge history, but when it comes down to it, what any town needs most is jobs.

I need to go back to Maryborough, and soon, because I forgot to go to the toilet. The Cistern Chapel, that is. The fabulously decorated public toilets attached to the Town Hall. Can’t miss that.

February 6, 2024 1

Bell

Bell, located on the Bunya Highway in the western foothills of the Bunya Mountains, 35kms north-east of Dalby, was rich dairy country when I was young, and trains carried away wheat, timber and cream.

When I visited here as a teenager, for the Bell Ball or church functions, the people were welcoming and the cream-filled sponge cakes were wonderful.

The Ball was held in the Memorial Hall. We danced gypsy taps and progressive barn dances to the music of local Darling Downs bands, with Pops wax flakes sprinkled on the floor to keep it fast, kids sliding on it between dances, and men outside around the cars passing bottles between them. And delicious suppers.

The Bell Memorial Hall, today – just as I remember it

My father was the rector at St Paul’s Anglican Church, Jandowae, north of Dalby. Each Sunday, Dad would conduct a service at St Paul’s, then jump in the car and drive to a church at one of the other small towns in the parish, often on dirt roads, speeding to get there on time. Bell was one of these towns, along with Warra, Kaimkillenbun (The Bun), and Cooranga North.

I was away at boarding school, but my younger brothers often went with Dad on these trips, to serve as altar boys. According to them, Bell put on the best morning teas.

Around twenty years ago, I went back to Bell for the races. Con and I spent two nights in a cabin in the small caravan park. Con sat under a picnic shed with his newspaper and his little radio, getting the scratchings for the day, while I wandered around talking to people.

Getting the scratchings, Bell Caravan Park

I spoke to a woman, a permanent resident, living in a caravan. In the shade behind it was an assortment of mismatched chairs, with empty coffee tins for ashtrays.

“That’s my beer garden,” she told me. “It’s for the old blokes who live in the other caravans. There’s nowhere for them to get together for a yarn, so they come here.

“I’m the only one with a car, too, so when they need to go to Dalby to the doctor or the bank, I drive them in.”

A young mother with two small kids was living in one of the basic cabins. I would see them as they walked to the amenities block. There was a newish sedan parked beside the cabin, and I wondered what her story was, and if she was hiding from someone.

That little caravan park had stories to tell.

And the Tea Room at the races did nice cakes and scones.

Last month, heading for a road trip through the South Burnett, we again stopped at Bell.

The Bell Tourist Park is still there, but it had no cabins available.

It’s still almost the only visitor accommodation in this town of about 500 population, apart from traditional pub rooms at the popular and cutely named Bellview Hotel, looking over the old railway line.

At the Bell Bunya Community Centre we ate scones with jam and cream, then drove up the hill to look for the old Anglican Church.

The small, wooden St Matthew’s Anglican Church and its quaint hall are tucked at the end of a curving driveway on the hill, almost out of sight of the town below. It was closed when we visited.

Congregations in traditional churches everywhere are shrinking. Sometimes small country churches like this are sold and renovated as homes, and people are sad about it.

In another country town where a church was sold and converted into a house, a local woman told me, “I couldn’t bear to live there. I’d never be able to forget all the coffins I’ve seen coming down the aisle.”

Country town churches are usually small, plain weatherboard buildings, but almost all of them have some fine detailing in their windows or their towers, and some are surprising and beautiful. The previous day, I’d visited tiny St Anne’s Anglican Church at Jondaryan, north of Toowoomba. Heritage Listed, it was constructed in 1859 of timber slab. It’s the oldest surviving church on the Darling Downs, originally built as the private chapel for Jondaryan Station. With its quaint windows and frilly timber facia boards, it’s charming.

St John’s Lutheran Church at Kalbar, in the Scenic Rim, is another one I like, with its fine, multi-sectioned tower.

Another is the lovingly restored St Mary’s Catholic Church, nestling among shady mango trees at the old railway town of Pentland, on the Flinders Highway west of Charters Towers.

Con admiring St Mary’s Church at Pentland

At Bell, Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church faces the Bunya Highway running through town. We went there to see the Bell Biblical Garden.

It was a hot day, and the countryside was brown with drought; but the garden was remarkably lush and beautiful.

Walking through the garden, we met a woman watering.

This was Mrs Megg Cullen: artist, gardener and Catholic parishioner. https://www.bellbiblicalgarden.org/about-the-artist/

Opened in 2012, this garden is the work of many, but Megg is at the heart of it.

On once vacant land there are now trees, flowers and a pond. A winding path follows the traditional Stations of the Cross, with accompanying mosaic artwork and carvings, resting places, and an impressive crucifix of barbed wire and corrugated iron.

“We had over forty people walking the Stations last Good Friday,” said Megg.

The garden contains as many as possible of the plants mentioned in the bible: olive trees, plane, almond, bay and fig trees, date palms, roses and hyssop and rue and many others. These are interspersed with hardy flowering plants such as bougainvillea and geraniums, as well as bottle trees and cacti.

“Have you seen inside the church?” Megg asked.

“Isn’t it locked?”

“No,” she said. “It’s always open. Churches shouldn’t be locked up.”

Our Lady Help of Christians Chirch, Bell

Painted yellow, with little stencilled bells in blue running up either side of its steps, this is an attractive building, and inside, it’s alight with paintings. In bright colours they illustrate Bible stories, from Adam and Eve onwards, with an emphasis on people, happiness, and hope. Megg Cullen was the artist.

The paintings inside the Catholic Church, Bell

In 2022 Megg was interviewed for a series on local artists of the Western Downs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIyUxohTSh8

Even in the attractive booklets we later bought in the church, Megg’s name is hardly mentioned; but one person can have a big effect in a small town.

I love this place, with its garden, its artworks and its stories.

Bell has two large concrete grain silos, and the community has pushed for a few years for them to be painted. That may never happen, but it would be a great way of bringing more tourism to the town. People love to shop and drink coffee, and the Bell Bunya Community Centre, the Bellview Hotel, and the chic Pips’n’Cherries Café are among the businesses ready and willing to welcome them.

This will always be rich beef and grain country, and the Country people with their elastic sided boots and Akubra hats come to town to catch up at the pub and the cafe, and to support the annual Bell Races, the show and rodeo.

Most people driving the Bunya Highway, for work or visits to Dalby or the Bunya Mountains, slow down through this small town and speed on their way; but it’s worth stopping for a closer look, and a cream scone or two.

October 27, 2023 9

The Royal Mail, Goodna

An elderly man sits on his Brisbane Terrace verandah, looking out at the street. We chat. “I’m losing all my neighbours,” he says.

Across the road is a vacant lot, with crepe myrtle trees. A house stood there once, on that good corner block.

“It was the floods – January 2022. Missus across the road, she’s gone. And the people down the street.”

The government Resilient Homes Program provides funding for people whose houses have been affected by floods; and while submissions can be made to retrofit or raise houses, these vacant lots are the result of the Voluntary Buy Back scheme, through which people have been able to move elsewhere and leave their houses to demolition or removal.

“Did your place get flooded?” I ask.

“It came to three feet below the floorboards,” he answers. “I’m lucky my house is high set. Lots of places around here didn’t survive.

“If the pub goes, there’ll be nothing. And it’s up for sale.”

Along with so many regional pubs in Queensland, I think to myself. They often sit on the market for years.

The pub he’s talking about is the 150-year-old Royal Mail Hotel, a few hundred metres down the road. A traditional two-story timber pub, with verandahs, and a beer garden out the back, this is a much-loved venue.

The Royal Mail Hotel, Brisbane Terrace, Goodna

When I told a Brisbane friend, a lover of music and a regular at the Woodford Folk Festival, that we’d been to a pub in Goodna, her eyes lit up. “Was it the Royal Mail?” she asked. “I love that place!”.

Goodna is an eastern suburb of Ipswich, and until 1955 what is now Brisbane Terrace was the main road between Brisbane and Ipswich. Cobb and Co. Coaches used this road, and the Royal Mail was one of their stopping points.

Participants get ready for a fox hunt outside the Royal Mail Hotel in 1892 *Photo: couriermail.com.au*

Now cut off from passing traffic by the motorway, it still brings people in after work, and publican Andrew Cafe and his family also found another way to attract customers.

Aerial view of the Royal Mail, with Woogaroo Creek behind and the Ipswich Motorway in the distance *Photo: Ray White Commercial*

They have brought this old pub to international attention by making it, over the last thirty-five years, a famous Blues venue.

Royal Mail Blues lounge, quiet at Friday lunchtime

This year’s Bathurst 1000 ad was filmed at the Royal Mail, Goodna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLSJ1TpzKDQ

According to its website, the Royal Mail Hotel is “the only venue in Australia to be awarded the International Keeping the Blues Alive Award from the Blues Association in Memphis Tennessee.” Every Thursday and Saturday, Blues bands and performers appear here, plus Jam sessions one Sunday a month. When we visit at lunchtime on a Friday, there are a good number of customers: a few tradies, a couple of singles, and several groups of friends having quiet beers. Some motorcycles are parked out the front. The bar and music lounge are atmospheric. A few people sit out in the shady beer garden, yarning.

Friendly group in the beer garden behind the Royal Mail

It’s not always this relaxed, though. It’s difficult to imagine how people can recover from the floods that have been through this suburb, and this old building.

Flood debris, Brisbane Terrace 2011 *Photo: ipswich.com.au*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKMLcJFi8sc The Royal Mail flooded in 1974, 2011, and again 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fIPvYQGgfo The water rose to just below the ceiling in the bar. In 2011, publican Andrew says, he used a large oar, up until then a decorative feature in the bar, to push floating shipping containers away from the building, where his family and some flooded-out neighbours had taken refuge.

Andrew Cafe in 2011, after the flood, with that oar *Photo: David Nielsen. couriermail.com.au*

When the waters went down, many locals and people from further away came to help with the clean-up. The oar is back in the bar today.

Photo from the hotel’s webpage, with the oar back in place in the bar, above the EFTPOS sign

Brisbane Terrace is a quiet street, although the non-stop roar of the Ipswich Motorway can be heard just a couple of blocks away. Most of the suburb of Goodna lies on the other side of the motorway and the railway line. The street runs through a narrow strip of land, dipping to flood-prone creeks and gullies and following a curve of the Brisbane River and Woogaroo Creek, 100 metres away, which forms the boundary between Brisbane and Ipswich. Along both sides of the road are old silky oaks and jacaranda trees, in gorgeous flower at this time of the year.

Brisbane Terrace, looking east past Evan Marginson Park

The jacarandas were planted in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.

The University of Queensland has jacaranda purple as its official colour and holds the Bloom Jacaranda Festival every spring. Grafton holds a famous Jacaranda Festival. Herberton in FNQ and Goombungee, north of Toowoomba, hold Jacaranda Festivals.

And Goodna. There have been yearly Jacaranda Festivals held here since the 1960s. Except for flood years. And COVID.

Later this month, from 27 to 29 October, the Club Parkview Jacaranda Festival will be held in sprawling Evan Marginson Park, a few hundred metres up the road from the Royal Mail.

This old suburb has seen hard times but is surviving. There will be more floods in the future, and more houses will disappear. I hope the old Royal Mail keeps going for many years to come. It has become the much-loved centre of the community.

In the women’s toilets at the Royal Mail

October 11, 2023 1

“The Queensland Drover”

A fine story from ABC Western Queensland, about the drover’s life and the cattle industry today.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2023-10-03/drovers-take-to-stock-routes-el-nino-causes-cattle-price-crash/102896370?utm_campaign=newsweb-article-new-share-null&utm_content=mail&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

October 3, 2023 1

Ipswich

In 1972 we were living at Rosevale, 50 kilometres southwest of the city of Ipswich. We went to Ipswich to shop, but our nearest town was Rosewood. As in all regional areas, sport is strong around Ipswich, and Con played cricket on the Rosewood United team, in an Ipswich competition. One team member that he got to know, named Daryl, was a coal mine rescue worker. Daryl’s father was a miner, too.

At 2.47 a.m. on 31 July 1972, a mining disaster occurred in the Box Flat coal mine, a few kilometres southeast of the city. When a huge explosion occurred, seventeen miners and rescue workers were killed, with another dying later of his injuries. Daryl was one of the men killed; and so was his father.

No one underground at the time could have survived; the bodies could not be retrieved, and the difficult decision was made to permanently seal the mine.

The whole region grieved. Mining communities are close-knit, and it was said that everyone in the district knew someone who died that night.

A video from the Mine Safety institute of Australia covers the story of the disaster. https://youtu.be/m-dXzS5KanI

“*Ipswich Historical Society President Hugh Taylor points to the location of the fire in the 1972 Box Flat mine about 100 metres beneath the surface of the ground at Swanbank*” Report *brisbane times.com.au* on the 50th anniversary. Photo Tony Moore

The sombre Box Flat Memorial was constructed at Swanbank, near the scene of the disaster.

The Box Flat Memorial, Swanbank Road, Swanbank

Last week I visited the Memorial, then drove to the site of the Cooneana Heritage Centre a few kilometres away for more information. This is the home of Ipswich Historical Society and of the original Cooneana Homestead, built in 1868 and lovingly preserved.

Water tank and Old Cooneana Homestead, Cooneana Heritage Centre, Redbank Plains Rd, New Chum

The Society’s headquarters and museum are housed in an attractive, award-winning Modernist building, constructed in 1976 as the offices of Rhondda Collieries and still in its original condition.[1]

Award-winning headquarters of the Ipswich Historical Society

Displays of miners’ lamps in the IHS museum, most of them part of the original equipment of the building

Coal is why ipswich is where it is. Coal and limestone.

In the early, convict days of Brisbane when building was progressing, lime was needed for mortar. In 1827, Commandant Patrick Logan, energetic explorer of the Moreton Bay area, discovered limestone deposits on a hill above the Bremer River in what is now Ipswich. A small convict outpost called the Limestone Station was set up, with George Thorn as overseer, and lime burning kilns were constructed.

Cunningham’s Knoll on Limestone Hill is a spectacular pyramid of limestone terraces built in the 1930s as a Great Depression employment project. On top of the Knoll, old fig trees grasp blocks of raw limestone in their buttress roots.

Old fig tree on top of Cunningham’s Knoll

Little remains of the old kilns now except for a small mound of kiln residue behind the Knoll.

Mound of limestone burning residue as seen from the top of Cunningham’s Knoll

Patrick Logan also discovered coal reserves near Limestone Hill, and over time coal mines were opened all around the area, with miners coming from as far away as Wales. The suburb of Blackstone is still known locally as Welsh Town, and Rhondda Colliery and the suburb of Ebbw Vale were named after coal mining areas in Wales.

My own connections with Ipswich go back to 1861, when my great-great-grandfather James Matthews, fresh from England, spent a night there, enjoying the hospitality of the same George Thorn, probably in his hotel, the Queen’s Arms (soon to be re-named the Clarendon), on the corner of Brisbane and East Streets: Ipswich’s first licensed hotel.

James had come up the Bremer River by paddle steamer, with Archdeacon Benjamin Glennie, and the next morning they set off together to walk to Warwick. (See my story “Walking to Warwick” https://roseobrienwriter.blog/2018/07/27/walking-to-warwick/ )

George Thorn, like many colonial officials, businessmen and squatters, was an English ex-military man who did well out of being in the right place at the right time. He became a major landholder and a Parliamentarian, influential in the colony of Queensland, and regarded as the Father of Ipswich. “Claremont”, the house George Thorn bought at the river end of what is now Milford Street, is sometimes opened to the public for the Great Houses of Ipswich weekend. “Claremont” is just one example of Ipswich’s many magnificent old homes and its fine civic buildings.

“Claremont”, Ipswich. Designed 1857 *nationaltrust.org.au*

Ipswich became a steam railway centre, and in 1865 the first railway line in Queensland was opened, running to Bigge’s Camp/Grandchester, about thirty-four kilometres away; the first stage of a line to Toowoomba. The railway workshop established in North Ipswich, now home of the Workshops Railway Museum, became the state’s biggest employer, constructing over 200 steam locomotives in its time.

In the 1850s, as statehood for Queensland approached, there was an unsuccessful movement for Ipswich to be chosen as the new state Capital. The owners of the Ipswich paper, The Queensland Times, pushed for it. This fine old masthead continues today. However, once News Corp bought it, its print days were numbered, like so many of Queensland’s regional newspapers; and now The Queensland Times is only available online.

Losing a local print newspaper is a bad thing for communities. Local news is no longer covered in detail; and people without online access might not find out until a year after the funeral that someone they knew has died.

In the early 1980s, Con and I returned to the area, to the farming town of Lowood, 35 kms to the northwest. Again, Ipswich was our shopping town, and again I shopped at the iconic old department store of Cribb & Foote, then Reid’s, on Brisbane Street, just a block up the street from the site of George Thorn’s hotel.

Thorn’s hotel had eventually been destroyed by fire. Shockingly, in 1985 Cribb & Foote also burned down, leaving a massive gap in the CBD.

Ipswich is to Brisbane as Newcastle is to Sydney, or Geelong is to Melbourne: the tough industrial neighbour with a slightly grimy reputation. Each of these old cities has had to reinvent itself as local industry changed. The Ford car factory in Geelong has been closed for years. Newcastle no longer builds ships; and the last coal mine in Ipswich closed in 2019. In each case, the city has moved to meet the challenges.

New communities have grown up in the ex-mining and scrubland country of the western growth corridor between Brisbane and Ipswich. Ripley, with ambitions to become Australia’s largest planned community, is currently under development only a couple of kilometres from Swanbank, the site of the Box Flat disaster.

Highways are expanding to meet the challenge of increasing population, and busways and extensions of the railway network are under consideration.

In 2013, an initiative to reverse some of the peak hour commuter traffic on the Ipswich Motorway to Brisbane and revitalise the CBD was completed. On the site where Cribb and Foote once stood, the Icon Tower was constructed, an office building occupied almost entirely by Queensland State Government departments, including, appropriately, the Department of Resources.

Icon Tower, Ipswich *ipswichfirst.com.au*

We live in Brisbane now, but we often take our grandchildren to the playground and Nature Centre in Queen’s Park, on the slopes of Limestone Hill; we visit Nerima Japanese Gardens, and the Ipswich Art Gallery, with its wall of coal. We visit cafes and the river walkways, restored after recent Bremer River floods. It’s a quiet river when we visit, and it’s hard to imagine the devastation it regularly causes through the low-lying areas of the city.

Below the old railway bridge, now a pedestrian bridge, is a commemoration of the resilience of Ipswich and its people in flood times

This is not soft country. The Ipswich area is hotter in summer and colder in winter than Brisbane. Living at Lowood, we sometimes scraped frost off the car windscreen at eight in the morning. At Rosevale in 1972, we suffered the hottest Christmas of our lives, with all-time record temperatures.

For the sad coal-mining families in the area, there would have been empty places at the table that Christmas.

[1] Thank you to Ipswich Historical Society President Hugh Taylor and other well-informed staff who generously helped with information and access to files when we visited Cooneana Heritage Centre.

August 29, 2023 0

Want to Buy a Country Pub?

‘There was an Irish tradition that if you were building a hotel, you had to bury under it a hat, a cat and a bottle. Well, when we were renovating we found a hat and a bottle, and there they are.”

Joan pours me a gin and tonic and points to a battered felt hat on a shelf above the bar. Next to it is an old bottle.

“We never found the cat, though. I hope we don’t.

“Along there you can see my father’s walking stick, and the cap he wore when he was racing trotters.”

I’d driven years ago past this attractive old Warwick hotel with its red brick and iron lace and been sorry to see it in a rundown condition. Originally the National Hotel, built in 1907 and Heritage Listed, O’Mahony’s is located at the eastern end of Grafton Street, Warwick, opposite the railway station. It had in the past been patronised by train travellers and railway workers, but those days are almost gone.

Joan Wallace is the licensee and current owner of O’Mahony’s, with her brother Kevin. She tells me that they bought it in 2001 and they’ve been renovating it ever since, sourcing material and furnishings from near and far. The handsome timber bar came from the Ship Inn in South Brisbane, and the comfortable-looking lounge suite in the lounge originated in a monastery, she tells me. There are high pressed metal ceilings throughout, chandeliers, and a magnificent cedar staircase.

Looking down the main staircase at O’Mahony’s

“We have thirty-four bedrooms, and sometimes we fill them all,” Joan says. “And we’re listed on Airbnb.”

When I was young, living in a large country town, hotels were smelly places to walk past, with a bad reputation. My father, a temperate drinker, didn’t go into public bars except on ANZAC Day. The rest of the year he would buy the occasional bottle of wine or beer at the side door. Now, after many years living and travelling through rural Queensland, I’ve learned to appreciate country pubs, whether magnificent buildings like O’Mahony’s or small, single-storied structures that have been the social centres of isolated communities for well over a century. They are places for travellers to stay and rest, places for locals to gather and relax and do business. I’ve often thought that for a family, perhaps with two or three generations together, a country pub would be a fine business to run, even providing a home.

When you stay in a country hotel it feels like home. It might be slightly daggy, but you have the run of the place: lounge and verandahs, breakfast room, bar. These old places all have stories; but as they age, and demographics shift, and times change, some of them become neglected and no longer viable.

Then, sometimes, the right people come along, people who are prepared to take them on and keep that tradition of hospitality going in the face of changing times; and not only magnificent places like O’Mahony’s.

Across Queensland there are many humbler hotels in tiny, isolated towns that provide the only meeting place for kilometres around. Road trippers love old country pubs, with their quirky bush décor of bush hats and branding irons and an atmosphere of yarns and larrikins; but they’re tricky businesses to run, what with pandemics and decreasing local populations, with insurance and regulations, transport costs and staff shortages, maintenance of old buildings and the eternal issues involved with dealing with customers and alcohol.

Hotels in tiny towns might sell groceries and fuel, provide campgrounds, run the local Post Office, maintain the local public toilets and run a Centrelink Agency. It sometimes seems as if liquor sales are incidental to everything else that goes on. The Heritage Listed Noccundra Hotel, along a gravel road in the Channel Country , 13 hours’ drive west of Brisbane, is like that.

Noccundra Hotel *Photo: tripadvisor.com.au*

In Hebel, a local rescued the pub for the sake of the community. Hebel is a tiny town in south-western Queensland, on the Castlereagh Highway just north of the NSW border. When it looked as if the Hebel Hotel was going to close, because of drought, floods, farm closures, isolation and COVID, a local businessman farmer named Frank Deshon and his family bought it, along with the General Store, because they knew the community needed it.

Heather Ewart on ABC’s Backroads went there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5p3wtKPC4

It’s not only locals who come to the rescue of dying bush hotels. Take the Quamby Pub. Around fifty kilometres north of Cloncurry on the long and lonely road to Normanton, there’s not much happening in Quamby, except once a year for the rodeo. The small town died as roads improved and the local cattle and mining industries changed.

Ten years ago the old hotel was abandoned to the white ants, but in 2021 it was spotted by travelling Gold Coast friends. It was for sale, and they bought it, and rebuilt it for present day customers.

The photos on the Quamby Pub Facebook page document the arduous restoration process they went through, with the help of friends, locals, and even passing travellers. https://www.facebook.com/quambypub

Now the Quamby Pub is open once more, with food and drink, a big new covered deck out the back, camp sites, and even a pool.

Judging by the response of locals and travellers it’s hard to imagine that the Quamby Pub will be closing down again. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-19/historic-quamby-pub-restored-by-gold-coast-tourists/102235284

Now, after all their devoted work, Joan and Kevin Wallace’s fine old Warwick hotel is on the market too. O’Mahony’s is up for auction, Joan tells me, and because of its iconic status locally, the sale has been the subject of news reports: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1635605283142106

The auction will take place on 19 July, 2023: just a couple of weeks from now. Want to buy a pub?

July 4, 2023 8

Captain Logan and Queen’s Wharf

“The settlement,” Cowper had told Clunie on the Isabella, “is mostly on one point of land. Penis-shaped, we shall say, backed by a high ridge we shall call the Line of Bollocks.”[1]

Jessica Anderson wrote a wise and interesting novel of convict Brisbane, “The Commandant”, published in 1975. It includes this pungent description of the site of the Moreton Bay Convict Station, in the words of the notoriously bitter, badly-behaved drunk, Henry Cowper, the convict station’s first medical officer. The site of the Moreton Bay Convict Settlement, established in 1826, runs along the ridge where William and George Streets run now.

Queensland’s government buildings still occupy this “penis-shaped” piece of high ground along the river.

Henry Cowper was the medical officer for the Settlement from 1826 to 1832. He worked in primitive conditions in this isolated, under-funded and under-supplied outpost of the British Empire. Captain Patrick Logan was the commandant.

Captain Patrick Logan, 57th Foot Regiment, Commandant of Moreton Bay Convict Station 1826-1830 *State Library of New South Wales*

Jessica Anderson’s excellent novel was thoroughly researched, and conditions in the settlement, and many of the characters, are based on records of the time. The novel culminates in the sombre discovery and retrieval of the body of Captain Logan.

Captain Patrick Logan of the 57^th Foot Regiment, a veteran of the Peninsula War against Napoleon, was commandant of the settlement from 1826 until his murder in 1830 at the age of just thirty-nine.

Many men who came to Australia in the early years of European occupation, to supervise convict stations and run governments, were veterans of the European wars of the early nineteenth century. Violence and flogging were not new to them. Logan was a notoriously harsh disciplinarian who followed the rules without mercy. The floggings Logan ordered for convicts would have provided Cowper with a stream of grievously injured patients.

Constant complaints about the treatment of Moreton Bay convicts were made to the government in Sydney. The famous old song “Moreton Bay” has a convict describe it:

For three long years I was beastly treated
And heavy irons on my legs I wore
My back from flogging was lacerated
And oft times painted with my crimson gore
And many a man from downright starvation
Lies mouldering now underneath the clay
And Captain Logan he had us mangled
All at the triangles of Moreton Bay

Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews
We were oppressed under Logan’s yoke
Till a native black lying there in ambush
Did deal this tyrant his mortal stroke
My fellow prisoners be exhilarated
That all such monsters such a death may find
And when from bondage we are liberated
Our former sufferings will fade from mind[2]

In Esk, in the Brisbane Valley, the Memorial Park has shady trees and picnic tables. We stopped there for lunch one day. Sandwich in hand, I wandered around the park, and found a rock with a plaque attached. The plaque describes Patrick Logan as “an enthusiastic and energetic explorer of Southern Queensland’, and provides the information that it was near here, on 18 October 1830, on his last exploratory trip before his term as commandant was over, that he was killed by an Aboriginal group.

Plaque on the monument in Esk Memorial Park

It may be true that escaped convicts were also involved in Logan’s murder; but there is always going to be violence when one group invades another’s traditional homelands and takes them for their own.

Patrick Logan made frequent exploratory expeditions and is credited with many “discoveries” in south-east Queensland. His name is on lookouts at Rathdowney and Mount French in the Scenic Rim. He is credited with discovering the Logan River, Dugulumbah to Yugumbeh people who had known it for thousands of years. Logan Road, the City of Logan, and many other plaques, streets and suburbs carry his name.

During Logan’s time as commandant, the first permanent buildings in what was to become Brisbane were erected. Two of them still stand: the windmill up on Wickham Terrace (on Cowper’s “Line of Bollocks”, in fact) and the Commissariat Store in William Street, the oldest inhabited building in Brisbane. The Commissariat Store building is now the Convict Museum and the headquarters of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, and on its lower floor can be seen models of the Convict Station the way it looked at the time of Logan’s death.

The Commissariat Store, in its original two story form, can be seen above the wharf towards the end of the point of land. The Commandant’s house is the last one on the right above the Store. The wharf was not called “Queen’s Wharf” in those days. George IV had recently died, and William IV was king. Queen Victoria did not gain the English throne until 1837. “Image of early Brisbane Town in convict days, ca. 1831. From a painting by Cedric Fowler.” *collections.slq.gov.au*

These include a model of the Commandant’s house, with a verandah in front.

Model of the Commandant’s house, in the Convict Museum, William Street, Brisbane

A museum volunteer tells me that the house, which features in Jessica Anderson’s novel, looked across William Street to the river, near the site where huge casino and hotel buildings are currently rising: the Queen’s Wharf Development Project.

The roof and top floor of the Commissariat Store, now headquarters of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, William Street. Queen’s Wharf Development site in the background

According to the website, the finished Queen’s Wharf development will include a Sky Deck 100 metres above William Street, and fifty restaurants, bars and cafes.

This whole area is a massive construction site; and in the midst of it sits, incongruously, the Commissariat Store.

Commissariat Store in the midst of construction site

I’m told the developers wanted to take over the convict-built Commissariat Store. It would have made a fine site for a restaurant and bar, this old stone building opening out on to the riverbank. But somehow the RHSQ managed to keep it.

The white peaked roof of the Commissariat Store can just be seen behind the freeway overpass. The Commandant’s house would have been behind the building with the cranes

Other historical buildings within the William and George Street precinct are being protected and preserved, but it’s difficult now to imagine the environment of simple wooden buildings, dirt pathways and gardens that occupied this stretch of land two hundred years ago.

Today there’s a huge, powerful white snake rearing out of the Brisbane River, looking as if it’s about to strike.

Neville Bonner Bridge under construction

It’s the new Neville Bonner Bridge, startling in its design but destined to become a Brisbane icon. The last sections have been craned into place, and soon pedestrians will be able to cross from Southbank Parklands to take part in the promised glories of the new development.

The ridge above the river will never be the same again. Patrick Logan would not recognise it.

It’s to be hoped that enough well-off tourists come to spend their money there to pay for it all.

[1] “The Commandant”, Jessica Anderson. First published 1975. This edition: The Text Publishing Company, Australia. 2012. P. 74.

[2] folkstream.com

March 15, 2023 1

Josh Arnold’s Queensland Songs

I love stories about Queensland, especially the regions and small towns; and so I was delighted when Josh Arnold was featured in this week’s episode of the ABC’s “Backroads” with Heather Hewitt. They visited Birdsville, Dajarra and Camooweal, little towns in the far west of the state. For each town, Josh has written a song for the local school and filmed the kids singing it.

I’ve been aware of Josh’s school songs for a while now. An award-winning country music singer, songwriter and guitarist, Josh grew up at the small town of Tara, west of Dalby.

For over a decade, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba and local councils and groups, Josh has been running a project called Small Town Culture. He visits schools in country towns across Queensland and makes songs with the students.

Josh, a family man and school worker himself, has a gift for getting kids to relax with him and have fun. The children tell him what’s special about their area and the things they like to do. He makes up a song, including their ideas; they learn to sing it, with Josh on guitar. Adults and local musicians get involved, too – especially in a place like Birdsville, where at the time of filming for “Backroads” the school had just three pupils.

At Birdsville, with Heather Ewart and the three pupils enrolled at the school, with the school principal at the piano

A video is filmed, with the kids singing, running, playing, riding dirt bikes, swinging on playgrounds, sliding down sand dunes, cracking whips, on horseback, splashing in creeks; from the green of South East Queensland’s Scenic Rim to the red dirt of Dajarra and Camooweal.

Josh travels with a camera operator, and the production values of the resulting videos are impressive.

Shared on Youtube and elsewhere, they are beautiful, full of sunset shots and happy people, and always the song. The whole process must be an unforgettable delight to all involved, and a source of pride in tiny, isolated places where people rarely see themselves on film.

Blackall, Wallumbilla, Lowood, the Boyne Valley; Miriam Vale to the Gold Coast, Quinalow to Cunnamulla; Charleville, Warwick, Miles, Rockhampton and more. Josh Arnold has been to some places I’ve never visited myself, such as Cooyar, or Darlington. At Ewan, in the dry country back of Townsville, Josh filmed a song at the Outreach Centre of the Charters Towers School of Distance Education.

Along with his school songs project, Josh records his own music, as you can hear and see for yourself on Youtube or his Facebook page.

Josh Arnold is a musician with a great appreciation of people, places and stories. He has a gift.

NB Photos with this story are taken from Josh Arnold’s Facebook page and abc.net.au

February 24, 2023 3

Bundaberg

I’d meant to book a motel in Bundaberg.

Driving from Brisbane and heading for Cairns a year or so ago we turned off the Bruce Highway at Childers to visit some relations in Bundaberg, planning to spend the night in a motel in the centre of the city. After waving goodbye to Con’s cousin I tapped the motel’s name into my phone. The sat nav directed us through the suburbs as I expected it to; but then it sent us north across the Burnett River.

I know the Bundaberg CBD is on the south bank of the river. Just as the CBDs are in those other two major Queensland river cities, Rockhampton and Mackay.

Putting on my glasses I had a closer look at the phone. Distance to the motel: 620 kilometres.

I’d accidentally booked a motel in Mackay.

All the Bundaberg motels had No Vacancy signs, and we ended up driving back to Childers for the night.

On another trip I booked a place in Gayndah when I meant to book one in Gin Gin. There are so many Colonial Motels, Country Comfort Motels, Seaview and Ocean View, Heritage and Midtown Motels across the country, it’s easy to get confused.

That Bundaberg motel mistake happened a few years ago, and last year we took a more leisurely trip north and decided to visit Bundaberg to stay for a few days. I booked a room in the Matilda Motel, making sure it was the one in Bundaberg, not the Matilda Motel in Winton or the one in Dubbo…

The fine old sugar town of Bundaberg is known for its ginger beer, but it’s Bundaberg Rum the town promotes itself by. Once a thriving port, it has some beautiful civic buildings, banks and hotels, and heritage listed bridges.

Burnett Bridge, Bundaberg, built in 1900, heritage listed *Photo:* *en.wikipedia.org*

We took in dinner and the Trivia Night at the Old Bundy Tavern, overlooking the river. This elegant brick hotel with its verandahs and stained glass windows was built in 1917 as the Hotel Bundaberg.

The Old Bundy Tavern, previously The Hotel Bundaberg

Best of all for me, as a fan of old infrastructure, is a wonderful 1902 brick water tower in East Bundaberg, heritage listed and still in use.

East Bundaberg water tower, still in use

Across the river in North Bundaberg are the Bundaberg Botanic Gardens, with the striking-looking Hinkler Museum celebrating Bert Hinkler, aviator, one of Bundy’s most famous sons.

Hinkler Museum, Bundaberg Botanic Gardens *Photo: queensland.com*

There’s a sugar industry museum in beautiful old Fairymead House; and you can take a ride on a cane train. I love a train ride.

All of Queensland’s old river port cities, Mackay, Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Maryborough and Brisbane itself, are built on flood plains. The Burnett River has a catchment area of some 33,000 square kilometres, including Gayndah and Monto, and it all flows down to Bundaberg. The city has been flooded many times. The worst happened in January 2013, and it was apocalyptic. The CBD flooded and an estimated 600 businesses were inundated, as well as many houses.

Bundaberg with the Burnett River in flood, January 29, 2013, as seen from space *Photo: Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield*

People living in North Bundaberg were told to leave their homes. Evacuation was mandatory, but many people said, “They don’t know what they’re talking about. North Bundaberg never floods.”

This flood was different, and higher, and in the end hundreds had to be rescued by helicopter.

Helicopter evacuation, Bundaberg 2013 *Photo Fiona Sweetman, couriermail.com.au*

In 2014, the year after the flood, we drove through Gayndah and visited the small museum there and heard how that same Burnett River flood ripped trees out of the riverbanks, filled the museum with mud and flowed through the shed full of prized old agricultural machinery. “Backpackers helped us clean up. We couldn’t have done it without them,” the museum staff told us.

Burnett River, Gayndah, in normal times. Height of bridge is an indication of flood heights here

Last year it was Maryborough’s turn to go under. Twice, within six weeks. These old regional river cities are beautiful, but beware the floods.

Mary River flood, Maryborough, 2022: second flood within six weeks *Photo: good-news-fraser-coast.com*

And take care when booking your motel.

January 25, 2023 3

Where the Bruce meets the Sea

The first glimpse of the sea is always exciting. Suddenly there it is, spread out blue in the sun, with light glinting off the wave crests.

I feel calmer and happier near the sea. Perhaps it’s the clean, salty breeze. Coastal air seems more charged with oxygen than inland air. Perhaps it’s the peaceful sleep that comes with the sound of the waves all night long.

We think of Queensland’s Bruce Highway, in its magnificent 1679 kilometres from Brisbane to Cairns, as a coastal highway. The irony of it is that in all that length there are only four spots where can you actually see the sea. And you have to earn those views.

First sight of the sea comes 840 kms up the Bruce from Brisbane: well into the Tropics, passing the beaches of Noosa and Rainbow Beach, of Hervey Bay and Yeppoon, without a glimpse.

After eight hours or so of hinterland driving to Rockhampton and another couple of hours through the beautiful but dry cattle country further north, suddenly, below a curving hillside, across the railway line that skirts the highway, the sea appears. On a narrow strip of land beside the water is the tiny fishing village of Clairview.

Less than a minute’s drive later, it’s gone, and the dry forested hills are back.

“That looked beautiful,” you say. “We must stop there some time!”

A few weeks ago when driving to Cairns, we did stop at Clairview, spending the night in a cabin at the peaceful BarraCrab Caravan Park.

BarraCrab Caravan Park Clairview *Photo: thetimes.com.au*

We ate fish and chips (neither barramundi nor crab was on the menu) with a beer at the casual licensed restaurant, looking across the coconut palm lined beach to the peaceful evening sky and sea, where people were strolling or fishing.

Workers commute up and down the Bruce Highway all year round, often spending the night in motels and caravan parks, and here at Clairview a tradie was standing relaxed on the beach, looking at the water, work done for the day, in hi-vis and thongs with a Fourex Gold beer can in his pocket.

We weren’t tempted to swim. Stingers and crocodiles are always a threat in these waters, and like all northern beaches in the shelter of the Great Barrier Reef, the waves are little more than ripples.

Onwards up the Bruce.

Three and a half hours north of Clairview, just south of Bowen and across the road from the Big Mango, you glimpse the sea again. The tide is out, revealing the roots of mangroves and millions of tiny mud dwelling creatures; but beyond them the water is bright blue. Looming to the east are the hazy purple hills of Gloucester Island and the Whitsundays.

Nearby, above the highway and looking out across Nelly Bay, is the Ocean View Motel, and it’s a pleasure to sit outside a unit there, under the frangipanis, and enjoy the evening view across the water to the lights of Bowen.

Bruce Highway where it meets the sea, south of Bowen, near the Big Mango *Photo: petfriendly.com.au*

This is one of the rare Bruce Highway motels with a view of the sea. You’ll need to drive north for another four hundred kilometres or so to find another.

An hour and a half north of Townsville comes the next ocean view. On a stretch of the these-days divided highway that crosses the Cardwell Range nineteen kilometres north of Ingham, you can glimpse the sea through roadside vegetation. For the full sea view, away from the fast-moving traffic, take the slip road at the top of the range and walk five minutes to Panjoo Hinchinbrook Lookout for a breathtaking outlook over the channel and Hinchinbrook Island (Munamudanamy) to the ocean.

View from Panjoo Lookout across Hinchinbrook Passage and Island (Munamudanamy)

The Banjin People are traditional owners of this large, undeveloped, beautiful island, which is part of the Girringun Indigenous Protected Area.

At Cardwell, thirty-eight kilometres north of Panjoo Lookout, the Bruce Highway at last spends time near the sea – the Coral Sea. Here, for over a kilometre, the highway follows the shoreline. A walkway leads past big old calophyllum inophyllum trees, otherwise known as ballnut trees, on the edge of the beach.

Protected since 1865, a *Calyphyllum inophyllum* at Cardwell

Governor Bowen, travelling in the ship “Platypus”, visited this area in 1865, only a year after the town was formed and the local Girringun people had been violently “dispersed” from their ancient lands. The Queensland Government wanted Cardwell for a port.

Governor Bowen was impressed by the calophyllum trees, hundreds of years old even then. Since 1866 they’ve been protected by law; and they weathered Cyclone Yasi better than most.

A postcard from c.1885 shows the dark-leaved calyphyllum trees, old even then, on the shoreline of Cardwell *Photo: northqueenslandhistory.blogspot.com*

In 2011, Cardwell was devastated by Yasi, with sand and water blown across the highway, the bitumen ripped up and houses destroyed; but now, eleven years, later, it has never looked better.

Girringun Bagu sculptures, based on the design of firesticks, by local artists Eileen Tep and Charlotte Beeron, stand enigmatically on the shoreline. They watch the tourists who stop here for the scenery, the information centre, playground, petrol and food.

There are motels and pubs, the popular Yasi Bar, and a charging station for electric vehicles. And the calophyllum trees.

Best not go for a swim, though. Crocodiles and stingers are common here, so close to the mangroves and muddy water of Hinchinbrook Channel.

That’s it for sea views from the Bruce Highway.

Named in the 1940s after a North Queensland Labor politician and Minister for Works, Harry Bruce, this highway deserves a more romantic, evocative title. Many travellers have called it derogatory names over the years, one favourite being Goat Track. That’s unfair. This is a long road, covering difficult terrain in an extreme climate, with a comparatively small population to pay for it.

I’ve been travelling the Bruce for over fifty years, in drought and in flood. I’ve crossed the old Marlborough Stretch, been stopped at its one-way bridges, experienced flat tyres and breakdowns and dodgy motels. I’ve crawled around the hills south of Gympie, stuck behind caravans on the old narrow, curving road that has now been replaced by a motorway. I’ve suffered the bumps and potholes in the flood-prone roads around Bowen and Proserpine. But to me the Bruce Highway is a beautiful road, and I’ve seen great improvements to it over the years, making it far safer and more pleasant to drive on; and upgrades are happening all the time.

However, if it’s sea views you want, you’d be better to take the Captain Cook Highway from Cairns to Port Douglas.

Captain Cook Highway *Photo: australiangeographic.com.au*

There are many spectacular sea views to enjoy in Queensland; but you’ll have to leave the Bruce to find them.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/03/blue-space-living-near-water-good-secret-of-happiness

October 12, 2022 4

Queensland Stories