On December 30, 1943 my youngest sister, Gladys Jean, was born. Dad chose to name her after Mom so, to lessen confusion in the household, he gave her the nickname Babs. My story cannot continue without acknowledging her part in it.
On November 4, 1949 our baby brother, Daniel George, arrived. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in May 2008.
Also, important to my story, I must mention the four legged members.
As Dad loved hunting, for his birthday in 1942, Mom gave him a cocker spaniel pup who was jet back and was named - I am embarrassed to say - 'Nigger'. He (along with a cat named Blackie) moved from Ruskin with us.
Shortly after we moved to Dawes Hill a complaint was received that the dog was chasing a neighbor's animals. Dad wrote to a long time friend in Mission who was an avid hunter and who agreed to take the dog. Within a week or so of Nigger moving to the home of his new master, we received another complaint about him chasing animals. Wrong dog - the culprit belonged to neighbors who lived a couple of blocks from where we did.
Around this time Dad bought Mom a Pekingese pup as a Christmas gift. It was a sweet animal but, unfortunately, it came down with a disease (indigenous to that breed) that left it blind and so it had to be destroyed.
Meanwhile, Blackie - the cat - lived on and, whenever she could, she would crawl into the bed with me. Mom's ritual at bedtime was to put the household pets outside for the night. Always she would find Blackie sleeping under the covers on my bed and down by my feet.
One day an Irish setter followed Alda home from school. While she was a beautiful dog, she was sadly short on brains. Living not far from us was a man who, like Dad, loved hunting and he owned a kennel of English hunting dogs. One day a Great Dane appeared. The English dogs took exception to the intruder and fights broke out which the Great Dane - because of his size - always won. Therefore Mr. Booth wanted to get rid of the interloper and Dad offered to give him a home.
Dad sharpened the neighbors' saws for them (he had a vise on the back porch railing for that purpose). On the same day that the Great Dane arrived Dad went out on the porch to sharpen saws and the new dog went with him. The Irish Setter was there as well. Babs was still a toddler and was knocked down by Lady (the setter) jumping up on her. Dad hit the dog and told her to stay down. However she jumped again and the Great Dane (who had witnessed the reprimand) rose up with a growl in his throat, hit the setter with his shoulder knocking her away and then settled back for his nap. The setter didn't jump up again.
After Dad went to work and we went to school on Monday, Mom put the Great Dane outside. He took off and headed back to where Dad had found him - more than a mile away. We never saw him again.
The neighbor at the other place (Mr. Boisse) owned a herd of sheep and raised Border Collies. Dad got a pup from him and we called him Lad. He was a beautiful dog but an inherent trait undid him - he loved to herd. If it wasn't the milk cows belonging to our landlord - who wasn't amused - he would go to the other side of the highway and 'herd' passing cars. He was hit once, was nursed back to health, and then disappeared. Mom and Dad felt that, since he was a pure bred, was handsome, and was friendly, some motorist picked him up and took him to another home.
Alda has a much clearer memory of this than I do but, in late 1945 or early 1946, the landlord (of the house situated on the brow of Dawes Hill) moved another family in with us. We had no choice but to move ourselves.
Another one of Dad's workmates, Clifford Picton, began building a second house on the eastern side of his property which was down on the highway on the south side of the hill. Dad moved us there under the condition that he would continue to help Cliff build the house around us. That place never - to me - had a 'permanent feel' to it. However, we lived there for the following five years.
The downside of this situation, for me, was that there were no other boys around my age living in the vicinity. But there were a couple of truly remarkable neighbors.
Across the road from the Clifford Pictons lived Tom Wesley - the very first black man that I met. He had been married but was separated from his wife who lived in Vancouver. He had three daughters and a son living at home with him. The apple of his eye was the youngest - June.
He had a few acres lying below the highway and extending to the railway tracks (a spur line belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railway extending from Port Coquitlam into New Westminster) The main line passed to the north through Port Moody and along the south shore of Burrard Inlet to Vancouver.
In front of that property were old disused gasoline pumps and a tumble down cafe. Tom devoted a small field to the cultivation of strawberries (my first earnings came from picking those berries for Tom). The berries were displayed in front of the cafe so passing motorists would stop to buy some. During that brief period each summer - if my memory is serving me correctly - the 'cafe' also sold ice cream bars and milk shakes.
As I mentioned above, June was her dad's pet and he would celebrate her birthday each June by hosting a strawberry social to which all of the neighbors were invited. I loved a 'strawberry stew' that was created each year - and, Yes!, the birthday cake was a classic strawberry shortcake with real cream icing! Tom had a few dairy cows as well.
The other memorable neighbor was Jim Mackie - a World War 1 veteran who had worked for years for the Canadian Post Office and was a sorter in the mail car attached to transcontinental trains. Now that occupation is certainly an anachronism!
Jim was a widower with no children. He lived in a lovely bungalow about a quarter mile east of where we lived. Over the years he had accumulated an impressive library - consisting mostly of non-fiction works. Mom and Dad met Jim through the local Ratepayers Association and became the source of an invitation to Alda and I to come by for an evening of reading. Jim would read to us.
This invitation existed for a number of years - even extending beyond the years when we lived just down the road. From that house on Pitt River Road we moved to another house back up on Dawes Hill. Alda and I would walk down to Jim's and he would walk with us on our way home. In August are the meteor showers and there would be a competition to see who could spot the most meteors streaking through the skies. Alda always won - she has very sharp eyesight - and I always came in third.
We read many books together but the only one that I remember with clarity was Xavier Hollander's "A House Is Not a Home". Why is it that I remember that one above all of the others?
This house (which we were renting) was about a mile and a half west of Essondale - the Provincial Mental Hospital. The grounds of that institution were beautifully landscaped and were pleasant to stroll through. Much to Dad's horror, Cliff Picton's twins (Connie and Clifford) enticed us to go to Essondale on two raids - for tulips in May and cherries in July. They were a few years older than Alda and I.
Across the highway from Essondale - and connected to it - was the Colony Farm which was the Provincial Agricultural Experimental Station. We loved to go there on hikes (we used a path that passed through the scrub lands of the flood plain between the railway tracks and the Fraser River). A big attraction was to visit there a month or so after our birthdays as the calf pens had labels listing the genetic pedigree of each calf - mostly Holsteins - as well as its date of birth. We were looking for our 'twins'!
Next door to our house lived the Knapps. They had lovely flower gardens which I enjoyed weeding. This caused Dad some anguish as he had planted a vegetable garden which needed weeding as well. To me weeding flowers was much more fun than hoeing vegetables.
In B.C. only the public schools were financed by municipal taxes - religious schools had to be paid for by the parents. Coquitlam had a fairly large population of Roman Catholic people. In the early 1950s a population boom put extra strain upon the public school system so the Roman Catholic School Board went on 'strike' trying to force the Public Board to give in to their demands. The Public Board was obligated to reply so they put in place a 'swing shift' system. The senior students (Grades 10 through 12) began the school day at 7:45 AM and returned home shortly after noon. The junior kids (Grades 7 to 9) left for school just before noon and returned at the supper hour.
I was the only kid my age in our immediate neighborhood (the Picton twins went to a high school in New Westminster) so I had to amuse myself. It was spring and the great outdoors beckoned. Behind our house was the forest that extended for miles along that slope of the ridge. I tramped all through those woods and made a point of visiting a few large ravines (there were a handful of ponds scattered through those woods and the drainage was by creeks which, over time, carved those ravines).
When I was in Australia I was asked about 'bush walking' in Canada. I told my interlocutors that I loved hiking and often tramped through the woods. "Wasn't I afraid of bears?" I never saw any!
However, there was one plant found in some of the ravines that gave me pause - devils' club. It is a plant that sends up large stalks covered by spines that could be toxic. I knew how to recognize those plants and gave them a wide berth.
Dad's 'building the house around us' idea did not really work out all that well so, when we heard of a house up on the 'Hill' that was for rent, he jumped at the opportunity to move us back up there.
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Monday, 12 September 2011
Dawes Hill - Part 1
For a number of years during the 1930s and the early '40s, Dad had not been able to find steady employment in one place. However, in 1943, he found work at the Capilano Shingle Mill in New Westminster. For many months he boarded at a home in New Westminster while the rest of us continued to live in Ruskin. I attended Grade 1 at Ruskin Elementary School across the road from where we continued to live. Dad came home on Friday evening via the country bus and returned on Sunday evening. Then one of his workmates heard of a house that was vacant on Dawes Hill. Dad went to see it, found it to be suitable, so Mom, Alda and I moved there in August. My youngest sister (Gladys but known to all as 'Babs') was born near the end of December in that year.
'Dawes Hill' is not actually a hill but part of a ridge that extends all the way from Point Grey in Vancouver to the city of Port Coquitlam which lies near the east bank of the Coquitlam River.
Before I proceed further, here is a short history.
Early in the 20th Century, Fraser Mills was created and it grew to be the largest lumber mill in the British Commonwealth and, in size, second only to a mill in the State of Oregon.
The mill needed employees so, shortly after its creation, a Father Maillard brought a group of Quebecois settlers out west and formed the community of Maillardville. As these folk were French, the community followed the French/Canadian plan for a town. The church - Our Lady of Lourdes - was erected in a town square with the settlers building their homes - and the Catholic school - around it. By the time that we arrived in the area that community had grown and the 'Main Street' had shifted a couple of blocks to the south. That was where most of the shops, the public school, and the Municipal Hall were located.
.JPG)
Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church in Maillardville
A friend who moved from Toronto to Vancouver - and who reads my blogs - drove out to Maillardville and to Dawes Hill with his camera. He took a number of photos of the old neighborhood of Dawes Hill (much changed from when we lived there) and I am adding three of his photos to this blog.
Actually, the main street became a part of a highway from Vancouver heading east through the northern part of the Fraser Valley. The stretch through Maillardville was Brunette Street, Pitt River Road further along and then the Lougheed Highway. Where one part of the named road became the next one I never did determine!
We lived about a mile east of the public school (which was at the eastern edge of Maillardville). Most of our neighbors were employees of Fraser Mills with two or three others working where Dad did.
The house which Dad was able to rent was situated just across the road from the brow of the hill and we had a panoramic view of Fraser Mills, most of Maillardville and we could see down the Fraser River to the Patullo Bridge that crossed from New Westminster to Surrey.
.JPG)
Fraser Mills had a huge smoke stack and attached to it was a deep booming whistle. If there was an emergency there - like a fire - the whistle would blow repeatedly and everybody would rush to where they could view the valley. Thank God, there never was a major fire.
Our walk to school and back each day was down the hill, across the highway and along the shoulder (our left facing oncoming traffic) to where it became Brunette Street and the school. The walk home every afternoon was, of course, the reverse. We kids - there must have been a dozen or more of us - never had an accident. However, a neighbor boy (who attended the Catholic school) was killed one morning when his bicycle arrived at the highway - he braked, his bike slid on some loose gravel and he was thrown beneath a car. He was our paper boy and a very popular lad. That accident happened more than 60 years ago but I still think of him - Marcel Dolbec.
.JPG)
Years later I lived for a while in Prince George, B.C. during the boom years of that city. To the north of the town was an unorganized area referred to by some wags as "the dog's breakfast" - there were no building codes and anybody could build whatever he or she wanted. Dawes Hill, on the other hand, was a part of the Municipality of Coquitlam but our unofficial village was a 'dog's breakfast' as there were no building codes that I was aware of either.
Our house was up from the road with a full basement and the main floor and upper floor above that. In front of the house - and sloping down to the road - was a small orchard with cherry, apple and plum trees, To the upper side of the house was a grape arbor and, below it, a vegetable garden. In the summer and autumn months we did not lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. There was a chicken pen so we had fresh eggs and, occasionally, a roast chicken dinner. For fresh milk we walked up a lane beside the house (past three other houses), through a fence and to yet another house. Those people had a few dairy cows.
World War II began when I was 4 or 5 years old and lasted until I was 9 - the years when I had a very vivid imagination. Somewhere across the Fraser River there was a searchlight that, during late autumn, winter and early spring evenings, penetrated the night sky. Our evening walk to buy fresh milk was in the direction of where the searchlights were coming from. Instead of making me feel secure it frightened me - I thought that bombers were on their way.
Four roads led down the hill to the highway - Dawes Hill Road, Peterson, Wiltshire and Hillside. The latter was no more than a lane while Wiltshire was the shortest route down the slope and was the only one that was paved. Our most direct walk to school was down Dawes Hill Road which was no trouble in the morning but seemingly a long hike up in the afternoon.
We lived in that house from August 1943 until March 1946. In autumn in B.C. torrential rains can come. On one of those autumn nights the heavens literally opened with downpours. The next morning we discovered that run off water had carved a gulch down the middle of Dawes Hill Road. It was rumored that army motorcyclists came to use that road during the storm so they could gain experience in riding over shell pocked terrain at the European front! In retrospect I think that this was more an 'urban legend' than reality.
Our experience one day during our walk home was real - we were met by an army convoy traveling along the highway. There were no military bases anywhere near where we lived (that we knew of) so we boys and girls were awestruck.
We seemed to have had more than our share of eccentric men living near us. There was Harold Escott who was a "Remittance Man" - an Englishman who was paid to stay away from his home in England. Originally he had gone to the West Indies but, having become ill with malaria, he moved to the cooler climate of the B.C. Coast. His cabin (shack) was in the bush. He was a nice elderly gentleman - although a bit odd. I understand that he had a large - and valuable - collection of books which he willed to the Library at the University of British Columbia. Unfortunately, the dampness of his simple dwelling in the forest damaged many of the books.
Not far away was the other Harold - (Harold Crewdson). This gentleman had fought in World War I where he had lost an arm. He used his military discharge money to purchase a few acres of land and built a beautiful house. There had been a Mrs Crewdson who had died before we moved into the neighborhood and there were children who were married and lived in Vancouver.
The property had been cleared and a fairly extensive orchard planted. Mostly proper 'farmland' did not exist - just 'rock farms'. Mr Crewdson's property had been cleared of rocks which had been left in huge piles. He purchased some hives of bees which pollinated the fruit tree blossoms and then he collected the honey. With the fruit and the honey he made wines and mead which Dad claimed were among the finest that he had tasted. Mr. C's favorite storage places for the bottles of wine were under the rock piles. When he wanted to open a bottle he would have to go look for it but he could never remember which rock pile was which so some of his beverages aged wonderfully well!
An older couple lived three doors north of where we lived. Mr. Durr had served in the British Army in India and he gave Alda and I names that he claimed were from India. While I have no recollection of what Alda's nickname meant, mine was said to mean 'wild man of the bush'! I am not sure if that was a compliment or not! This gentleman's son was the man who had told Dad about the house being available for rent.
Next door to us (over the back fence) were Mr and Mrs. Boisse and their son Maurice who was reported to be an orphan of the Spanish Civil War. Mr. Boisse worked somewhere in the forestry industry, raised sheep on his few acres, and rode a motorcycle which had a sidecar. He was quite involved in union work and I remember a few Sunday afternoons when he loaded his son - Maurice - Alda and I into the sidecar and took us into town. While he attended to union business we three kids amused ourselves on the streets of Vancouver or New Westminster. In the 1940s the downtown areas of Canadian cities were deserted so there was no perceived threat to our safety. Those outings were fun.
Across the road from us was a French Canadian family who were quite lively and entertaining. There was a son and two daughters who were a few years older than Alda and I. The mother was warmhearted but she could be coarse - and gave us a lot of amusement. One afternoon their yard was in an uproar. The boy had put on one of his sister's dresses and the girls were chasing him and screaming at him in anger, He was afraid of what they would do if the caught him. Watching was lots of fun.
At the top of the lane - next to the fence surrounding the dairy farm - lived the Poirier family. The father had joined the Canadian Army and was serving in Europe leaving behind his wife to raise seven children. The oldest son had moved to a community in the Cariboo and I did not meet him until the wedding of one of his sisters where he met my sister, Alda, for the first time. A few years later they were married, beget five children, worked hard and were happy until he passed away in August 2004.
The Poiriers were always part of our family's existence until all were married and living in various parts of B.C.
World War II came to its bloody conclusion in August of 1945. When the news came over the radio that the Japanese had surrendered, Dad came out onto our front porch with his shotgun. He aimed it at the sky and pulled the trigger. Mrs. Emond (across the road) was out congratulating with the neighbor lady on the other side. At the sound of the 'boom' she jumped and screamed, whirled around and shouted every profane word that she knew - and there were a number - at Dad while we laughed.
Some Mennonite folk had come to Ruskin and set up a Sunday School in the Community Hall. Alda and I had enjoyed attending and missed it when we moved. So Mom wrote and invited them to come to Dawes Hill and set up a Sunday School there. They met in our small living room for a while and then a neighbor - with a larger living room - offered her house. That Sunday School moved to other houses and lasted for about fifteen years. The highlight of the first couple of years was the summer Daily Vacation Bible School. Two young men came and pitched a couple of tents in a vacant lot. We would go for lessons in the mornings and then these young men would lead we boys on merry romps in the woods. The week ended with an evening 'concert' which our parents attended. Those are wonderful memories.
For the sake of some brevity, I am going to break this narrative into three segments.
Friday, 9 September 2011
Home to Canada
In September of 1965, the fifth anniversary of my trip to Australia came and passed and I began receiving hints in letters from Mom that it was time that I returned home.
At that time all of the banks had an in-house travel agency so I made inquiries at the bank that I used and was directed to their travel department. What was shown to me was very intriguing so I booked a fare on that trip and began paying for it by installments.
The itinerary was a sailing from Sydney to Manilla, Hong Kong and Singapore, train travel to Bangkok, a plane over Burma to Calcutta, a trip up the Ganges to Benares and then across to Mumbai (with a stop in Agra along the way). In Mumbai I would join a bus camping trip through Pakistan, Iran. Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to Turkey. In Istanbul we would have boarded the Orient Express for the ride to London. From London by ship to New York and then by train to Montreal and across Canada to New Westminster. In the Middle East I would have seen Isfahan, Qom, Petra and the Arab controlled portion of Jerusalem. A dream trip to end all dream trips!
I was at work on November 17 when I received a message that there was a telegram waiting for me at the boarding house. I telephoned there and asked Fred Carroll to open and read the contents to me. It contained the news that Dad had died suddenly. He had not been well earlier in the year and I understood that he had recovered (he had returned to work). During the earlier illness the doctor had discovered an aneurism in his body but the technique had not been developed by which to excise it.
He had been at work - on the afternoon shift - the day before, had come home and went to bed. Mom and Dad had an appointment in New Westminster the next morning so she got up early to go downstairs to put on the coffee and to begin breakfast preparations. She went back upstairs to waken Dad and discovered that he was dead. My kid brother, Danny, was sleeping in a neighboring bedroom so she woke him to ask him to check what she had found was correct. Dan, who was just a teenager - 16 years old (he passed away suddenly in 2008) - confirmed what Mom had discovered to be true.
When I read the telegram I remembered a dream that I had had the night before. In my dream I had gone to the home of friends where I visited frequently. In the dream I was alone in the living room when there was a knock at the front door. I opened it, Dad was standing on the stoop, wordlessly we hugged and the dream ended. A few years ago I was in correspondence with a Canadian author whose books are compilations of Canadian 'ghost stories'. I told him my story and he replied that that phenomena is not at all uncommon.
Word of my news spread rapidly through the office and the Office Manager urged me to go home for the day. At the boardinghouse I read the telegram and then I went over to Kedron Methodist Church where I saw the Rev. Mr. Morton. Upon hearing my news he immediately (as there was no hope of me being home for the funeral) began planning a Memorial Service to be held on Saturday morning to coincide - as close as possible - with the time of the funeral at home. There were about 50 people at the service (including a dozen or so from Dunlop Rubber) and I was very touched.
My first task on Monday was to go to the travel agency to cancel my reservations for the overland trip and to book an air ticket home. However, as I could not make it in time for the funeral, I delayed my departure until Friday, December 17. In the meantime I was feted by various groups of people and given a number of lovely gifts. I will be forever grateful for all of that love.
Jets were a new means of transportation at that time. Trans Australian Airlines had purchased some 'Whispering T-jets' which were the latest wonder. I flew on one of them from Brisbane to Sydney. The word 'whispering' was an anomaly - they were, with the engines located above the back of the plane, very noisy.
As jets that were able to fly nonstop for long distances had not yet been created, I had to travel 'hop, skip, and jump' to Vancouver. My flight on to North America did not leave Sydney until Saturday evening - which was the first of two Saturdays that I lived through in 1965. I spent the day by visiting all of my haunts when I lived in Sydney. "Down Memory Lane" so to speak.
The Qantas flight left Sydney late Saturday evening, landed at Nandi International Airport in the Fiji Islands for refueling (and the Duty Free Shop) and then went on to Honolulu. Shortly after leaving Nandi we crossed the International Date Line and landed on the second Saturday morning (I had lost a day while crossing the Pacific on the SS Iberia in 1960).
In Honolulu we had to clear US Immigration and Customs. As luck would have it, we landed around the same time as aircraft from Manilla and Tokyo so had to queue with passengers from those aircraft in order to gain clearance to enter the U.S. In front of me was a late middle-aged American woman who was attempting to bring home, from Tokyo, what looked like the contents of a nursery. Naturally, practically all of the shrubbery was banned from the United States. The woman was so indignant - after all, she WAS an American!
In Honolulu I had an entire day to kill so I took a tour out to the newly completed 'Polynesian Village' on the north side of Oahu. The village - built by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) - was a collection of 'villages' depicting all of the island cultures to be found across the Pacific. It was fascinating.
My flight onward was supposed to be a Canadian Pacific Airlines flight from Honolulu to Vancouver. However, it was outbound from Amsterdam via Toronto and Vancouver to Honolulu and was delayed for upwards to twelve hours. As I had written home the details of my itinerary I was concerned that my folks would be at the airport to meet me at the time I mentioned in my letter to them. Therefore I arranged for a different flight.
This one was via Northwest/Orient Airlines to Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington (the aircraft was going on from there to Minneapolis and New York City - talk about a milk run!) and then another transfer to a United Airlines flight for the final hop to Vancouver. When I arrived in Seattle, I telephoned home - and learned that my letter containing my itinerary had not arrived. Dan was not yet old enough to drive so they had to scramble to find somebody else who could drive them to the airport. They located two cars and drivers so they could meet me and bring me and my hand luggage home.
At that time all of the banks had an in-house travel agency so I made inquiries at the bank that I used and was directed to their travel department. What was shown to me was very intriguing so I booked a fare on that trip and began paying for it by installments.
The itinerary was a sailing from Sydney to Manilla, Hong Kong and Singapore, train travel to Bangkok, a plane over Burma to Calcutta, a trip up the Ganges to Benares and then across to Mumbai (with a stop in Agra along the way). In Mumbai I would join a bus camping trip through Pakistan, Iran. Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to Turkey. In Istanbul we would have boarded the Orient Express for the ride to London. From London by ship to New York and then by train to Montreal and across Canada to New Westminster. In the Middle East I would have seen Isfahan, Qom, Petra and the Arab controlled portion of Jerusalem. A dream trip to end all dream trips!
I was at work on November 17 when I received a message that there was a telegram waiting for me at the boarding house. I telephoned there and asked Fred Carroll to open and read the contents to me. It contained the news that Dad had died suddenly. He had not been well earlier in the year and I understood that he had recovered (he had returned to work). During the earlier illness the doctor had discovered an aneurism in his body but the technique had not been developed by which to excise it.
He had been at work - on the afternoon shift - the day before, had come home and went to bed. Mom and Dad had an appointment in New Westminster the next morning so she got up early to go downstairs to put on the coffee and to begin breakfast preparations. She went back upstairs to waken Dad and discovered that he was dead. My kid brother, Danny, was sleeping in a neighboring bedroom so she woke him to ask him to check what she had found was correct. Dan, who was just a teenager - 16 years old (he passed away suddenly in 2008) - confirmed what Mom had discovered to be true.
When I read the telegram I remembered a dream that I had had the night before. In my dream I had gone to the home of friends where I visited frequently. In the dream I was alone in the living room when there was a knock at the front door. I opened it, Dad was standing on the stoop, wordlessly we hugged and the dream ended. A few years ago I was in correspondence with a Canadian author whose books are compilations of Canadian 'ghost stories'. I told him my story and he replied that that phenomena is not at all uncommon.
Word of my news spread rapidly through the office and the Office Manager urged me to go home for the day. At the boardinghouse I read the telegram and then I went over to Kedron Methodist Church where I saw the Rev. Mr. Morton. Upon hearing my news he immediately (as there was no hope of me being home for the funeral) began planning a Memorial Service to be held on Saturday morning to coincide - as close as possible - with the time of the funeral at home. There were about 50 people at the service (including a dozen or so from Dunlop Rubber) and I was very touched.
My first task on Monday was to go to the travel agency to cancel my reservations for the overland trip and to book an air ticket home. However, as I could not make it in time for the funeral, I delayed my departure until Friday, December 17. In the meantime I was feted by various groups of people and given a number of lovely gifts. I will be forever grateful for all of that love.
Jets were a new means of transportation at that time. Trans Australian Airlines had purchased some 'Whispering T-jets' which were the latest wonder. I flew on one of them from Brisbane to Sydney. The word 'whispering' was an anomaly - they were, with the engines located above the back of the plane, very noisy.
As jets that were able to fly nonstop for long distances had not yet been created, I had to travel 'hop, skip, and jump' to Vancouver. My flight on to North America did not leave Sydney until Saturday evening - which was the first of two Saturdays that I lived through in 1965. I spent the day by visiting all of my haunts when I lived in Sydney. "Down Memory Lane" so to speak.
The Qantas flight left Sydney late Saturday evening, landed at Nandi International Airport in the Fiji Islands for refueling (and the Duty Free Shop) and then went on to Honolulu. Shortly after leaving Nandi we crossed the International Date Line and landed on the second Saturday morning (I had lost a day while crossing the Pacific on the SS Iberia in 1960).
In Honolulu we had to clear US Immigration and Customs. As luck would have it, we landed around the same time as aircraft from Manilla and Tokyo so had to queue with passengers from those aircraft in order to gain clearance to enter the U.S. In front of me was a late middle-aged American woman who was attempting to bring home, from Tokyo, what looked like the contents of a nursery. Naturally, practically all of the shrubbery was banned from the United States. The woman was so indignant - after all, she WAS an American!
In Honolulu I had an entire day to kill so I took a tour out to the newly completed 'Polynesian Village' on the north side of Oahu. The village - built by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) - was a collection of 'villages' depicting all of the island cultures to be found across the Pacific. It was fascinating.
My flight onward was supposed to be a Canadian Pacific Airlines flight from Honolulu to Vancouver. However, it was outbound from Amsterdam via Toronto and Vancouver to Honolulu and was delayed for upwards to twelve hours. As I had written home the details of my itinerary I was concerned that my folks would be at the airport to meet me at the time I mentioned in my letter to them. Therefore I arranged for a different flight.
This one was via Northwest/Orient Airlines to Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington (the aircraft was going on from there to Minneapolis and New York City - talk about a milk run!) and then another transfer to a United Airlines flight for the final hop to Vancouver. When I arrived in Seattle, I telephoned home - and learned that my letter containing my itinerary had not arrived. Dan was not yet old enough to drive so they had to scramble to find somebody else who could drive them to the airport. They located two cars and drivers so they could meet me and bring me and my hand luggage home.
Thursday, 8 September 2011
Brisbane
In an earlier post I shared an amusing quote about the mainland Australian capital cities. If you have read that blog, possibly you remember the statement that a citizen of Brisbane likely could make when meeting a stranger - "Come have a beer".
That syllogism summarizes my memories of the city and the people who live there - very friendly and laid back.
I lived in the same room in the same boardinghouse for most of the 2 1/2 years that I was there - and never had any cause to wish that I was elsewhere. There were a dozen or more lodgers (and when one left somebody else would take his bed almost immediately) . We all got along with each other.
Brisbane is a sub-tropical city and, therefore, the summers could be quite warm and humid while the winter days could be quite the opposite. In 1963 to 1965 there was no central air except in important buildings. Therefore, during the summer, one slept with no more than a sheet on top but winter was different. Then the prevailing winds seemed to be from over the hills and across the inland plain. The winds could be quite biting - and they brought the flies with them. The house was not insulated (beneath the window frame was a tiny gap through which I could see the outside).
The house at 81 Brookfield Road. Kedron was an older one. While it was a single story residence the land sloped from the road so that, while the front entrance (which was rarely used by anybody) was only one or two steps up from the ground level, the rear entrance was a story above the ground. Entering by the back door brought one into the kitchen. The dining table - a long rectangular piece of furniture - was around to the left. Oddly, at the back of the dining area was the bathroom with a shower and a sink. The toilet was directly below the shower at the foot of the outside stairs and backing on to the area where the cars were parked.
The driveway came into the east side of the yard and curved around to where drivers could park under the house and in rows. This arrangement, though odd to many of us from this side of the Pacific, was fairly common in that neighborhood.
Leaving the kitchen and walking past the dining area one passed bedrooms on the right. To the left was the living room and beyond it were more bedrooms. The Carroll's suite was on the right at the front of the house.
Being a warm climate, as well as the flies there were cockroaches and some of them made those found here seem awfully tiny! Every three months or so the exterminators came in - we boarders were warned in advance - and fumigated thoroughly. After they left there was quite a stench of chemicals but very few 'roaches. When they did begin to reappear it always seemed that they were sighted first in the downstairs toilet room.
The city - like all cities in the 'New World' - sprawled. While there were buses the main forms of transportation were streetcars and suburban trains. There was a streetcar stop about a block away and that streetcar passed right in front of the Dunlop Rubber building so it gave me easy access to work. The Dunlop building was on the north side of downtown and within walking distance of the major stores thereby making it easy for me to shop during my lunch hour.
Not long after I returned to Canada a major fire destroyed the streetcar barns. From photos that I have seen, it looks like Brisbane now has a very modern rail transit system.
The suburban trains were old as well and many still used steam power. The cars were not air conditioned so riders lowered the windows. Whenever the train passed beneath an over pass - or through a tunnel - the passengers would hastily raise the windows to prevent the engine smoke from entering the car.
One day the Beatles came to town and they were lodged in the 'premier hotel' near the river to the south of downtown. That was not that far from where I worked so, out of curiosity, I walked there at lunch and saw the usual gaggle of screaming teeny-boppers. Why I would have wanted to view that I don't remember!
Always I have loved theatrical productions and had seen some in Sydney and in Melbourne. Brisbane was to be no exception.
Two of the other boarders were a father (a widower) and a son, Brian. He - the son - was not really a theater kind of guy but he was curious so, when I purchased a ticket for a production of Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld", I bought one for him. His reaction was priceless. When the cast launched into the Can Can Brian was the first on his feet cheering and calling for an encore. There wasn't one encore - there were two.
I saw other productions - including the 'Farewell Concert' by Gracie Fields - as well as a production of Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" performed by a Maori troupe from New Zealand which was pure magic. Like the Welsh, the Maori's are noted for their singing abilities. A group who are not noted for their singing abilities are the Australian Aborigines but an Aboriginal man from Victoria (State) gave a concert - he had a beautiful tenor voice.
Some Soviet Bloc performers came to Brisbane as well and, much to the horror of some of my workmates (the Cold War was still very present in world affairs), I bought a ticket to each. I saw a performance of the Georgian State Dancers (these were from the republic in the Caucasus - not the American state) and a circus from Omsk.
I went to sporting events - auto races at the Exhibition grounds (not my favorite form of entertainment), rugby, Aussie rules football and cricket matches. The Harlem Globetrotters came to town too and another boarder and I took in that entertainment. I have not heard of them for years so I wonder if they have folded?
Like most major capitol cities, Brisbane hosts an annual fair. The Methodist Church in Queensland rented a booth in order to sell costume jewelry created from the gem stones found in parts of the State. I volunteered to help in that booth when I wasn't working. That was one way to visit the "Ex" for free!
That syllogism summarizes my memories of the city and the people who live there - very friendly and laid back.
I lived in the same room in the same boardinghouse for most of the 2 1/2 years that I was there - and never had any cause to wish that I was elsewhere. There were a dozen or more lodgers (and when one left somebody else would take his bed almost immediately) . We all got along with each other.
Brisbane is a sub-tropical city and, therefore, the summers could be quite warm and humid while the winter days could be quite the opposite. In 1963 to 1965 there was no central air except in important buildings. Therefore, during the summer, one slept with no more than a sheet on top but winter was different. Then the prevailing winds seemed to be from over the hills and across the inland plain. The winds could be quite biting - and they brought the flies with them. The house was not insulated (beneath the window frame was a tiny gap through which I could see the outside).
The house at 81 Brookfield Road. Kedron was an older one. While it was a single story residence the land sloped from the road so that, while the front entrance (which was rarely used by anybody) was only one or two steps up from the ground level, the rear entrance was a story above the ground. Entering by the back door brought one into the kitchen. The dining table - a long rectangular piece of furniture - was around to the left. Oddly, at the back of the dining area was the bathroom with a shower and a sink. The toilet was directly below the shower at the foot of the outside stairs and backing on to the area where the cars were parked.
The driveway came into the east side of the yard and curved around to where drivers could park under the house and in rows. This arrangement, though odd to many of us from this side of the Pacific, was fairly common in that neighborhood.
Leaving the kitchen and walking past the dining area one passed bedrooms on the right. To the left was the living room and beyond it were more bedrooms. The Carroll's suite was on the right at the front of the house.
Being a warm climate, as well as the flies there were cockroaches and some of them made those found here seem awfully tiny! Every three months or so the exterminators came in - we boarders were warned in advance - and fumigated thoroughly. After they left there was quite a stench of chemicals but very few 'roaches. When they did begin to reappear it always seemed that they were sighted first in the downstairs toilet room.
The city - like all cities in the 'New World' - sprawled. While there were buses the main forms of transportation were streetcars and suburban trains. There was a streetcar stop about a block away and that streetcar passed right in front of the Dunlop Rubber building so it gave me easy access to work. The Dunlop building was on the north side of downtown and within walking distance of the major stores thereby making it easy for me to shop during my lunch hour.
Not long after I returned to Canada a major fire destroyed the streetcar barns. From photos that I have seen, it looks like Brisbane now has a very modern rail transit system.
The suburban trains were old as well and many still used steam power. The cars were not air conditioned so riders lowered the windows. Whenever the train passed beneath an over pass - or through a tunnel - the passengers would hastily raise the windows to prevent the engine smoke from entering the car.
One day the Beatles came to town and they were lodged in the 'premier hotel' near the river to the south of downtown. That was not that far from where I worked so, out of curiosity, I walked there at lunch and saw the usual gaggle of screaming teeny-boppers. Why I would have wanted to view that I don't remember!
Always I have loved theatrical productions and had seen some in Sydney and in Melbourne. Brisbane was to be no exception.
Two of the other boarders were a father (a widower) and a son, Brian. He - the son - was not really a theater kind of guy but he was curious so, when I purchased a ticket for a production of Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld", I bought one for him. His reaction was priceless. When the cast launched into the Can Can Brian was the first on his feet cheering and calling for an encore. There wasn't one encore - there were two.
I saw other productions - including the 'Farewell Concert' by Gracie Fields - as well as a production of Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" performed by a Maori troupe from New Zealand which was pure magic. Like the Welsh, the Maori's are noted for their singing abilities. A group who are not noted for their singing abilities are the Australian Aborigines but an Aboriginal man from Victoria (State) gave a concert - he had a beautiful tenor voice.
Some Soviet Bloc performers came to Brisbane as well and, much to the horror of some of my workmates (the Cold War was still very present in world affairs), I bought a ticket to each. I saw a performance of the Georgian State Dancers (these were from the republic in the Caucasus - not the American state) and a circus from Omsk.
I went to sporting events - auto races at the Exhibition grounds (not my favorite form of entertainment), rugby, Aussie rules football and cricket matches. The Harlem Globetrotters came to town too and another boarder and I took in that entertainment. I have not heard of them for years so I wonder if they have folded?
Like most major capitol cities, Brisbane hosts an annual fair. The Methodist Church in Queensland rented a booth in order to sell costume jewelry created from the gem stones found in parts of the State. I volunteered to help in that booth when I wasn't working. That was one way to visit the "Ex" for free!
Monday, 5 September 2011
Kedron Methodist Church
When I was about six years old some Mennonite people came to the Community Hall in Ruskin to set up a Sunday School. While the community of Whonnock to the west had something like seven churches and Silverdale to the east had one or two, Ruskin did not have any. The Mennonites came to communities with no churches nor organized Sunday Schools in an attempt to fill the void.
Our family was not particularly religious. Dad had grown up in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Montreal while Mom - as far as I know - had received no religious instructions. Her parents were not necessarily atheists but were Deists. On the other hand my Grandfather's sisters - Aunt Emma and Aunt Edith - were devout Christian ladies. Aunt Emma belonged to the Glad Tidings Tabernacle in Vancouver while Aunt Edith was a Baptist. The former was always a gentle sweetie while Aunt Edith was a strict disciplinarian and somewhat frightening (until she became elderly and then mellowed). Therefore their religious communities did not appeal to me.
My parents had been married by an itinerant United Church of Canada minister (the wedding was held in my grandmother's garden) so that was the denomination to which we always identified.
In Australia - when I did attend church - I went to one of the three denominations that made up the United Church of Canada (Methodist, Presbyterian or Congregationalist).
In Alice Springs, the John Flynn Memorial Church was a 'Uniting Church' and the pastors could be from any one of the three 'parent' denominations. The Reverend Lloyd Shirley was from a Methodist background.
When I settled into the boarding house on Brookfield Road in Kedron I looked in the yellow pages for any of the churches which represented my background. As the crow flies, the Presbyterian was the closest while the Methodist was the easiest to walk to. I did - and found a friendly, warm and welcoming group of people. When I arrived the minister was a man in late middle age (Reverend Gayden) but he was replaced shortly by Rev. Morton (the Methodist Conference rotated the clergy every three years).
Myself and two of the senior students - Kedron Methodist Church, Brisbane, Queensland
Some of the Sunday School. To my left is the minister's family, the Mortons.
I remained a faithful attendee - and volunteer - during all of my time in Brisbane.
The Methodist Church in Australia - particularly in Queensland - had a vigorously active Youth Ministry and seemed to have 'camps' all over the place. I attended three different camp Youth Conferences in different parts of the region and had a wonderful time.
The largest camp was down at Southport a few miles to the north of Surfers Paradise. Christmas arrives in the middle of summer Down Under and the youth flock to the beaches - especially to those along the Gold Coast. The Methodist Church - under the leadership of the very dynamic Rev. Ivan Alcorn - owned a huge camp at Southport and there - as well as at Surfers Paradise and Burleigh Heads - 'cabarets' were held each evening during the Christmas break. Methodist young people hit the beaches and boardwalks with flyers advertising the evening dances to every young person within reach. The attendance at these events was very good and, yes, evangelizing was part of it (this part of the evening did make me feel uncomfortable).
This was how I came to experience that very popular vacation spot - the Gold Coast.
Also. there were camps at a much smaller surfing center to the north of Brisbane (Caloundra) and near the community of Springdale in the highlands west of the Gold Coast on the New South Wales/Queensland border I attended camps at both of those locations.
The one at the highland camp was over an Easter weekend and, on Easter Sunday morning, a few of we young men got up before sunrise and hiked to the top of one of the peaks where we sat and watched the sun rise out of the Pacific Ocean miles to the east of where we were located.
The community near this camp is in an apple growing area - the only one in Queensland - and is the only place in that State that does receive the occasional recorded snow fall. I remember one Sunday morning when a radio newscaster announced that snow was falling up there. Our landlords loaded the kids into the car and left the boarding house to us - they were on their way for their first glimpse of real snow!.
This is a photo of the attendees at one of the Youth Camps - which one I can not recall.
It seemed to me that all Methodist teens - when they reach they age for Confirmation - are given a hymn book. Not ones with just the words but ones with the words between the lines of music. Therefore all - except the completely tone deaf - learn to read music and to sing parts (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). Also more than one could play a piano of which there was always one in the camp lounge.
I have always loved music so young voices singing hymns in near perfect harmony was wonderful.
Often I think back to those camps with feelings of nostalgia.
Our family was not particularly religious. Dad had grown up in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Montreal while Mom - as far as I know - had received no religious instructions. Her parents were not necessarily atheists but were Deists. On the other hand my Grandfather's sisters - Aunt Emma and Aunt Edith - were devout Christian ladies. Aunt Emma belonged to the Glad Tidings Tabernacle in Vancouver while Aunt Edith was a Baptist. The former was always a gentle sweetie while Aunt Edith was a strict disciplinarian and somewhat frightening (until she became elderly and then mellowed). Therefore their religious communities did not appeal to me.
My parents had been married by an itinerant United Church of Canada minister (the wedding was held in my grandmother's garden) so that was the denomination to which we always identified.
In Australia - when I did attend church - I went to one of the three denominations that made up the United Church of Canada (Methodist, Presbyterian or Congregationalist).
In Alice Springs, the John Flynn Memorial Church was a 'Uniting Church' and the pastors could be from any one of the three 'parent' denominations. The Reverend Lloyd Shirley was from a Methodist background.
When I settled into the boarding house on Brookfield Road in Kedron I looked in the yellow pages for any of the churches which represented my background. As the crow flies, the Presbyterian was the closest while the Methodist was the easiest to walk to. I did - and found a friendly, warm and welcoming group of people. When I arrived the minister was a man in late middle age (Reverend Gayden) but he was replaced shortly by Rev. Morton (the Methodist Conference rotated the clergy every three years).
I remained a faithful attendee - and volunteer - during all of my time in Brisbane.
The Methodist Church in Australia - particularly in Queensland - had a vigorously active Youth Ministry and seemed to have 'camps' all over the place. I attended three different camp Youth Conferences in different parts of the region and had a wonderful time.
The largest camp was down at Southport a few miles to the north of Surfers Paradise. Christmas arrives in the middle of summer Down Under and the youth flock to the beaches - especially to those along the Gold Coast. The Methodist Church - under the leadership of the very dynamic Rev. Ivan Alcorn - owned a huge camp at Southport and there - as well as at Surfers Paradise and Burleigh Heads - 'cabarets' were held each evening during the Christmas break. Methodist young people hit the beaches and boardwalks with flyers advertising the evening dances to every young person within reach. The attendance at these events was very good and, yes, evangelizing was part of it (this part of the evening did make me feel uncomfortable).
This was how I came to experience that very popular vacation spot - the Gold Coast.
Also. there were camps at a much smaller surfing center to the north of Brisbane (Caloundra) and near the community of Springdale in the highlands west of the Gold Coast on the New South Wales/Queensland border I attended camps at both of those locations.
The one at the highland camp was over an Easter weekend and, on Easter Sunday morning, a few of we young men got up before sunrise and hiked to the top of one of the peaks where we sat and watched the sun rise out of the Pacific Ocean miles to the east of where we were located.
The community near this camp is in an apple growing area - the only one in Queensland - and is the only place in that State that does receive the occasional recorded snow fall. I remember one Sunday morning when a radio newscaster announced that snow was falling up there. Our landlords loaded the kids into the car and left the boarding house to us - they were on their way for their first glimpse of real snow!.
It seemed to me that all Methodist teens - when they reach they age for Confirmation - are given a hymn book. Not ones with just the words but ones with the words between the lines of music. Therefore all - except the completely tone deaf - learn to read music and to sing parts (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). Also more than one could play a piano of which there was always one in the camp lounge.
I have always loved music so young voices singing hymns in near perfect harmony was wonderful.
Often I think back to those camps with feelings of nostalgia.
Saturday, 3 September 2011
Camping Trip Around Queensland.
During July, 1964 I saw an advertisement in the newspaper which I replied to immediately . It was for a bus camping tour of the State of Queensland towards the end of August (winter down under). I booked a seat and, on Monday, August 24, I was up very early and called a cab to take me down to the main bus station in Brisbane.
I was nonplussed to discover that the vehicle I was to board was a rejuvenated school bus! Not to worry - that was merely the shuttle up the Toll Bar Road to Toowoomba. The official buses (two of them) had been driven up from Sydney with passengers from the south and were waiting there - 28 seat motor coaches. My first seat was in the back and I was the companion of a middle-aged woman named Clare. She and I were 'partners' for the entire trip. She was a veteran camper - I was not - and the deal was that I would be collecting the firewood while she pitched both of our tents. We got along famously.
If memory serves me correctly, I was - at 29 - the youngest person on that trip.
As for being in the back seat - the capacity of each bus was 28 passengers and, each day when we boarded the bus, we moved one seat. We began in the rear seat but worked our way up to the seat behind the driver followed by the seat immediately behind the front door and then, row by row, back to the rear seat. The system worked well.
From Toowoomba we headed west along a highway that was very good for most of that day - paved for quite a while, then a well maintained gravel highway which eventually deteriorated to being no more than a couple of ruts in the dirt and the sand. The latter condition did cause some concern but the driver was skilled and we never became bogged down (nor did the other bus).
Inland Queensland - like the Canadian/American plains - is a wheat and crop growing area. Eventually, though, 'farmland' gave way to grazing for both cattle and sheep. We went through many towns and hamlets and we were a 'seven day wonder' in many of those hot and dusty places.
The further we went the further apart became the settlements and we stopped at stations ('ranches') for water and road directions. One of those stations was called Roseberth which - for us - was a source of amusement as well as pathos. The buses stopped there so that the drivers could ask directions for the remaining distance to the hamlet of Birdsville - considered to be the most remote community in Australia.
When the drivers got off the buses in order to confer with the Station Manager members of his family came out of the house to view the wonder of the vehicles and the passengers. One of the residents was a little boy of about 3 or 4 years. He was heard to exclaim, "Look at all the people! There must be a hundred head on there!". I don't believe that any of us had ever been referred to as cattle before - or since!
The pathos for we passengers came when we realized that this was where a tragedy had unfolded the previous Christmas. A young man had come out from England to work on the station and his parents and a sibling followed in order to spend Christmas with him. The lad was excited and decided to go down to Adelaide where he would buy a car and then meet the ship. From reports, the meeting was successful and then the young man set out to drive his family to the station up in Queensland. It was known that the family had passed through Marree (where I had changed trains while on my way to Alice Springs) and then vanished. Eventually the car was found and, nearby, the bodies of that family who had tried to cross the unfamiliar desert in the heat of summer.
From Roseberth Station the bus drivers drove the remaining 18 miles to Birdsville where we camped for the night - and where our arrival was a huge sensation. At that time Birdsville had a population of about 50 people - 12 white and 38 Aborigines. Needless to say, some of those residents were real characters. You couldn't have paid me enough money to live there - nor could you have paid those residents to live anywhere else!
Upon leaving Birdsville the bus drivers took us south to the South Australian border. This allowed us to claim that, indeed, we had driven on the Birdsville Track (a storied route Down Under) and also gave us a view of the terrible terrain which the British family had tried to cross on their fateful trip.
From Birdsville we traveled for many miles over roads that, sometimes, were no more than tracks across the desert. However - unlike the photos we have seen of the Sahara and other world deserts - while there was some sand (and a number of colorful sand dunes) - much of the land was pebbly with shrubs and spinefex (a low growing cactus like plant). At a couple of points the roads took us over the border into the Northern Territory and back. Lonely and dusty but still a fascinating trip. There were a number of river and stream crossings along that section and, mostly, they were concrete causeways across dry stream beds.
On the way we called into two large 'cattle stations' - Lake Nash and Austral Downs. Lake Nash was beautiful as it sits on the edge of a billabong which is a large pond left behind when the river stops flowing - that is until the monsoon rains return in the summer.
All along the route we saw Australian wildlife - lots and lots of emus but, surprisingly, only a few kangaroos - and most of them were road kill. The most awesome sight was the bird life - many many cockatoos and at least one flock of colorful parrots. Further on were ant hills (both red and grey) - a misnomer as the insects actually are a variety of termites. One other 'wild thing' that was in abundance out there - as they were in Alice Springs - were flies. Probably you have seen photos of outback people wearing 'bush hats' decorated with pieces of cork tied at the ends of strings hanging from the hat brims. These are to prevent flies from landing on moist parts of the face - mouth, nostrils and eyes.
Communities in the central northern part of Queensland are storied - because they were landing places for aircraft that were fighting the Japanese in Indonesia and New Guinea. Burketown and Normanton (both on the Gulf of Carpentaria) are two of them. We visited both of those places - then sleepy small towns after their glory days during World War II.
The next leg of the journey was up over the uplands to the east and down to Cairns on the coast.
The uplands had busy mining centers in the 19th century and many of them were then ghost towns. One community, though, had a fair sized deposit of agates - a semi-precious stone - and so we were able to purchase decorated pieces of jewelry.
From there we went on up to the top of the Continental Divide and onto the Atherton Tablelands. Up there - and down to the coast - the vegetation was mainly jungle. There is one well known site which we visited - a curtain fig tree. The curtain fig is a parasite, not the fruit bearing fig but a relative, the seeds of which land in a crotch of another jungle tree where it sprouts sending tendrils down to the ground as roots. Eventually the host tree dies leaving this enormous parasite towering high in the jungle with its roots like a thick hemp curtain. To get there we left the buses down on the highway and walked up a well-marked trail. All around were the calls of birds and other tropical noises. I found the experience quite awesome!
A few miles away (all of these sites are located in a National Park) are two lakes. At the hotel on one of them the manager was persuaded into taking some of us out in his motor launch to the jungle on the other side. As we cruised in towards the shore we saw an enormous python resting on huge lily pads soaking up warmth from the misty sunshine. The temperature was 72F.
In my journal I noted that I would never forget the sighting of the snake - but I was wrong. Not having read my journal for a number of years I had completely forgotten about the python - but had a clear memory of the walk through the jungle to the curtain fig tree!
At the end of that day we were down on the coast in Cairns - that lovely northern city. We stayed there for a couple of days and, on one of them, many of us took the launch across to Green Island - the northern anchor of the Great Barrier Reef.
This was a few months after my trip to Heron Island and I could not help but to compare the two tropical paradises. Green Island is much closer to the mainland - only 1 1/2 hours to cross - while Heron is further and larger. As Green Island is closer to Cairns than Heron Island is to Gladstone, it is more developed.
When I crossed to Heron Island it was under relatively stormy conditions whereas the crossing to Green Island was on a lovely day - therefore the spectacular colors of the tropical sea were obvious - first bright blue, then emerald green (as we approached the Barrier Reef) and then milky green. I walked all the way around the atoll and then across it and visited the local aquarium before taking the launch back to the mainland.
There were two more excursions. One was the spectacular railway ride up the steep slope of the Tableland to a place named Kuranda. The train on which we traveled was fairly modern so it was possible to move from side to side in the car as the train went around curves opening new vistas. The station in Kuranda has flower beds on the platform and it is absolutely lovely.
Through my work at Dunlop Rubber I came to know the name of every community in Queensland and to be seeing many of these places for the first time was a real pleasure. Therefore I gladly accepted the opportunity to ride on the bus north from Cairns to Port Douglas passing through a number of other communities along the way. The escarpment angled to the northwest so the agricultural coastal plain became narrower and narrower. Still there were many fields of sugar cane along the way - as well as beaches beside the Coral Sea.
As the buses headed south along the coastal highway I saw more and more sugar cane - and even fires that were deliberately lit to burn out the underbrush (and chase out dangerous reptiles) so the cane cutters would have room to swing their machetes as they harvested the crop.
Two comments:-
Fires in the sugar cane fields are spectacular to watch - but not from the roadways. The order is "REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES!" Why? There are a number of types of poisonous snakes in Australia and the taipan - which lives in cane fields - is considered to be both the most ornery and the most deadly. No one in his right mind wants to meet an angry taipan - unless he is well armed with an instrument by which to kill it.
The second is the prevailing odor around burning sugar cane fields and around the mills which extract the sweet products from the cane. That aroma is of molasses - an overwhelming smell of molasses.
Leaving Cairns we traveled south to the larger city of Townsville. Most of the route was past cane fields and through the communities that thrived off of them. Some of the communities were picturesque while others were somewhat drab. One lovely town was Ingham - a lovely English name of a community that was almost entirely Italian!
The campground in Townsville was the loveliest one that we stayed at on this trip - but the 'regulars' there did not like us - we were up too early each morning! The grounds of this campground were well maintained and I camped beside a hibiscus bush the yellow flowers of which hung over my tent.
A few miles off of Townsville is the continental - as opposed to coral - Magnetic Island. Most of us spent the entire day over there. The island had three 'buses' which were converted flatbed trucks all gussied up. Each had a name (Flighty Flo, Nippy Nell and Galloping Gertie) with seats on the deck and a 'roof' of sorts overhead. They were free and one could hop on and off where ever one wished to.
After the day in Townsville (and on Magnetic Island) we continued south to the last major 'sugar town' of Mackay. There was a large sugar warehouse there into which we were able to look - at a mountain of brown sugar! I understand that the white sugar that we are used to seeing comes from local sugar mills located near where we grocery shop.
As we came nearer and nearer to Brisbane the towns (Maryborough, Gladstone, Bundaberg) were ones that I had visited while on trips north with Brisbane friends.
The people with whom I traveled were, by and large, quite nice. I do not remember one incident of hot temper and nasty words. One of the women on the other bus was a real character who 'read palms'. Normally I look upon the occult arts with a jaundiced eye but, towards the end of the trip, I allowed her to read my palm. It was a pleasant experience and I was amazed by what she perceived about me - most of it was absolutely correct!
If I had the chance would I book onto another trip like that one around Queensland? You bet I would!
I was nonplussed to discover that the vehicle I was to board was a rejuvenated school bus! Not to worry - that was merely the shuttle up the Toll Bar Road to Toowoomba. The official buses (two of them) had been driven up from Sydney with passengers from the south and were waiting there - 28 seat motor coaches. My first seat was in the back and I was the companion of a middle-aged woman named Clare. She and I were 'partners' for the entire trip. She was a veteran camper - I was not - and the deal was that I would be collecting the firewood while she pitched both of our tents. We got along famously.
If memory serves me correctly, I was - at 29 - the youngest person on that trip.
As for being in the back seat - the capacity of each bus was 28 passengers and, each day when we boarded the bus, we moved one seat. We began in the rear seat but worked our way up to the seat behind the driver followed by the seat immediately behind the front door and then, row by row, back to the rear seat. The system worked well.
From Toowoomba we headed west along a highway that was very good for most of that day - paved for quite a while, then a well maintained gravel highway which eventually deteriorated to being no more than a couple of ruts in the dirt and the sand. The latter condition did cause some concern but the driver was skilled and we never became bogged down (nor did the other bus).
Inland Queensland - like the Canadian/American plains - is a wheat and crop growing area. Eventually, though, 'farmland' gave way to grazing for both cattle and sheep. We went through many towns and hamlets and we were a 'seven day wonder' in many of those hot and dusty places.
The further we went the further apart became the settlements and we stopped at stations ('ranches') for water and road directions. One of those stations was called Roseberth which - for us - was a source of amusement as well as pathos. The buses stopped there so that the drivers could ask directions for the remaining distance to the hamlet of Birdsville - considered to be the most remote community in Australia.
When the drivers got off the buses in order to confer with the Station Manager members of his family came out of the house to view the wonder of the vehicles and the passengers. One of the residents was a little boy of about 3 or 4 years. He was heard to exclaim, "Look at all the people! There must be a hundred head on there!". I don't believe that any of us had ever been referred to as cattle before - or since!
The pathos for we passengers came when we realized that this was where a tragedy had unfolded the previous Christmas. A young man had come out from England to work on the station and his parents and a sibling followed in order to spend Christmas with him. The lad was excited and decided to go down to Adelaide where he would buy a car and then meet the ship. From reports, the meeting was successful and then the young man set out to drive his family to the station up in Queensland. It was known that the family had passed through Marree (where I had changed trains while on my way to Alice Springs) and then vanished. Eventually the car was found and, nearby, the bodies of that family who had tried to cross the unfamiliar desert in the heat of summer.
From Roseberth Station the bus drivers drove the remaining 18 miles to Birdsville where we camped for the night - and where our arrival was a huge sensation. At that time Birdsville had a population of about 50 people - 12 white and 38 Aborigines. Needless to say, some of those residents were real characters. You couldn't have paid me enough money to live there - nor could you have paid those residents to live anywhere else!
Upon leaving Birdsville the bus drivers took us south to the South Australian border. This allowed us to claim that, indeed, we had driven on the Birdsville Track (a storied route Down Under) and also gave us a view of the terrible terrain which the British family had tried to cross on their fateful trip.
From Birdsville we traveled for many miles over roads that, sometimes, were no more than tracks across the desert. However - unlike the photos we have seen of the Sahara and other world deserts - while there was some sand (and a number of colorful sand dunes) - much of the land was pebbly with shrubs and spinefex (a low growing cactus like plant). At a couple of points the roads took us over the border into the Northern Territory and back. Lonely and dusty but still a fascinating trip. There were a number of river and stream crossings along that section and, mostly, they were concrete causeways across dry stream beds.
On the way we called into two large 'cattle stations' - Lake Nash and Austral Downs. Lake Nash was beautiful as it sits on the edge of a billabong which is a large pond left behind when the river stops flowing - that is until the monsoon rains return in the summer.
All along the route we saw Australian wildlife - lots and lots of emus but, surprisingly, only a few kangaroos - and most of them were road kill. The most awesome sight was the bird life - many many cockatoos and at least one flock of colorful parrots. Further on were ant hills (both red and grey) - a misnomer as the insects actually are a variety of termites. One other 'wild thing' that was in abundance out there - as they were in Alice Springs - were flies. Probably you have seen photos of outback people wearing 'bush hats' decorated with pieces of cork tied at the ends of strings hanging from the hat brims. These are to prevent flies from landing on moist parts of the face - mouth, nostrils and eyes.
Communities in the central northern part of Queensland are storied - because they were landing places for aircraft that were fighting the Japanese in Indonesia and New Guinea. Burketown and Normanton (both on the Gulf of Carpentaria) are two of them. We visited both of those places - then sleepy small towns after their glory days during World War II.
The next leg of the journey was up over the uplands to the east and down to Cairns on the coast.
The uplands had busy mining centers in the 19th century and many of them were then ghost towns. One community, though, had a fair sized deposit of agates - a semi-precious stone - and so we were able to purchase decorated pieces of jewelry.
From there we went on up to the top of the Continental Divide and onto the Atherton Tablelands. Up there - and down to the coast - the vegetation was mainly jungle. There is one well known site which we visited - a curtain fig tree. The curtain fig is a parasite, not the fruit bearing fig but a relative, the seeds of which land in a crotch of another jungle tree where it sprouts sending tendrils down to the ground as roots. Eventually the host tree dies leaving this enormous parasite towering high in the jungle with its roots like a thick hemp curtain. To get there we left the buses down on the highway and walked up a well-marked trail. All around were the calls of birds and other tropical noises. I found the experience quite awesome!
A few miles away (all of these sites are located in a National Park) are two lakes. At the hotel on one of them the manager was persuaded into taking some of us out in his motor launch to the jungle on the other side. As we cruised in towards the shore we saw an enormous python resting on huge lily pads soaking up warmth from the misty sunshine. The temperature was 72F.
In my journal I noted that I would never forget the sighting of the snake - but I was wrong. Not having read my journal for a number of years I had completely forgotten about the python - but had a clear memory of the walk through the jungle to the curtain fig tree!
At the end of that day we were down on the coast in Cairns - that lovely northern city. We stayed there for a couple of days and, on one of them, many of us took the launch across to Green Island - the northern anchor of the Great Barrier Reef.
This was a few months after my trip to Heron Island and I could not help but to compare the two tropical paradises. Green Island is much closer to the mainland - only 1 1/2 hours to cross - while Heron is further and larger. As Green Island is closer to Cairns than Heron Island is to Gladstone, it is more developed.
When I crossed to Heron Island it was under relatively stormy conditions whereas the crossing to Green Island was on a lovely day - therefore the spectacular colors of the tropical sea were obvious - first bright blue, then emerald green (as we approached the Barrier Reef) and then milky green. I walked all the way around the atoll and then across it and visited the local aquarium before taking the launch back to the mainland.
There were two more excursions. One was the spectacular railway ride up the steep slope of the Tableland to a place named Kuranda. The train on which we traveled was fairly modern so it was possible to move from side to side in the car as the train went around curves opening new vistas. The station in Kuranda has flower beds on the platform and it is absolutely lovely.
Through my work at Dunlop Rubber I came to know the name of every community in Queensland and to be seeing many of these places for the first time was a real pleasure. Therefore I gladly accepted the opportunity to ride on the bus north from Cairns to Port Douglas passing through a number of other communities along the way. The escarpment angled to the northwest so the agricultural coastal plain became narrower and narrower. Still there were many fields of sugar cane along the way - as well as beaches beside the Coral Sea.
As the buses headed south along the coastal highway I saw more and more sugar cane - and even fires that were deliberately lit to burn out the underbrush (and chase out dangerous reptiles) so the cane cutters would have room to swing their machetes as they harvested the crop.
Two comments:-
Fires in the sugar cane fields are spectacular to watch - but not from the roadways. The order is "REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES!" Why? There are a number of types of poisonous snakes in Australia and the taipan - which lives in cane fields - is considered to be both the most ornery and the most deadly. No one in his right mind wants to meet an angry taipan - unless he is well armed with an instrument by which to kill it.
The second is the prevailing odor around burning sugar cane fields and around the mills which extract the sweet products from the cane. That aroma is of molasses - an overwhelming smell of molasses.
Leaving Cairns we traveled south to the larger city of Townsville. Most of the route was past cane fields and through the communities that thrived off of them. Some of the communities were picturesque while others were somewhat drab. One lovely town was Ingham - a lovely English name of a community that was almost entirely Italian!
The campground in Townsville was the loveliest one that we stayed at on this trip - but the 'regulars' there did not like us - we were up too early each morning! The grounds of this campground were well maintained and I camped beside a hibiscus bush the yellow flowers of which hung over my tent.
A few miles off of Townsville is the continental - as opposed to coral - Magnetic Island. Most of us spent the entire day over there. The island had three 'buses' which were converted flatbed trucks all gussied up. Each had a name (Flighty Flo, Nippy Nell and Galloping Gertie) with seats on the deck and a 'roof' of sorts overhead. They were free and one could hop on and off where ever one wished to.
After the day in Townsville (and on Magnetic Island) we continued south to the last major 'sugar town' of Mackay. There was a large sugar warehouse there into which we were able to look - at a mountain of brown sugar! I understand that the white sugar that we are used to seeing comes from local sugar mills located near where we grocery shop.
As we came nearer and nearer to Brisbane the towns (Maryborough, Gladstone, Bundaberg) were ones that I had visited while on trips north with Brisbane friends.
The people with whom I traveled were, by and large, quite nice. I do not remember one incident of hot temper and nasty words. One of the women on the other bus was a real character who 'read palms'. Normally I look upon the occult arts with a jaundiced eye but, towards the end of the trip, I allowed her to read my palm. It was a pleasant experience and I was amazed by what she perceived about me - most of it was absolutely correct!
If I had the chance would I book onto another trip like that one around Queensland? You bet I would!
Friday, 2 September 2011
Out of Town Excursions
Having steady employment - in Brisbane - and receiving weekly pay envelopes I was able to avail myself of out of town excursions. Not long after arriving in Brisbane (May 1963 - autumn down under) I read an advertisement for a day long bus trip up to the City of Toowoomba on the edge of the escarpment to the west of Brisbane. It was the annual Flower Festival. I booked a seat on the comfortable coach for the trip up and back.
The highlight of the day was the Flower Parade in which all of the entries were either covered by flower petals or carried huge bouquets. This was the first 'Flower Parade' that I had seen - since then I have been to the Rose Festival Parade in Portland, Oregon and I have watched the like parade from Pasadena, California on TV. The one in Toowoomba was as beautiful as the others. After the parade we were driven around the city in order to view the prize winning gardens.
One of the young women whom I had met while in Alice Springs kept in touch with me and invited me to join her and a girlfriend on a weekend trip to Heron Island which is a coral atoll at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. On a Friday evening we caught a Queensland Railway train from Brisbane up north to the town of Gladstone. What we were not aware of was that a cyclone was moving down the coast - but out to sea. However, the winds did affect the coastal areas which delayed our trip out to the island for one day. In the meantime, it was perfectly clear and calm in town. We had nothing to do but to book into a hotel and laze around a rather uninteresting place.
The next morning the off shore seas had calmed enough for the launch to come in with returning vacationers and pick us up to take us out to the reef. Also, in some parts of Australia, that was a school break week, so there were families on board. The launch was fairly new and quite comfortable. While we were still in the lee of off shore continental islands, the sea was relatively calm. Once we were clear of the coast islands the water became quite rough. I am used to being out on the water and have never been subject to seasickness - therefore, I remained up on the top deck. However, most of the others went down to the cabin or even down to the few bunks below. They were near the engine and just above the oil smelling bilge waters so everyone of those people became sick. I believe that there were only three of us who were not ill.
When we arrived at Heron Island we had to get off the launch and into smaller boats to be taken over the reef to where the water was shallow from where we waded the rest of the way.
I was shown to a cabin under the palm trees in which I was the only guest.
The island - coral atoll - was only about a mile and a quarter in circumference and, therefore, easy to hike around. The vegetation consisted of tropical shrubbery and palm trees. There were holes in the sand at the base of each palm and in those holes were mutton birds. They are about the size of a good-sized pigeon and are very docile. As many were nesting we were asked not to disturb them. Meals were taken together in the main lodge and, one evening when I returned from dinner, I found a mutton bird in my cabin and had the 'fun' of shooing it out.
We were there for only three days - arrival, a day on the island, and departure. One of the activities offered during the middle day was a walk on the coral reef that surrounds the island. By this time the cyclone had moved well out to sea but its effect was still evident. While it was safe to walk on the reef - at low tide - the water was still very murky and the vivid colors of the reef were dimmed. Still - to be walking on a coral reef (in footwear provided to prevent cuts from the coral some of which is poisonous) - was thrilling.
The next morning, after breakfast, we were ferried out to the launch for the return trip to Gladstone. The water was still rather rough but the transfer from skiff to launch went without incident. Again the 'fools' went down below for the crossing while we 'smarter ones' remained up on top . While they were ill again we were not.
Naturally, while in Brisbane, I went on more than one trip down to the Gold Coast and I will write about being in that area in my blog about the Methodist Church which I attended while in that city.
Also, the most pleasant way to get to the Brisbane Zoo was an 'excursion' on a launch from downtown Brisbane up the river to the park. I was there a few times and that is one place with the gimmick of having guests 'wear' a carpet snake (a type of python) around the neck in order to gain permission to hold and pet a koala bear. I passed on that one!
On other road trips north from Brisbane the highway passed through the town of Nambour which is in the heart of the pineapple growing area. That was another place where I got to eat fresh pineapple which had been ripened before picking. Oh Yummers! Nambour is next to a geological phenomena called 'The Glasshouse Mountains' which are remnants of volcanoes from a distant past. What is left are the inside of the long extinct cones that have not completely eroded away. They are quite striking.
The highlight of the day was the Flower Parade in which all of the entries were either covered by flower petals or carried huge bouquets. This was the first 'Flower Parade' that I had seen - since then I have been to the Rose Festival Parade in Portland, Oregon and I have watched the like parade from Pasadena, California on TV. The one in Toowoomba was as beautiful as the others. After the parade we were driven around the city in order to view the prize winning gardens.
One of the young women whom I had met while in Alice Springs kept in touch with me and invited me to join her and a girlfriend on a weekend trip to Heron Island which is a coral atoll at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. On a Friday evening we caught a Queensland Railway train from Brisbane up north to the town of Gladstone. What we were not aware of was that a cyclone was moving down the coast - but out to sea. However, the winds did affect the coastal areas which delayed our trip out to the island for one day. In the meantime, it was perfectly clear and calm in town. We had nothing to do but to book into a hotel and laze around a rather uninteresting place.
The next morning the off shore seas had calmed enough for the launch to come in with returning vacationers and pick us up to take us out to the reef. Also, in some parts of Australia, that was a school break week, so there were families on board. The launch was fairly new and quite comfortable. While we were still in the lee of off shore continental islands, the sea was relatively calm. Once we were clear of the coast islands the water became quite rough. I am used to being out on the water and have never been subject to seasickness - therefore, I remained up on the top deck. However, most of the others went down to the cabin or even down to the few bunks below. They were near the engine and just above the oil smelling bilge waters so everyone of those people became sick. I believe that there were only three of us who were not ill.
When we arrived at Heron Island we had to get off the launch and into smaller boats to be taken over the reef to where the water was shallow from where we waded the rest of the way.
I was shown to a cabin under the palm trees in which I was the only guest.
The island - coral atoll - was only about a mile and a quarter in circumference and, therefore, easy to hike around. The vegetation consisted of tropical shrubbery and palm trees. There were holes in the sand at the base of each palm and in those holes were mutton birds. They are about the size of a good-sized pigeon and are very docile. As many were nesting we were asked not to disturb them. Meals were taken together in the main lodge and, one evening when I returned from dinner, I found a mutton bird in my cabin and had the 'fun' of shooing it out.
We were there for only three days - arrival, a day on the island, and departure. One of the activities offered during the middle day was a walk on the coral reef that surrounds the island. By this time the cyclone had moved well out to sea but its effect was still evident. While it was safe to walk on the reef - at low tide - the water was still very murky and the vivid colors of the reef were dimmed. Still - to be walking on a coral reef (in footwear provided to prevent cuts from the coral some of which is poisonous) - was thrilling.
The next morning, after breakfast, we were ferried out to the launch for the return trip to Gladstone. The water was still rather rough but the transfer from skiff to launch went without incident. Again the 'fools' went down below for the crossing while we 'smarter ones' remained up on top . While they were ill again we were not.
Naturally, while in Brisbane, I went on more than one trip down to the Gold Coast and I will write about being in that area in my blog about the Methodist Church which I attended while in that city.
Also, the most pleasant way to get to the Brisbane Zoo was an 'excursion' on a launch from downtown Brisbane up the river to the park. I was there a few times and that is one place with the gimmick of having guests 'wear' a carpet snake (a type of python) around the neck in order to gain permission to hold and pet a koala bear. I passed on that one!
On other road trips north from Brisbane the highway passed through the town of Nambour which is in the heart of the pineapple growing area. That was another place where I got to eat fresh pineapple which had been ripened before picking. Oh Yummers! Nambour is next to a geological phenomena called 'The Glasshouse Mountains' which are remnants of volcanoes from a distant past. What is left are the inside of the long extinct cones that have not completely eroded away. They are quite striking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)