I wrote this blog post in 2005. I can't find the photo I published then and have cribbed a little with a photo of a pelican in the foreground and the Urangan Jetty mid-distance on the right. Mum was born 93 years ago today.
During my recent trip home to Maryborough to visit my parents, Mum and I decided to 'go down the bay'.
The bay in question is Hervey Bay - named by Captain James Cook in 1770 - when he moored the Endeavour in the shallow waters inside Fraser Island - and sent a boat ashore for fresh water. The bay was named after Cook's cabin boy - Hervey. In the old measure the Bay is about 25 miles from Maryborough.
I lived at Hervey's Bay from age two to eight. For four years we lived at Urangan n Elizabeth Street , before moving to Torquay, another part of Hervey Bay, to live in Freshwater Street.
Mum and I found a park bench, which gave us a view of the Urangan Jetty, and which also served as our table for fish and chips. Our bench was under the casuarinas just to the left of the beginning of the Pier. The Urangan Jetty is sometimes called the Urangan Pier; but by either name it has been there a long time.
When I was a kid railway lines ran to the end of the jetty where there was a large galvanized iron shed. Sea going ships would berth there to discharge oil or take on sugar from freight trains which came down from Maryborough. Mum told me that when she was a girl she would often get on a passenger train in Maryborough which brought her directly to the Urangan Jetty. She would swim and play around the pylons where the water laps the sandy shore. The train passenger service had ceased when I was growing up, but freight trains continued to meet the ships coming in. I distinctly remember one ship in the early 1950s, which had a Japanese crew, who came onshore and played a game I had never seen before - baseball.
Mum favours whiting. It is about the only fish she will eat. At the Fish & Chip Shop I was able to pick out some fresh fillets to be crumbed and then deep fried. We also had potato chips and tartare sauce. Mum had a lemon squash and I managed a couple of light beers. We both agreed that our fish was probably the freshest and most delicate whiting that either of us had ever had from a Fish & Chip Shop. Of course, nothing compares to Mum's home cooked whiting and chips.
From our seat we were able to watch pelicans, gulls and terns fishing in a somewhat desultory manner. The best entertainment was provided by a lone gannet who performed dramatic stall-turns before plunging vertically into the sea, seeming to drown, but then reemerge after 5 or 10 seconds, alive and well.
Mum explained that, as a girl, she often came to the Urangan Jetty with the Demaine family. She was brought along as company for Joan, granddaughter of the atheistic socialist Mayor of Maryborough, William Demaine. He was universally known as Billy, and Mum told me that he would never stand while "God Save the King" was being played at the beginning of the movies. I knew that he had been part of the Paraguayan Experiment. After the 1892 Queensland shearers' strike, a socialist utopian movement called New Australia gained momentum, and some 500 members headed off for Paraguay with the intention of establishing a collective socialist settlement. New Australia, as the settlement was called, was riven by internal conflict and failed. I understand that descendents of some of the experimenters can be found in Paraguay to this day, but many settlers, including Billy Demaine, returned home. He became Mayor of a town whose thriving economy was based on timber and engineering and when he died his funeral was held at the Trades Hall.
Mum and I began to talk about what we had seen in earlier times when looking out over the calm waters of Hervey Bay which is protected by the breakwater of 90 mile long Fraser Island. At Inskip Point, which is at the lower end of Fraser Island and Hervey Bay, there is a small channel allowing access to the calm waters of Hervey Bay. Cook did not venture through that channel, but went to the north end of Fraser Island before taking the Endeavour south west into the waters of Wide Bay and then Hervey Bay to the south. The Inskip Point channel had been safely used by humpbacked whales for generations.
Mum and I agreed that some of the 'black' things we had both seen in Hervey Bay, in the past, in the distance, must have been whales. Today, the Bay is a centre for seaside tourism and whale watching. When our family lived there in the early 1950s we never talked of whales for we didn't understand that there were a few of them there. A whaling station at Byron Bay, a long way south of Hervey Bay, took care of most of the whales which had normally came into the waters of Hervey Bay to calve. Mum and I had both seen breeching whales, but we did not know what to make of the phenomenon at the time. It was only after the whaling station at Byron Bay was closed that whales became recognized once more in Hervey Bay.
Shared memories on a park bench with a fine view on a beautiful day, make some places, no matter how humble, very special.
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