"The deserted air of an eternal slack"

Source: Vidonja Balanzategui, Bianka. Gentlemen of the Flashing Blade. Townsville: Department of History and Politics James Cook University, 1990,

Plumes of flowers appearing over waving fields of maturing sugar cane herald that the harvest season is nigh. In farm sheds preparations have been going on for the harvest all over the slack with harvesting machinery being dismantled and overhauled. But now mill navvy crews are starting to emerge from the mill yard as they work their way around the district rail network checking and doing maintenance work. All is still quiet however in the fields as good rainfall has set back planting.

What would seem strange for a time traveller from say, the year 1950, is that even as the 2016 harvest season clearly approaches Ingham still has “the deserted air of an eternal slack”. There appears to be no sense that the community may soon be basking “in the sun of the crushing boom.” While undoubtedly anticipation is high amongst mill workers, harvester crews and farmers, little of the “exhilarating climate of the annual crushing season” of yore can be discerned walking the streets of Ingham town.

The days when a thousand young men descended on Ingham eager to sign on for the good money to be made for a season of cane cutting are long gone. Then as the Queen’s birthday weekend approached in sugar towns up and down the coast it was clear that “The long sleep is over.” The month of May would have seen prospective cane cutters arriving by road or rail and queueing up for the sign-on. While this description in a novel entitled Cane! is written of Innisfail it could just as well have been written of Ingham: “Storekeepers have restacked their shelves, publicans have filled their cellars and tightened the screws on bar-rails and doors. In the boarding houses freshly patched sheets cover old mattresses, spiders and cockroaches have been routed, ant-holes blocked, and clean glass ashtrays decorate the dressing tables. Even the windows have been polished so you can see what goes on the other side without spitting and rubbing-hard with your elbow. The bootmaker stands in his doorway, squinting down the long road to the station, licking his lips and juggling the small ancient coin in his pocket that is his luck-piece. Sam Batten can smell money on the other side of a ten foot wall. Along Down Street the girls are naked in their rooms, having a last look at their working clothes. Innisfail is ready.”   

Conducting a sugar industry in war years was impeded by many difficulties. Enlistments and internments meant there was a limited labour force while there were wartime restrictions of farm products and confiscation of equipment. The shortfall of labour was occasionally met by women and partially by Indigenous workers recruited from Palm Island. The latter group who, despite have performed most satisfactorily, were no longer employed as cane cutters once war was over. Instead post war immigrants were directed to Ingham cane fields.  With this new labour force 1950 looked to be bumper year all round. The Townsville Bulletin of May 18 1950 reported that:

“The best sign-on since 1941 resulted in the first sign-on of cane cutters for Macknade last week. With the arrival of about 100 Italian migrants, who have been nominated by friends and relatives and, in the few weeks here, have already undergone the 'nursery' tuition in the work of general farm labour and canecutting, there will be no aboriginal cutters employed.

Macknade mill will make history in four avenues in the 1950 crushing season. It will be the first mill to start in Queensland, had the earliest sign-on in the district's history, also the earliest start in crushing and will treat a record aggregate crop for the district, which is estimated at 348,000 tons.”

The other group that new cane cutters were being drawn from in the post war period were 'Balts' or Displaced Persons. This newspaper report of 1949 describes one group's arrival in Ingham. Because of the 2 year contract to which they were obligated as a condition of their being accepted as migrants to Australia many of those 160 would have returned in 1950 to Ingham or to another cane cutting district as directed.

Quotations drawn from:

Vidonja Balanzategui, Bianka. Gentlemen of the Flashing Blade. Townsville: Department of History and Politics James Cook University, 1990, 94.

Gollschewsky, E. “The Yesterdays and Todays of the Sugarcane Industry.” Bulletin, April (1969): 75

Donaldson, R., M.Joseph, & R. Braddon. Cane! Sydney: Sphere Books, 1936, 42-43

 “Ingham sign-on,” The Townsville Bulletin, May 18, 1950, 5.

“A miserable, low-lying dead-and-alive place"*

The recent headline in the ‘Herbert River Express’ “Marina ‘timebomb’" in reference to Port Hinchinbrook Marina, shallow water and an inaccessible channel is not a new lament in regard to our sea water access from Port Hinchinbrook. Readers may not realize Port Hinchinbrook had once been predicted to become the main port servicing the hinterland and that Cardwell would become "the capital of a new and separate colony."

However the port's own physical shortcomings, together with the fact that the major ports of Cairns and Townsville, together with Dungeness and then Lucinda, took the business away from Port Hinchinbrook, means that Cardwell and its port never reached the dizzy heights predicted.

Rather for a brief period our own Dungeness, and then Lucinda became busy ports of call for the coastal steamers that plied the eastern coast.   Readers possibly cannot imagine that a scene such as this one which pictures a steamer plying its business on the Herbert River between the mills and Dungeness and then the Lucinda was common place once. The Herbert River provided the main means of access around the Valley.  Small boats travelled up and down the river carrying passengers and cargo and everyone used their own boats for crossing the river or making short journeys to visit friends or access the various small communities that had sprung up along the river. Each sugar mill had its wharf on the banks of the Herbert River for loading and offloading goods and passengers which were coming from, or going to, the port at Dungeness.

Macknade Plantation and Mill view of Herbert River with steamer. Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library Local History Collection

Dungeness was the first port serving the district’s needs. In 1878 a Customs Officer was appointed and the new Customs House then opened in 1881 with a ship’s pilot appointed in the following year. This allowed ships to stop at Dungeness, rather than having to go on to Cardwell to load and unload goods which then had to be transported overland. The need for these services at Dungeness had become patently clear by the amount of trade that had been going in and out of Dungeness compared to Cardwell. However there were signs from the earliest days that Dungeness was going to prove problematic as a port. Initially at the mouth of the Herbert River, a wide stretch of deep navigable water extended back to the entrance to Dungeness Creek. Over the years shifting sand created a spit and eventually Dungeness was rendered useless as a port. 

Dungeness and facilities circa 1881. Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library Local History Collection

As early as 1880, planters observed that the wharf at Dungeness was having trouble withstanding the rush of water during flood times and visitors rarely described the port in favourable terms. In 1882 it was commented that Dungeness was “not at all an attractive place consisting of about half-a-dozen houses built on the low sandy point on the southern side of the river mouth. The site is not a very secure one, as each wet season brings a heavy fresh down the river sometimes cutting off a portion of the point; already a wharf has been washed away, and it has been found advisable to shift one of the houses back to prevent its falling a prey to the waters.” Another visitor described Dungeness as “a miserable, low-lying dead-and-alive place; and here we sat and broiled in the sun for five hours, waiting for the tide to take us up in the tender.” The Marine Hotel started trading at Dungeness in 1884, no doubt hoping to prosper on trade from passengers and crews. While it was described by one later writer as “large and commodious” a traveller of the time described it as “so unprepossessing, and the people about looked such rough customers, that I preferred to keep as far away from it and them as possible, and sat melting slowly under a scorching sun until we were ready to start.” In 1894 the hotel burnt down and was not rebuilt.

It would be Cyclone Zeta of April 1894 that would spell Dungeness's final death knell as an official port. The writing had been on the wall. Earlier in the year on January 20 the Customs Officer at Dungeness telegraphed the Collector of Customs in panic to tell him that the “boatshed and gear suddenly disappeared…having been washed away by the heavy flood in the river.” Others were evacuated from the remaining buildings for safety. Then the rush of water down the river resulting from Cyclone Zeta further eroded the Dungeness spit and more buildings were destroyed. A fortnight afterwards another flood caused further damage and more erosion. It was clear at this point that the remaining buildings had to be removed and relocated with some urgency to Point Lucinda (later Lucinda Point). The moved buildings included the post and telegraph office, boatsmen’s cottages and boatshed. A new customs-house and quarters were built. At that point the days of Dungeness as a port were over. Even though Lucinda was an improved location the port was still inadequate, limited to approach by the smaller steamers which were the only type anyway that could navigate the inside route up the coast.

Halifax Wharf circa 1885 Source: State Library of Queeensland

The river serviced by a port at Dungeness was always recognized as going to be unsustainable. When John Ewen Davidson sailed up the Herbert River in 1867 he claimed that the river was only navigable in wet weather. In 1884 it was observed that “The great drawback to the district is undoubtedly the want of a navigable river as the Herbert is useless except for small boats.” Hazards such as sandbars, submerged logs and snags caused river travel to be dangerous. A semi-official River Trust group endeavoured to keep the river clear by blasting submerged logs and snags but their efforts were ongoing and frustrating because each flood deposited debris in different places, sandbars shifted and sand was deposited elsewhere to make new ones. By the 1880s river vessels could only go as far as Gairloch due to silting of the river. In 1884 the Government was thinking about constructing a tramline from Dungeness along the southern bank of the Herbert River to Ingham.

It was not until the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) extended its tramway on to Ingham and down to Lucinda that the river wharves became obsolete. The port at Lucinda too became redundant once the North Coast Railway line was laid and the steamers ceased to ply the eastern coast line.

Paddle Steamer 'Kent' at Halifax Wharf Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library Local History Collection

Lucinda - Pilot's Office 1910 Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library Local History Collection

Sources:
Arthur Scott to Walter Scott, March 21, 1866. (Scott MS) as quoted in G.C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972).
“North with the Minister for Works,” The Brisbane Courier, April 10, 1882, 3.

M.E. Rowan, A Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand  (London: John Murray, 1898), 23 and 24. *(Also title of this blog page quoted from Rowan, ibid., 23).

“Boom Days,” Herbert River Express, January 21, 1992, 6.

The Brisbane Courier,  January 24, 1894, 5.

“A Trip to the Lower Herbert,” The Brisbane Courier, February 7, 1884, 6.

Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui, The Herbert River Story (Ingham: Hinchinbrook Shire Council, 2011).

"The Uprooted Survive"

Herman ILVES 

The displacement of people is a consistent result of war and today media coverage and accessibility means we are bombarded with images of the people being displaced as a result of current conflicts. Their dilemma is one that Government agencies and Australian citizens alike, grapple with, on a daily basis, as we are confronted with images of, and hear accounts of atrocities, perilous journeys, sorrow, loss and separation.

Today the story and travails of the displaced survivors of World War 11 is long forgotten, yet at the close of the war between nine and 12 million non-German displaced people comprising soldiers, forced labourers, political deportees, prisoners of war and fugitives were dispersed throughout Europe. Between the end of war and December 1951 Australia accepted 572 300 immigrants, of them 170 000 were displaced persons.

The anonymity of this passing group is well illustrated by the story of one Estonian displaced person. He was employed to complete in poker work, a picture of “Our Lady of the Moon”. This panel was inserted under the Altar in the new Chapel of Our Lady of Fatima at Cardinal Gilroy College. As well he did similar work on the Stations of the Cross. This Estonian artist’s name was never recorded. It was only in 2009 with the restoration of the Chapel that some astute research by a teacher on staff with considerable expertise in family history research, Cheryl Gossner, that the man and his story was uncovered. 

He was Herman Ilves. He studied medicine before the war but his abiding passion was photography. Captured towards the end of the war he was sent to a prison camp. After the war, with the help of an organization created especially for this purpose, the International Refugee Organization (I.R.O.), he managed to be selected for migration to Australia. He travelled on the ship, the “General Black”, in March 1948. It was the third I.R.O. transport to Australia, and carried the first displaced persons destined for the sugar fields of the Herbert River Valley to cut cane. Australia accepted the displaced persons, not only as a humanitarian gesture but because they would fulfil the scale of labour required for post-war industrial recovery and expansion which could not be met by the Australian populace alone. The labour shortage was critical, particularly in occupations that Australian labour found uninviting like cane cutting.  The displaced person had to agree to remain for two years from the date of their arrival in whatever occupation and locality was determined for them by the Commonwealth Employment Service.

On rainy days in the barracks he would do craft work. His particular skill was decorated wood craft. This skill was noticed and it was then that he was released from his two year cane cutting contract to work for S. Messina and Son in the Chapel. When his two year contract expired he worked locally in a photographic studio for a couple of years and then moved to Sydney and later to Canada where he died in 2000.

Lithuanian cane cutting gang and cook, Balanzategui farm

Incidentally, Juozas (Gedas) Zemaitis and Milos (Mike) Milanovic also had travelled on the “General Black” with Herman Ilves and they, unlike him, did make the Herbert River Valley home. Australia was rarely the first choice of destination of the displaced persons. The U.S.A., Canada and South America were the most common first choices. A common dream too, was that when they made good money and their country was free they would return home. The sad reality is that few if any ever could or did. 

Sources:

POST TITLE: Borin, V.L. The Uprooted Survive: a Tale of Two Continents. London: Allen & Unwin, 1959.

PHOTOGRAPH OF HERMAN ILVIN: Korp Fraternitas Estica http://www.cfe.ee/album-esticum?show=1937

PHOTOGRAPH OF LITHUANIAN CANE CUTTING GANG: Vidonja Balanzategui, B. Gentlemen of the Flashing Blade, Townsville: Department of History and Politics James Cook University, 1990.

Vidonja Balanzategui, B. The Herbert River Story, Ingham: Hinchinbrook Shire Council, 2011.

Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild USAT General Black, http://immigrantships.net/v5/1900v5/generalblack19480427.html