Kelly's Brigade

Did you know that the Ingham Picture Theatre was the former J.L. Kelly Memorial Public Library building dedicated to James Lawrence Kelly?  Who was James Lawrence Kelly?

James Lawrence (Larry) Kelly was a very popular Shire Chairman who followed another popular chairman, Frank Cassady. He was only 26 years old when he was elected to the position.  Kelly’s terms were 1936 till 1943, and again from 1946 until his death in 1952 at the age of 42.  He was born in Ipswich and educated by the Christian Brothers. His first job was as an accountant with the Taxation Office. He came to Ingham and worked for Hardy and Venables. He had political pedigree being nephew of Edward Michael Hanlon, Premier of Queensland (1946-1952). As an executive member of the Ingham branch of the Labor Party (and President from 1944) he attempted to enter parliament at both the State and Federal levels without success. In his roles as Shire Chairman, citizen and parishioner of St. Patrick’s Catholic Parish he was popular, conscientious and active though his detractors accused him of dominating the Council. He served on many committees and boards.

Given recent flood events and discussions about low lying land a little story told in Janice Wegner’s thesis “Hinchinbrook: The Hinchinbrook Shire Council, 1879-1979” is worth recounting. Wegner shows Kelly to be fair-mined, compassionate and sensible. An example of his good sense was when there were plans to build a fountain. The site chosen for the fountain was criticized because it would be "in a semi-swamp below flood mark, confronting the remains of the old Ingham Chinatown" (Wegner, 444). Kelly pointed out, flood-prone areas were the most logical choices for parks! On a more serious note, his good sense and compassion were visible in his support of Councillors Frederick Hecht and Giuseppe Cantamessa in 1939 on the outbreak of WW2 when others doubted their loyalty. He reminded those doubters of how much Hecht and Cantamessa had contributed to the district.

Kelly is credited with many achievements despite having to work within wartime restrictions. Under his leadership the Council was able to construct a new aerodrome of a sufficient standard to attract services from the two airlines, A.N.A. and T.A.A.; take over the Showground and make substantial improvements; build a municipal library for Ingham and establish another in Halifax; construct with the Main Roads Commission, a new jetty at Dungeness; commission a town plan for Ingham and take over the picture theatre in the Hall. (Wegner, 470-1)

Dan Sheahan refers to those achievements (somewhat tongue in cheek) in his poem “Vote Kelly’s Brigade”:

            Now gaze around and think of what Labour has done

            The networks of roadways that shines in the sun.

            The fountains that sparkle, the concrete tower

            Symbols of beauty and progress and power” (Sheahan, 94)

Kelly died as the new library was being completed. Consequently, the J.L. Kelly Memorial Public Library was dedicated to him when it was opened on June 13, 1953. Prior to that library the School of Arts — established in Ingham in 1895 and another in Halifax in 1898 — conducted libraries.

The Library relocated to Lannercost Street when office space was needed pending the construction of a larger Hall and office complex to replace the then Shire Hall (opened in 1963). In 1987 the Shire Picture theatre, which had formerly been in the Shire Hall, was relocated to the J.L. Kelly Memorial Hall. Again the library was relocated to Lannercost Street. In 1999 it moved to the purpose-built building shared with TAFE. It then moved to its present location in the TYTO precinct.

Libraries are welcoming spaces whose value is measured not so much as economic capital but as social capital. James Lawrence Kelly would no doubt approve, that today the Ingham Picture Theatre, housed in his building, is a social venture of the Ingham Disability Support Services.

Opening of J.L. Kelly Memorial Public Library, 13 June 1953. Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photograph Collection

James Lawrence Kelly, Ingham Shire Chairman. Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photograph Collection

Dignitaries at the opening of the Ingham Aerodrome, 1939. 

Sources:

Sheahan, Dan. “Vote Kelly’s Brigade.” In Songs from the Canefields. Ingham: Josephine R. Sheahan, 1982 reprint.

Vidonja Balanzategui, Bianka. Portrait of a Parish: A History of Saint Patrick’s Church and Parish Ingham 1864-1996. Ingham: St Patrick’s Parish, 1998.

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

Wegner, Janice. “Hinchinbrook: The Hinchinbrook Shire Council, 1879-1979.” Master’s thesis, James Cook University, 1984.

PUB WITH NO BEER

“The Herbert is also a first-rate place for teamsters to spell their bullocks. There is one public-house and another promised, where good entertainment for man and beast is guaranteed.”

Much of Ingham’s story is that it is on a path to somewhere: to pasture lands for stock, to the gold fields, to urban centres and battlefields north. The Telegraph Hotel was established in 1874 on the Camping Reserve, later Town Reserve, to take advantage of the Palmer gold rush trade. It only traded for a year and then reopened later as the Day Dawn Hotel, today known as Lee’s Hotel.

The hotel is deservedly famous as the birthplace of the poem “A Pub without Beer” penned by bush poet, Dan Sheahan, adapted by Gordon Parsons to become “A Pub with no Beer’ sung by Slim Dusty. But the story of the Day Dawn Hotel and it’s reincarnation as Lee’s Hotel is equally an intriguing tale. At its centre are the intrepid Chinese men and women who came to work the northern gold fields and an architect whose “design philosophy was very much about honest expression of structure and response to climate”. 

Rupert Lee (Snr)’s father toiled on the Palmer gold fields, married a woman of mixed Irish and Chinese descent and together they had eight children. She returned to China with the children and later at only 12 years of age Rupert Lee (Snr) returned to Australia and to Ingham. He worked the steam trains at Victoria Mill, borrowed money and opened a baker shop and then a grocery store. When he purchased the Day Dawn Hotel in 1958 it was so far gone restoration was impossible and it had to be demolished, though local folklore has long had it that it was burnt down.  Rupert then engaged a young fledgling architect, Ian Ferrier, to design a modern hotel, Lee's Hotel, which opened in 1960.

Ian Ferrier became renowned for his designs which incorporated innovative adaptions to the tropical climate like completely openable walls of doors to allow cross ventilation. While countless schools, commercial buildings and homes across Queensland and northern Australia bear his inimitable imprint, cathedrals, churches and chapels became a speciality amongst them the Cairns and Darwin Cathedrals. His notable, local achievements are St. Peters Church in Halifax and St. Patrick’s Church in Ingham.  

Sources:

“Herbert River,” The Queenslander, September 25, 1875, 7.

Ferrier Baudet Architechts, http://catherine-baudet.squarespace.com/history/.

 “Slim poured a Legend,” news.com.au, November 2, 2007, http://www.news.com.au/news/slim-poured-a-legend/story-fna7dq6e-1111114967360.

Day Dawn Hotel, 1919. Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photograph Collection.

Postcard, circe 1970. Source: Centre for the Government of Queensland. Publisher: ACP.

Sugar dreams

Though government legislated for the use of indentured Melanesian labour in Queensland sugar cane fields that use was not universally approved of. White workers resented the presence of a cheap, non-white labour force while other people objected on humanitarian grounds. The Herbert district used indentured Melanesian labour and the Herbert River planters were the brunt of much criticism. A poem published in 'The Worker' on 23 April 1892 expressed a mixture of sentiments critical of the use of Melanesian (Kanaka) labour, with the criticism directed at the Herbert River planters.

Even after the use of indentured labour had been stopped white workers did not want to cut cane either. It was hard, dirty work and was seasonal. They preferred to work nearer the cities or in the mines. A poem written by local poet Dan Sheahan published in 'Songs of the Canefields' in 1972 by his daughter Josephine Sheahan, was reminiscent of the above poem and titled The Canegrower's Dream. It talks of a farmer's dream of a harvesting machine and of cane cutters who liked to cut cane!

Melanesian workers at Macknade and overseer Mr E.L. MacDonald. Their daily regime was ruled by the clock and the bell, n.d. (Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photographic Collection)

First of the white cane cutters in Ingham, 1904. (Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photographic Collection)

A life to be endured

In the comfort of our ‘first world’ lives we still battle terrible health scourges: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or miner’s black lung for which we desperately try to find cures. While we no longer live in fear of epidemics of diphtheria, measles, whooping cough or polio because these have largely been eradicated where inoculation programmes have been successfully implemented, it also makes us complacent, because we have no scarring memory of mothers in out back mining Queensland towns like Ravenswood, burying child after child, within days, when diphtheria swept through the town. If we happen to visit the desolate, dilapidated graveyards of yesteryear and stand at the foot of such graves the misery and tragedy is tangible. Walk around the old Ingham Cemetery or the Victoria Estate Cemetery or any older cemetery and you can’t but be struck by the youth of the deceased and the appreciation that they died from things which today are largely preventable because of availability of medicines, access to health services, inoculation and attention to safe working practice.

Dan Sheahan, our own bard, as always, has the words to describe what it was like in the not so long ago days of early Ingham when:

“No medical aid when Doctor was wanted –

The Priest and the Parson were far, far away –

Their women beside them they plowed and planted…

When hot fever came, unaided they’d linger –

No ambulance raced “at the double” for them –“

If we look at the first years of European settlement in the Valley we see that that death visited the small community with heartbreaking frequency. Infant and child mortality rate was very high and death did not discriminate by nationality or status. The Aboriginal population was decimated by European diseases and the death rate amongst the Melanesian indentured labourers was staggering. Medical care was very much reliant on home remedies, castor oil being a common cure all, and the generous and capable women who acted as midwives to neighbouring women.  Much of what faced them was beyond their knowledge and abilities: breech births, bullet wounds, severed limbs, strange fevers, snake bite, impacted wisdom teeth, dysentery, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, meningitis, respiratory illnesses, convulsions, and the plethora of childhood illnesses that were potentially fatal in those days, all confounded them. Sadly neglect and earth-eating, because of poor diet, were also causes of death in children. Robert Shepherd commented that “there were few settlers and their wives who were able to rear all their children … with some families suffering blow after blow.” 

The first so called doctors who found their way to the Valley were often inept, as much victims of the harsh conditions they found themselves in and of the drunkenness succumbed to by the young men they came to tend.  In fact it was observed that “the easiest way to find the town doctor was to look in the gutters in front of the hotels”.  Arthur Neame records in his diary that  a doctor who had came to the Valley lived in a shanty on the river bank was “not good, he was often drunk and used to draw drugs from our store containing opium to mix as medicine for his patients, and take them himself.” Neame ended up studying a book a doctor had given him and did all the doctoring on his plantation himself. The first competent, permanent doctor came to Ingham in 1883. His name was Dr. W.C. Macdonald. He was fired by a determination to do something about the health problems rife in the Valley. Apparently he “persuaded, threatened and blustered for a more realistic approach to environmental problems along with rigorous treatment.”

Sources:

Sheahan, D. “Back to Ingham.” Songs from the Canefields. Josephine R. Sheahan, Ingham, 1972.

Shepherd, Robert. “The Herbert River Story: The Health Menace.” Herbert River Express, January 14, 1992; and "The Herbert River Story: The Black Years Pass." Herbert River Express, January 28, 1992.

Moore, Clive. “Whips and Rum Swizzles.” Lectures on North Queensland History. Townsville: History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1975.

Neame, Arthur. The Diary of Arthur Neame 1870-1897.

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

Ingham Hospital Board members, 1909

 People pictured: (back row L-R): R.S. Alston, B. Lynn, Dr. W.C. MacDonald, Hon. A.S. Cowley, J. Menzies, A. Friend. (sitting): Nurse Probationer L. Bonning, Sam Allen, A.J. Cobroft, Jim Ryan, J.J. Cockburn, Matron Macartney.

Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library Collection

Womens ward of the Ingham Hospital Queensland 1916

Source: State Library of Queensland: View this image at the State Library of Queensland: hdl.handle.net/10462/deriv/97694

Ingham Ambulance vehicle 1925

An ambulance vehicle used in Ingham, pictured with First Superintendent Mr Edgar Von Alpen.

Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library Collection

Ingham In Summer

Inghamites, in  mid March 2016, swelter in humid heat.  Cyclones threaten as an unseasonably late rain season descends, sending down much needed rain on a parched landscape. All long for winter and cool relief.  In 1927 Jean Douglas Gordon waxed lyrical about Ingham in summer. This poem was published two months after a devastating flood, precipitated by a tropical cyclone which crossed the coast just north of Cairns on February 9, becoming a disastrous rain depression. The Herbert River swelled to such as extent that the river broke its banks sending flood waters coursing down onto the low-lying areas of the Herbert River Valley literally sweeping away everything in its path, A description of the time said the river “poured over the countryside like a drunken demon and bringing death and destruction in its wake.”  There was a tragic loss of life, in excess of 25 in Ingham, 15 in Cardwell and 1 in Townsville. 1 500 horses were calculated to have drowned in the Herbert River Valley, a terrible loss in a farming community that still depended heavily on horses for both field work and transport. Loss of crops, stock and property in the same area was estimated to have been in the vicinity of £300 000. Poet Dan Sheahan articulated the community’s reaction to this disaster in his own inimitable way when he wrote “But pigs will play pianos – and chooks will chew their cud – “Ere Ingham will forget about The ’27 Flood.”

INGHAM IN SUMMER

There is sunshine on the paddocks, there is glory on the hills.

There is beauty on the canefields sweeping west;

There are songs among the rain-trees, there is bustle round the mills,

And round the homestead peace, and love and rest.

There is shadow in the timber where the shy bush creatures hide,

There is quiet where the timber meets the shore;

There is golden wealth in plenty where the branches meet the tide,

And music where the lone sea-breakers roar.

There is sighing in the bamboos as the lost sea breezes wail,

And bleating from the sheepyard on the rise;

There is hurry round the crossroads where they’re sorting out the mail,

And sorrow where the lonely curlew cries.

There’s a cloudless sky above me of a deep and misty blue,

There is golden light and music in the air.

And the beauty of the summer blossoms in my heart anew,

As I see her wondrous beauty everywhere.

SOURCES:

“Hinchinbrook Shire Council Historical Library, River on a Rampage” (A selection of newspaper clippings and reports on the 1927 Flood October, 1968, 11).

Sheahan, D. “The ’27 Flood” in Songs from the Canefields (Ingham: Josephine R. Sheahan, 1972), 84.  

The Sydney Morning Herald, April 30, 1927, 11.

The Valley in flood becomes a veritable sea.  Outlying settlements and townships become isolated and residents flood bound in their homes.

Ingham in flood, 1927. Geo. C. Teitzel Butchers, Herbert Street (From the Hinchinbrook Shire Library Local History Collection)

Horses seeking shelter in flood, 1927. Hinchinbrook Hotel, Lannercost Street. (Shared by Terry Cooper on Lost Ingham and District)

Halifax in flood, 1927 Walton’s Hotel, Macrossan Street (From the Hinchinbrook Shire Library Local History Collection)