SNIPPETS
FROM
THE
PAST
Courier
Mail Wednesday 30 May 1956
Yandina has
“Ark” Motor
Cooroy- The
North Coast Council of Progress Associations want a new
railmotor on the Yandina Gympie line, because the old one
“will shortly fall to bits.”
The association has written to the Transport Minister
(Mr. Duggan) reminding him that he had promised six months ago
to give priority to this line. At a meeting of the
association, members said that new railmotors were going to
the South Coast instead. They claimed that the old railmotor
is “weird” and “looks as though it came out of the Ark.”
“Rope on Doors.”
They said that the motor, which travelled daily over
the 44 miles from Yandina to Gympie, had its doors tied with
rope and that its curtains were in rags. They also claimed
that the guard at one end “screamed” to the driver at the
other when he wanted the railmotor to start or stop.
Cream cans, cases of butter and parcels were packed
into the railmotor with the passengers, they said. The
association Secretary (Mr. D. A. Low MLA) said that he had
ridden in the motor to see how bad it was. It had pulled up
long before it reached the station because the brakes were
faulty.
Courier
Mail 14 August 1956
Is Sidney
House haunted
By a staff
reporter
Is the genteel spirit of Sidney Anne Jackson inhabiting
Sidney House, Toowong, in protest at the impending demolition
of the place? Several people who have visited the historic and
now desolate 74 year old two storied family mansion in
Coronation Drive have told me, in effect-
“I got the most eerie feeling that the place is
haunted, and that all those grand old decayed rooms aren’t
really empty.”
[Legend says that the spirit of anyone who has loved a
house may return to it on learning that the house is to be
destroyed]
Air is “alive”
Sidney House and its overgrown grounds have been bought
by Accommodation Australia, a Sydney firm which proposes to
build a motel at the site. Brisbane real estate agent, R. S.
Molloy, who handled the sale of Sidney House, said that the
building would be pulled down “soon.”
I roamed in and around the building, among cobwebs and
weeds, and I admit that the dead house has a “live atmosphere”
about it.
It was built along extravaganza colonial lines in 1888
by Thomas Finney, a founder of the old firm of Finney Isles
and Co., for his young wife, Sidney Anne.
The Mistress
Young
Mrs. Finney (nee Jackson) came from landed gentry of County
Monaghan, Ireland, whose crest and family arms included the
figure of an eagle.
She died at Sidney House, which was named after her,
one year after she became mistress of its 20 rooms, its
cellars, and its retinue of servants. The figures of two
“spread eagles” still stand at the front steps, and the eagle
motifs preserved to day in the crest of Finney Isles and Co.
Ltd.
Inside the haunted house, at the foot of the cedar
staircase, is the mysterious “lady with the lamp,” whose
meaning no one can explain (she does not represent Florence
Nightingale).
Ballroom
Queensland Historical Society records describe the
newly built Sidney House as a magnificent mansion in which the
young Mrs. Finney took great pride.
Built on stone foundations, the house contained a
ballroom and handsome fittings and period furniture and had a
name synonymous with grace and hospitality.
It stood originally in 2½ acres of terraced ground, and
beside the river was the famous “Finney Orchard.” Rockeries
and trellises surrounded it.
Stained Glass
Yesterday I studied the great stained glass window with
its Australian scenes, and the medieval and Shakespearian
pictures in the coloured tiles of the marble fireplaces.
The building, which once would have rivalled Newstead
House (built in 1846) is now just a skeleton of its former
self. Sidney House was sold by the Finney estate in 1916 to
Mr. Peter Vallely, who sold it again in 1926 to Mr. H. Hatch,
a pastoralist from the Gympie district.
It was converted to a guest house and was occupied by
the American Army during the war. Accommodation Australia
bought it recently from the former Mrs. Hatch, now Mrs
Florence Verney.
And now for the wreckers…will they be disturbed by that
genteel spirit.
Courier
Mail 5 September 1956
Letters to
the Editor
“Ghost
Music at Toowong”
Until the last 3 months Sidney House, Toowong (“Is Sidney
House Haunted, Courier Mail, 14 August 1956) had been my home
for 25 years. The only time during all those crowded and
hectic years that a ghost would have had a hearing was the
last few months of its life when nearly all the boarders had
left. There in the quiet nights I often heard music like an
Aeolian harp, soft and sweet. I have gone into the room from
which the sound came and switched the light on, but there was
nothing there. I wondered if Mrs. Finney had a harp. Two years
ago a young man from Sydney boarding there, wrote a ghost
story around the house. He made the ghost murder a newspaper
reporter. Quite interesting.
“Interested”
Brisbane.
Courier
Mail Spring Hill
It’s Not So
Hideous
By Keith
Dunstan
Jack and Jill went up the Hill,
To buy a keg of water
But ginger pop was cheaper then
So pop was what he bought her.
The concrete mixers are chunking up there in Leichhardt
Street, and Spring Hill is coming to have mixed feelings about
it. Of course, Spring Hill, as far back as most folks can
remember, was always hideous. But then it was so thoroughly
hideous, it was difficult not to love the place. Like an old
wicket keeping glove, it had character. It has been painted so
often, Margaret Olley and John Rigby have done some of their
best work there, and every visiting artist makes a beeline for Spring
Hill.
Old Building Coming Down
There’s an old printery at the top of Upper Edward
Street that is just coming down now. They say that it has been
painted more often than a Hollywood blonde.
And many more people in the past have thought in the
past, that this wonderful piece of real estate, some of the
highest land in Brisbane, would inevitably become Brisbane’s
Montmartre. But things are happening. The old buildings, with
their thick walls, their balconies and their porphyry stone
foundations, are coming down, one by one.
The big bricks, with their lovely yellowy red tones,
are being whisked off and used as paving stones in gardens for
the nice houses out at St. Lucia.
The Hill has seen the lot
Yes it is an inevitable trend for a young city that is
growing out of its first pair of long pants. Office space is
scarce and costly in Queen Street, so now the offices and
small factories are moving up on to the Hill.
In the last 12 months six architects, three engineers,
assorted surveyors, accountants, business organisations, and
others have moved in around Upper Edward Street, Leichhardt
Street, and along the Terrace. It happened in Jolimont,
Melbourne, and now it is happening here.
Spring Hill, no doubt, can stand the change. It has
seen everything in its time. The first building was the old
windmill or observatory that is still there now. The convicts
built it in 1829 and in the old days Wickham Terrace was a
dusty track that wound up the Hill. But right on into the late
1850s, Spring Hill and most of the Valley was covered with
thick scrub and Queen Street came to an abrupt end somewhere
near Petrie Bight.
But upon the Hill you could smell the wattle and it was
a favourite hunting ground for the blacks. Tom Petrie records
in his reminiscences that one time a general gathering of
tribes occurred to witness a grand new corroboree put on by
the Ipswich blacks.
After the ceremony, “a free for all fight brought the
proceedings to a highly successful conclusion.”
The Bribie, Mooloolah, Maroochy, Noosa, Durundur,
Kilcoy and Baramba blacks fought the Brisbane, Ipswich,
Rosewood, Wivenhoe, Logan and Stradbroke tribes. Brisbane won
hands down.
In 1855, an aboriginal called Dunalli, was involved in
the murder of several white people at North Pine, so they held
a public hanging at the Post Office. All the blacks from the
Brisbane and Bribie tribes came in and silently they witnessed
the hanging from the slopes of Wickham Terrace.
Naturally Spring Hill became Spring Hill because there
was a spring there. It was down in the hollow between
Leichhardt Street and Gregory Terrace.
In 1859 it was Brisbane’s main water supply. The water
carrier used to haul their wagons, maybe along Water Street,
and they sold the precious stuff for 1/6 a keg.
Smart Place in 1856
They surveyed Wickham Terrace in 1856 and Spring Hill
was parceled out in acre lots. It was a smart place for the
nice people of Brisbane. Apparently the first doctor on the
Terrace was one Dr. Fullerton.
By the 1870s, there were shops all along Leichhardt
Street. Mrs. Brown’s grocery store was rightly famous. She
sold ginger pop at a penny a bottle.
The City View Hotel was Parish’s Hotel and at the
corner of Robert Street, there was an old lady who kept goats.
Those goats used to wander up and down the Terrace eating the
daylights out of any garden where the gate was left open.
The Berry family owned the biggest house on the Hill,
“Richmond Cottage,” and Berry Street is there to this day.
Crowded with Houses
In the 1900s everybody wanted to live on Spring Hill
and it became crowded with every type of dwelling place. You
can see them pretentious wooden houses, with stained glass
windows, funny little places with pagodas, like miniature
Kremlins, and weary, sad, old buildings, tilted at crazy
angles on their sunken stumps.
There’s a once fine old house with a large garden, now
completely overgrown. The curtains are rotted and it would
make a wonderful scene set for Miss Haversham’s house in a
screen version of “Great Expectations.”
The streets are full of dogs, washing hangs on a
thousand clothes lines, and bedraggled papaw trees grow within
hundreds of yards of the most expensive real estate in
Queensland. Archbishop Duhig once had a fine scheme for
clearing away most of it and making Spring Hill a new
Botanical Gardens with Leichhardt Street a lovely boulevard.
But now, no doubt, it is too late. Yet before Spring Hill
becomes too much of a business area take a look around. There
are still a few gems.
Yellow and feet thick
For my money the loveliest of them all is a little
stone cottage crammed between a car park and a dry cleaners at
157 Leichhardt Street. The walls are a rich yellow and feet
thick. Nobody knows how long it has been there. The owner, Mr.
Don Vericelli, believes that it was built by the convicts and
perhaps it is 90 years old. Let us hope that the old place
stays there forever. These concrete mixers are getting nearer
and nearer.
Courier
Mail Saturday 16 June 1956
Tin Town
Refuses to be a Ghost Town
In
Irvinebank This Week
With
Annette Moir
Hidden away in the rugged mountain spurs
of the Great Dividing Range south west of Cairns is the old
mining town of Irvinebank.
It’s cut from the familiar ghost town pattern- a town
that knew a brief glory during the hey-day of the mining booms
and then faded away before it could be remembered.
Irvinebank once had a population of 3000- today it has
120.
What it lacks in numbers however, it makes up for in
dogged determination- for the entire town still lives by its
old tin mines.
“And we do pretty well,” the townspeople will tell you.
“There are nearly as many cars as there are people- and we’ve
got a Humber in the town.”
Everyone has some sort of interest in the mines- even
to the schoolteacher, William Marsson, who puts a plug of
gelignite into his pocket and goes off into the hills every
weekend.
Private tin mines still operate, and the State mill
grinds away far into the night.
The future of a town like Irvinebank seems rather
chancy, in spite of the fact that the locals claim the hills
are made of solid tin.
Old timer John Kirkman, 62, who has lived all his life
in the area, said: “Irvinebank has gone back to the bush.
people come and go, but they mostly go.”
“Of course,” he added, “it might come good again when
tin is needed.”
Along with many other old mining towns in the far north
of the State, Irvinebank has a fierce local pride which is
easily hurt by the casual remarks tossed off by visitors.
They all know, and reluctantly admit, that it is a
ghost town, but they don’t like to talk about it.
Once a Bishop visited the town to take a confirmation
class. In a church magazine he wrote later that the hall had
to be cleared of bats before he could start.
Irvinebank has never forgiven him.
Most of the people lead simple, uncomplicated lives and
almost everyone has a warm affection towards his fellow man.
Said Mr. Kirkman, for instance: “You must meet Mr.
Newburn at the hotel. A fine man, he is. Why he’d give a whole
ham away to the children, and think nothing of it,” and then
Mr. Newburn: “You must meet Mr. Kirkman- been here all his
life. A grand fellow.”
According to Mr. Kirkman’s sister, Mrs. Dorothy
Kirkman, 58, who is the Irvinebank postmistress, life is never
dull for the women.
“Everyone knows everyone else…there are afternoon tea
parties, and we all do our own sewing and knitting,” she said.
As long as Irvinebank exists, the name of John Moffat
will be remembered.
He was so much a part of the town in the old days that
when the children said their prayers, it was always: “God
bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, and God bless John Moffat.”
A Scot, he came to Australia in 1862 at the age of 21.
In 1880 he went north to Gibbs Camp, a rough mining
settlement, which he renamed Irvinebank, after the river
Irvine in Ayrshire, where he was born.”
“ A proper gentleman he was,” said Mr. Kirkman, “and a
kinder, more generous and honest man never lived.”
John Moffat is generally recognised as the father of
tin mining in North Queensland. He owned a crushing battery
and smelter works at Irvinebank, and he assisted in the
development of the famous mines at Chillagoe, Mt. Mulligan,
Mt. Molloy and Mt. Garnet.
In conjunction with his mining enterprises, he built
railways which were taken over by the Government in 1919. The
nearest approach to a railway that Irvinebank got, however,
was a narrow gauge canefield type tramway which ran from
Stannary Hills.
At one rather rickety crossing on a sapling bridge, the
driver and the guard always jumped off to let the train make
its own way across.
The huge old Irvinebank railway station is now the home
of Mr. and Mrs. W. Cross.
John Moffat also left his name in the sheep industry.
With the assistance of a Mr. Virtue, he invented a power sheep
shearing machine, patented under the name of Moffat-Virtue.
He had a profound faith in the oil potential of
Queensland, and he “imported” a prospector from America. He
readily backed local prospectors in their search for tin.
He died in Toowoomba in 1918, and a memorial was
erected to his memory in Irvinebank in 1950.
Courier
Mail 14 June 1956
Foundation
Teacher at Old Normal School retires
Teacher at
13. He retires at 70.
A foundation member of the staff of the first
practising school in Queensland retires this week, five years
past the normal retiring age. He is Mr. Arthur Bradbury, 70,
who began teaching when he was 13 and taught in Queensland
schools for 57 years. Yesterday Mr. Bradbury said that he had
a good opinion of school children today and had no trouble
controlling them. Mr. Bradbury was a pupil teacher at Nundah
State School, and remained there for 22 years. He opened the
State School at Virginia, taught at Eagle Junction, and was a
foundation member of the staff at the “Old Normal,” the first
“practising school,” where student teachers received their
practical training.
He taught at the Central Practising School for 29
years. Three of his pupils won the Lilley medal. Last night
the Central Practising School committee farewelled him.
Courier
Mail Friday 15 June 1956
Letters to
the Editor
Wrestling
on Trains
The St.
Lucia resident (Courier Mail 11 June 1956) who protested at
the conduct of some secondary school pupils on the St. Lucia
bus should be thankful not to be a passenger on the trains and
rail motor to and from Manly. We are subjected to wrestling,
falling and trampling, no one takes any notice if you object
to stockings being torn. Ports are a danger. These children
are noted for their bad behaviour and I wonder if there is any
home training.
“Constant Traveller,”
Wellington Point.
Courier
Mail Saturday 16 June 1956
School
scramble in the 3.52pm train
By a Staff
Reporter
Only for a large sum of money would I travel again on
the 3.52pm train from South Brisbane to Cleveland. This is the
train that takes the Cleveland line schoolchildren home from
Brisbane. “Constant Traveller” of Wellington Point, protested
about the children’s behaviour in a letter to the Courier Mail
yesterday.
Yesterday I travelled with the students, and returned
with a lot of sympathy for regular travellers. Compartments of
both boys and girls wrestled among themselves. They clambered
over seat leaving dirt smears and heel marks on upholstery.
Crude talk
Both boys and girls kept up a nonstop din, shouting
often at the tops of their voices. The language from both
sexes at times was crude. But the children kept to themselves
and did not physically annoy adult passengers. Before the
train left South Brisbane, a railway official requested that
the children behave “in view of that letter in the Courier
Mail.”
Courier
Mail Monday 18 June 1956
Letters to
the Editor
Rail Smoke
Intolerable
Sir Raphael Cilento (Courier Mail 15 June 1956) has
performed a public service by drawing attention to the
intolerable smoke nuisance emanating from Central Station.
Having lived for three years at All Saints Rectory, Wickham
Terrace, I am in a position to state unequivocally that the
constant inundation of the city by clouds of smoke is a threat to any
form of civilized living or work in the area. For a city of
some 500,000 people to tolerate our antiquated, unhygienic and
unprofitable steam train service to the suburbs, is a matter
of amazement to southern visitors. Melbourne and Sydney
electrified their suburban train services decades ago. The
whole matter reflects little credit on a government that has
had the continuous administration of the State for nearly a
quarter of a century.
(The Rev.) A. P. B. Rennie,
All Saints Church,
Wickham Terrace.
Courier Mail
Saturday 13
September 1956
First
Television
Sydney:
Australia’s first regular television transmissions will start
in Sydney tomorrow, (Sunday 14 September 1956) 7pm.
Station TCN9 will begin its transmissions, Scores of
people in and around Sydney with TV sets are planning special
parties to watch the first programmes.
The station will transmit for 3½ hours nightly for a
start. Later this will be extended.
Tomorrow’s programmes will include sessions by
Australian and top ranking overseas artists. Sydney’s other
commercial station, ATN is expected to start transmission in
December, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s station
in November.
First regular TV transmission in Melbourne will be from
station HSV (the Herald-Sun station) on November 4. HSV is
transmitting test programmes every day except Saturday.
TV is expected to begin in Brisbane in about 2 years.
Courier
Mail Saturday 13 September 1956
Applications
for new theatres
Six
applications for new theatres are before the Picture Theatres
and Films Commission- the applications are for new theatres at
Wynnum, Wavell heights, Upper Mt. Gravatt and Camp Hill, plus
an application for the reuse of the Mayfair Theatre at
Sandgate, and a drive in theatre at Kawana, Rockhampton. Two
new applications have also been made for drive in theatres in
the Burleigh area.
Courier
Mail Saturday 13 September 1956
With
reference to a wife swapping cult on a farm at Kuraby who had
not sent their children to the local school, the Education
Minister stated that the Education Act provided that children
under 10 must attend school if there is one within 2 miles of
their home. For children over 10, the distance was 3 miles.
The cult’s farm was within one mile of Kuraby State School and
officials and police will enforce the attendance at school of
children residing with the cult.
Courier
Mail Sat 22 September 1956
The Man Who
Out Hit Trumper is still in business.
“Poley”
Evans Mr. Kangaroo Point
By Arthur
Richards.
There must be some preservative quality in the air at
Kangaroo Point, just across the river from Town.
The traffic that rushes across Story Bridge and down
Main Street has made small difference to the “old” Point on
either side of it. The little streets running down to the
river have aged gracefully, enjoying their memories. Kangaroo
Point used to be able to claim to be first with the newest. It
had Queensland’s first export industry (salt beef and tallow),
one of her first ferries, first shipbuilding yard, first
locomotive builders, one of the first stone churches. Now, in
the Point’s maturity, it claims to be one of the oldest
residential suburbs to have the oldest major industry
(engineering) and one of the oldest active businessman. The
businessman is worth meeting. You can find him sitting in his
office in the shadow of the Story Bridge- 80 now, but still
alert and active.
If you’re over 50, you’ll recognise his name from the
past. He is the famous “Poley” Evans, once the greatest name
in Queensland sport. Maybe you remember him. He captained
Queensland at cricket and Rugby Union, was an Australian Rugby
selector, a State cricket selector, a State bowls selector,
and is a life member of the biggest sporting associations
around town. In his spare time he became one of the State’s
best players of bowls. And he is now chairman of one of the
State’s oldest engineering firms, Evans Anderson and Phelan of
Kangaroo Point.
“A fairly busy life” he says.
Poley Evans (christened William Thomas) has seen much
of Kangaroo Point’s history being made. He was born at
Indooroopilly in April 1876 when the Point was in its infancy.
In those earliest days Kangaroo Point was a tongue of heavily
wooded land, bright with native wattles. Its main usefulness
was in carrying the main road from the swamps of Woolloongabba
to the ferry at the tip of the Point.
The road from Ipswich
Traffic from Ipswich and the South used this approach
to the City in preference to the swampy road around through
South Brisbane. Bullock drays and Cobb and Co coaches from the
Downs were ferried across from the Point to a landing near the
present site of the Customs House.
Pedestrians travelled by row boat ferries, a nice slap
dash procedure. If the ferry was on the other side of the
river, you whistled to get attention. The loading regulations
were easy- if she floated, she was safe.
Industry first touched the Point in 1843. Graziers in
what is now South East Queensland found that they could breed
and fatten cattle on their new pastures. But their export
problems were appalling. Rather than walk the cattle overland
to Sydney they decided that it would be better to kill them in
Brisbane and pack salted beef into barrels.
Boiling Down Works Failed
A Mr. John Campbell was put in charge of this venture
at Kangaroo Point in 1843. The salt beef venture had failed,
so the graziers decided to boil down the carcasses instead for
their tallow. Kangaroo Point endured the smell for a few years
until this venture too failed.
The homes built by Campbell’s workmen however, gave the
Point its start as a residential suburb. Two hotels were doing
a good trade by 1850, and the ubiquitous Mr. Petrie opened a
quarry on the river bank slightly upstream.
By the time Poley Evans was born in 1876, Kangaroo
Point was a thriving young community. Homes had begun to
cluster along Main Street.
A year after Poley Evans’s birth, his Welsh engineer
father, John Evans, formed an engineering company with a
factory in Bowen Street. A year later, he was joined by a
Scotsman, James Anderson, and, in another two years, by an
Irishman, Edward Phelan.
In 1878, by which time inevitably the firm had been
joined by an Englishman, Mr. Andrew Chapman, the expanding
young engineering business moved to the tip of Kangaroo Point.
You can still see the red iron buildings of Evans Anderson
Phelan Pty. Ltd., there now. [Ed: 1956]
Throughout Poley Evans’ childhood in the 1880s and
1890s, the firm was turning out the engineering work that
helped build Brisbane. They did a lot of metal mouldings for
the young city. You can see some of this old work still.
[1956]. The iron railings ornamented in the Victorian style
which enclose the National Bank Building (Creek and Queen
Streets) are stamped for passers-by to read with the letters
“E.A.P. 1885.”
The old red cast iron P.M.G. letter boxes perched on
posts in Brisbane’s streets, came from the same foundry and
bear the same letters. Mine and sugar machinery for
Queensland’s young industries came from the same source.
The firm early established shipbuilding as an important
Kangaroo Point industry.
In 1886 they launched the dredge Hydra, which was to
play a large part in deepening the port of Brisbane.
The firm built a warship
The firm also built the historic vessel Miner
during the Russo Japanese war scare, as a defensive naval
craft for the Queensland Government. Miner’s main
mission was to mine the approaches to the port of Brisbane.
The same workshops
repaired the steam yacht Lucinda on which the Federal
Constitution was drafted (in 1899). Later (1923) Mr. Edward
Phelan bought her for £400 and dismantled her. Her rusting
hull now lies half buried in ooze at the mouth of the Brisbane
River.
But it is as locomotive builders that the E.A.P.
workshops made probably their greatest contribution to
Queensland. More than 190 of them have come from the tip of
Kangaroo Point, and they are still [1956] hauling wheat and
wool and cattle along the States’ lines. Locomotive delivery
days used to be big occasions in Kangaroo Point, Mr. Evans
recalls now. All the neighbourhood would turn out to see the
fun. The problem was to get the locomotives from the
riverside, where they had been built, to Woolloongabba, where
they could be placed on the Railway Department’s lines. There
was no rail connection between the two points. The elder Mr.
Phelan used to take charge of proceedings with Mr. John Evans
at the controls of the locomotive.
They always dressed formally for the occasion, even to
white shirt and hat.
E.A.P. workmen used portable sections of rail, about
100 yards long. As the locomotive came to the end of the
rails, a crew of workmen would take up the line behind it,
re-lay it in front. The locomotive would then steam forward
again.
So it would go on down Main Street. The young men of
the firm (including Mr. E. G. Phelan, the firm’s present
engineer and director) were kept busy packing up the rails
with timber to give a level roadbed.
A toast to a locomotive
Local residents would turn out to see the fun; parties
would drive up in sulkies and buggies. At the end of it all,
with the locomotive safely delivered, the workers would
adjourn to a hotel at Woolloongabba to toast the occasion.
Poley Evans recalls it all now, in his office, on the
same old site at the tip of the Point. While Kangaroo Point
was growing, he was adding to its legends in his own way.
Playing cricket for Queensland against Victoria, he became the
local hero when he hit 84 in 39 minutes. And he has hit balls
clean out of the Woolloongabba ground, one from each end of
the wicket. A feat that is still unequalled.
Played in Two Rugby Tests
Victor Trumper has hit a ball out of this ground only
once. Only Evans has done it twice.
Evans played in the first two Rugby tests against
Britain in 1899 and scored tries in the first of them. He was
every Brisbane schoolboys’ hero that year. After he retired
from football and cricket, he started a new sporting career.
He became one of the State’s leading bowlers and still takes a
keen interest in the game.
Maybe, as we said, it is something in the Kangaroo
Point air. Poley Evans, now 80, and the company he heads, now
81, both look as if they’ll have no trouble at all getting to
the century.
Courier
Mail Saturday 22 September 1956
Gulfites
Reunion
Old timers would weep “tears of blood” if they saw the
formerly prosperous towns on the Gulf of Carpentaria today,
former Police Inspector Mr. A. A. Bock, 73, said yesterday.
Mr. Bock was stationed at Croydon for several years
from 1900. Yesterday he attended a reunion of 150 “Gulfites”
at Newstead House. Organised by Normanton born Mrs. Gussy
Sommer, Gulfites have been meeting twice yearly since 1941.
The Gulf country was known as the Siberia of the Queensland
Police Force, but there were 20 hotels there at the turn of
the century, Mr. Bock said. Only one remained. Golden gate, a
prosperous mining town, with eight hotels, was a deserted
ghost town now, he said. German born Mr. Fred Schipke, 83,
said “Everything is different from the old days but the
changes are to the good.”
“One difference is that everyone used to be everyone
else’s cousin up north.”
Courier
Mail Monday 15 October 1956
Sunday
School on Scott’s Beach
Fifty
children in bathing suits had Sunday School taken to them at
the beach at Scott’s Point, on the Redcliffe Peninsula,
yesterday. Two men, who “want to see all children given the
opportunity to receive religious instruction,” set up the
Sunday School on the sand.
The men, Jack McMurray, a school teacher, of Chermside,
and Handley Shakespeare, a carpenter, of Toowong, are members
of the “Open Air Campaigners” which they described as an
“interdenominational religious group.” They said that “most of
the children who come here don’t attend church, so we are
bringing religious instruction to them.”
Courier
Mail Wednesday 21 November 1956
The Duke
of Edinburgh will declare the Olympic Games in Melbourne open
at 4.25pm tomorrow.
Courier
Mail 3 January 1957
Letter to the Editor from Mrs R. Ansell, 87 Kuran
Street, Chermside:
There’s no
Beach like Beachmere.
“We read
of the North and South Coast but I like a little ‘one horse’
beach that is seldom mentioned. It is Beachmere at the mouth
of the Caboolture River in Deception Bay. We have no cinema,
hotel or chemist, but we have a hall and a shelter shed and
septic for campers. The camp site is a sheltered reserve with
couch grass underneath and pine trees overhead, and good
drainage. We have no surf, and a safe beach for children.
There is fishing, and crabbing, and a bitumen road runs right
to the beach.”
Father of
Lady Francis
“In
referring to Lady Francis in the Social page (Courier Mail 1
January 1957) you state that her father Jim Cribb had been a
member of the Federal Parliament. Actually my father, the late
James C. Cribb [Cribb Island] was a member of the Queensland
Legislative Assembly from 1894 to 1916, representing the
electorates of Bundamba and Bremer.
Eric C. Cribb, 21 Bonney Ave., Clayfield.
Friday 4
January 1957
Whispering
Giant Bristol – Britannia turbo propellor airliners will make
their first flights on the London- Sydney run early in March
(1957). British Overseas Airways Corporation will fly
Britannias from London to Sydney on Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Saturdays. The first will take off from London on March 2. The
400 mile an hour 80 ton 100 passenger Britannias will slash
the London- Sydney trip time from 75 to 47 hours. Boeing 707
jetliners scheduled for operation by Qantas in 1959, will cut
this down to 28 hours. Qantas will replace Skymasters with
Super Constellations on its Sydney- Hong Kong route starting
Sunday. The Super Constellations will leave Sydney at 4.20pm
and reach Hong Kong at 11.25 next morning. They will take
Laouan (Borneo) from the route, stopping only at Darwin and
Manila (Philippines).
Courier Mail
17 January 1957
Week delay
in Free Milk for Schools
Free milk
will be delivered to Queensland’s schools one week after they
reopen this year. Before supplies can begin, schools must
notify the Education Department of their enrollments. The
Education Minister (Mr. Diplock) said yesterday that at the
end of the 1956 school year, 163,870 children were receiving a
daily supply of milk under the free milk scheme. This was an
increase of 13,320 on 1955, he said. At present 908 schools
were in the scheme- 286 in the metropolitan area, and 622 in
country districts. Children under 13 receive free milk. It is
pasteurized, and issued in individual one third pint bottles.
The £100,000 Starlight at Aspley was officially opened by the
Premier (Mr. Gair) last night. The Starlight, reclaimed from
25 acres of farmland, 12 miles from the Brisbane GPO, is the
last word in Drive-In streamlining. At least one acre of the
new Drive-In is devoted to a children’s playground. A
concession bar, staffed by 16 blue uniformed girls, last night
did a roaring trade in everything from pie and peas to
southern fried chicken. Opening the Drive-In, Mr. Gair said
the owners, the Sourris brothers, had shown enterprise in
giving the public such a splendid theatre. Films to be
screened at the Drive-In will be mostly “big” films from Metro
Goldwyn Mayer.
Allan and Stark Limited’s drive in shopping centre at
Chermside is expected to be open about Easter. Business
circles claimed yesterday the 28 acre site would be the
first drive in shopping centre to be completed in Australia.
They said about 100,000 people in 28 suburbs lived within a 3
mile radius of the project.
On Saturday 2 February 1957, advertisements appeared in the
Courier Mail announcing the release of the new Victa 18 inch
Rotomo for £49/ 18/-.
“For 15/- a
ride on an historic railway.”
Cooktown- For 15/- you can buy a ticket here for a bumpy,
jolting ride on Cooktown’s most historic railway. It will take
you 67 miles from Cooktown to Laura, a tiny decaying township
which sprang up with the hopes of gold rush days. It is
Cooktown’s only railway line. There is no rail link to the
south, and none other on the Cape York Peninsula. Revenue
falls far short of the station- master’s wages alone, and
there are 11 other railway employees to pay. But Cooktown
people would fight to keep their public railway. They have an
affectionate regard for the rail motor. To them it represents
one of the few tangible signs that the State Government still
realises that there is a place called Cooktown. Closure of the
line will rob the town of its hope that one day it will come
vigorously to life again.
83 bridges
Once a week, Cooktown’s station-master Bill Gladwell, drives
his battered old rail motor out of the station yard for the
three and a half hour trip to Laura. On the way the line
crosses 83 bridges- more than one a mile. They straddle
creeks, gullies, and rivers which flood quickly in this high
rain fall country, and often force the rail motor back to
Cooktown.
Most of the bridges have been there since 1880 when optimists
pushed the line out to Laura, on the crest of the gold wave.
Today they keep fettling gangs constantly busy strengthening
and maintaining them to keep the line alive. Biggest bridge is
across the swift flowing Normanby River where the rail line
takes a sudden 40 foot dip over 250 yards. It is peaceful,
fertile, and picturesque country any young farming pioneer
could bring to rich productivity within a few years if he had
the capital to back him, and assured transport to market his
crops. But few people see it these days. In its busiest
period, the railway only carries 55 passengers a month. Last
month it was down to 35. Station-master Gladwell has been here
since 1939. Today he is traffic superintendent, maintenance
officer, administrative chief, and mechanic, all rolled into
one. He also sells and collects tickets and drives the train.
At present Cooktown station, battered in the 1949 cyclone, is
being remodeled. Local people see that as a sign that there is
still hope for the railway. And out at Laura, people often
look at a sturdy masonry bridge built years ago to take the
railway line beyond the town. They are hoping too.
Last Annual report of the Railway Commissioner shows that the
Department is running 28 diesel electric locomotives, as
compared with 791 steam locomotives. The ratio of diesel to
steam will increase as new diesel locomotives, now on order,
take to the rails. The States diesel strength is expected to
reach 50 locomotives by next year.
Tasmanian
Tiger David Fleay
The recent report that an A.N.A. helicopter pilot had
shepherded a Tasmanian tiger four times round a sand dune at
Birthday Beach, 30 miles southwest of Queenstown, raised hopes
that one or more of these vastly interesting creatures might
yet be obtained for breeding and study. With commendable
foresight, the helicopter crew took pictures of the strange
animal running below them, and described it as a black and tan
dog like creature with a long tail. However, in view of actual
experience with living tigers, and after a critical
examination of the interesting photographs, I am quite
unconvinced that the mystery animal was a marsupial wolf or
tiger.
This phantom of the island state is correctly tawny grey with
a stiff rigid tail, low ears and transverse black stripes, but
the helicopter’s quarry- in the pictures at any rate- appears
to be a prick eared black dog or even a Tasmanian devil. Some
elderly devils are quite large and heavy, and, of course, all
black. The bounding gait in which the subject was “frozen” is
rather more suggestive of a dog. The locality is a
particularly likely and interesting one, as only 11 years ago,
and 25 miles from it, we narrowly missed capturing a “tiger”
on Poverty Plain.
In spite of a gap of 24 years since the last Tiger was seen in
captivity, there is still some hope that this vastly
interesting creature, which is alone among the marsupials in
so closely paralleling wolves and dogs, will not slip away
forever without a chance of perpetuating it in some benign
form of kindly captivity.
Courier Mail
Thursday 21 March 1957
Teddy Boys
are Sad and Lost
Other Young
Englishmen are Worried
The Troubled World of Youth
Part 4
England
By John
Williams
The Rock ‘n’ Roll film “Rock Around the Clock” was showing
that night at a small London suburban cinema. The cinema
manager quaked in anticipation and with good reason. A half
hour before the show was scheduled to start, the manager’s
worst fears were realised. For here came the Teddy Boys.
The Teddy Boys name is derived from the clothes they wear in
shabby, pathetic imitation of the grandeur of dress in the
early twentieth century era of King Edward VII. The Teddy
Boys- thin, cocky teenagers- wear “drainpipe” trousers
(related to American peg leg pants, and tapering, heavily
padded coats. Their hair is long, often greasy. Many are
organised in shady teenaged gangs. The girls match the boys,
raucous voiced, shallow, talking of little beyond third rate
films and reading little beyond romance novels.
Rock ‘n’ roll’s fame had spread wide, so here were the Teddy
Boys pouring into the cinema. The film started and the first
boops of rock ‘n’ roll exploded in their ears. The cinema went
mad. Boys jerked girls to their feet. They stamped and yelled,
danced in the aisles, on seats, even on the stage, blocking
the film. The manager stopped the film. He broadcast for
quiet. He was met by a sea of shouting, picked up, carried
from the cinema, and deposited in the street. The police were
called, and the night’s fun was over. After that, many areas
banned “Rock Around the Clock.”
But they couldn’t ban Teddy Boys and their girls, for this is
the sad lost generation that grew up with the crump of German
bombs as background and the floors of dingy air raid shelters
for beds. The new glass and glitter imitation Italian coffee
bars, dance halls, cinemas- these are the homes for many Teddy
Boys and girls. They neck on the platforms and in the
carriages of the roaring underground railways that honeycomb
London.
Grimy Cafes
They are pale, these young East End Londoners, from lack of
sunshine, lack of fresh air. The Teddy Boys eat badly too- in
grimy little cafes where the menu runs to fried fish, bready
sausages, and greasy eggs, always with potato chips.
This is a black picture. But, of course, only a section of
London’s youth are Teddy Boys. In this huge city you probably
would find as many young people who love Beethoven as love
Rock “n” Roll. Many of these serious minded young people,
coming to London from provincial homes, live in tiny, rented
rooms, cooking meals over gas rings, perched near their beds,
pushing pennies and shilling pieces into meters to get a
little heating for hot water. They work hard, study hard, and
save hard, except for tickets, maybe two or three nights
weekly, to West End plays, ballets and musical recitals. It is
these gentle, friendly young Londoners who seem to worry most
about their nation’s future, who ponder the rights and wrongs
of migrating to new, energetic lands. A young man who wanted
to marry and then take his bride to Australia, told me: “It
sounds unpatriotic, but this country is finished. We reached
our natural limits many years ago. From now on we go down
hill. The Empire, as was right, has broken up. It will need
tremendous effort to maintain even our present standard of
living. I think that our crippling income tax is at the stage
where it no longer pays to display incentive, to work hard.
There is no top to get to. You have seen the new Government
built houses- row after row of boxes with pitiful little
gardens. They’ll all be slums in 20 years. I love England but
I wanted a new life while I have a chance to earn more than
£15 or £20 a week, while I can own my own home, and car and
save a little money, where my children can get good food and
grow strong in the sunshine. The war took too much out of
Britain. Germany has rebuilt. In some areas we are still
planning to rebuild. You can see our tiredness in our faces in
the way we uncomplainingly accept any inconvenience as if the
war was still on. We are more and more content with less and
less.”
Courier Mail
Friday 22
March 1957
French Girls
and Boys Are Fed Up
They Don’t
Go Mad over Rock ‘n’ Roll
The Troubled World of Youth
Part 5
France
“You can see how the French revolution began,” said my
Australian friend, nodding from our restaurant table to the
screaming, furious crowd jostling in the street outside. It
was Paris, a mild night last November. A mild night when, for
the first time in a generation, the youth of Paris was stirred
to real fury. The day before Paris newspapers with deep
headlines, had announced the return of Russia’s tank cordon to
strangle free Budapest. Now the electric tension of two days
was broken. In the streets the young men and women of Paris
were digging up stones and huge chunks of roadway for use as
weapons.
Fought Reds
They joined groups of other young Parisians armed with broken
bottles and nail embedded wooden fencing. Carrying Hungarian
flags with Communist emblems torn out, they swept down on to
the Communist party’s headquarters.
Police, alerted for trouble, had a strong armed cordon around
the building. The youth of Paris swept aside the cordon and
stormed into the building. Communists, entrenched on the top
floor, threw home made bombs into the crowd below. Two or
three young anti-Communists were enveloped in flames and later
died.
Meanwhile, the rioting youths on the lower floors threw office
chairs, files- everything and anything- through the Red
Headquarters shattered windows. Eager friends below piled it
all on a huge bonfire. A second, hastily armed crowd bore down
on the Communist Party’s newspaper, L’Humanité, which earlier
that day had hung Russian and French flags side by side from
its windows. Bottles and bricks crashed into the building,
several rioters stormed inside and were “captured.” by the
newspaper staff. Street fighting mounted to such fury that
police sealed off the whole area. Even the underground railway
stations were closed as the bloody battles swayed over Paris.
For five hours the youth of Paris showed what they thought of
Communism.
My friend and I had mingled with the crowd and were stupid
enough to talk English. A group of young men heard us, waved
their sticks and bottles, and shouted “Americans.” We dived
into the safety of the nearest restaurant, not waiting to
explain that we were not Americans. For this was the time of
the Suez crisis, and the popularity of Americans, never high,
had reached an all time low. All things American are, as a
rule, ignored by young Paris, probably the only city in
Western Europe not to go mad over Rock ‘n’ Roll. The only
signs of Americana in the student quarters of Paris are pin
ball machines- clanking and jingling up the scores while the
Parisians whoop with delight.
Days after the riot when tempers were back to normal, a young
Frenchman explained his dislike of Americans.
“The typical American comes here wearing loud clothes, loaded
down with cameras, and stays three or four days firmly
convinced he is seeing Paris. He is usually with a party of
fellow Americans and so is relieved of the boredom of spending
any time with the French. He has the boyish belief, apparently
given him in America, that Paris is an excitingly naughty
city. To most people, Paris is so very much more. Finally he
can’t understand why we don’t all love Americans and want to
live in America. Politically we think that the American nation
is naïve. The Suez crisis was partly the fault of their lack
of Middle East policy. But all they do is act like hurt
children. If a dictator seized the Panama Canal, of course,
they would fight for it. And how would they feel if we voted
in the UN with Russia against them? That is exactly what they
did in reverse. We are fed up with their morality.”
Fed up, to put it plainly, the youth of Paris is fed up with
almost everything. Fed up with the bewildering number of
political groups that is reducing the economy to chaos and
France’s position in the world to a second class power. Fed up
with all religions, which, they feel, offer no solace, no
solution to their problems. And above all fed up with
respectability, with the uniform drabness of modern life.
Poor but…
There is certainly nothing uniform about the students of
Paris. “I could walk in the streets wearing purple pajamas and
leading a green monkey, and no one would notice,” a Parisian
told me. For clothing, anything goes- roll neck sweaters,
leather jackets, shirts of every possible hue, frayed
trousers, all mixed in with long hair for both men and women.
Boulevard St. Michel, heart of the student race, is a broad
street ablaze with light far into the night. Here and in the
side streets, and underground jazz clubs, you see students of
every nationality- Moroccans, Chinese, Brazilians, Americans,
crowding the students’ cafes built into old cellars. Many are
so poor that they eat only once a day- perhaps steak and
potatoes, and red wine at night. They sit packed in their
cafes, the windows steamed, petting their dogs, looking at
each other’s paintings, holding hands, eating pastry, and
talking of philosophy, poetry, plays, history, jazz, and love.
Sex Code
Their knowledge and love of the arts is deep. Apart from the
riots, I saw young Paris excited only once, at a cinema. As
the film ended, they stood and shouted applause. The film? An
award winner showing how Picasso, the master of modern art,
builds up his paintings, stage by stage. Their sex code is
their own. Most shabby student quarter hotels wouldn’t dream
of questioning a young couple sharing a room. They object only
if both are not registered at the hotel desk. For if only one
is registered, and the police raid, the hotel keeper can be
charged with overcrowding. Young Paris goes its own way,
disdaining the world it feels allows it no real place. “Yes
many of us are brilliant,” a young Frenchman told me without a
blush, “but our brilliance it is harnessed to nothing.”
The foundations of the new Chermside Municipal Library were laid at the corner of Gympie Roads and Hall Street, Chermside.
Work was progressing on the new APM paper mill at Petrie, the
biggest in the southern hemisphere.
From
Scrubland to Lavish Playground
The new £200,000 Skyline Drive In at Coopers Plains is to be opened this Thursday night. Hoyts Queensland Pty. Ltd. said that the theatre would bring to 15 the chain of Hoyts Skyline Drive In throughout Australia. It is the first the company has built in Queensland and will be Brisbane’s fourth Drive In. Bordered by Musgrave and Troughton Roads, it has been carved out of scrubland. There will be two sessions daily at 7.10pm and 9.30pm. The first film will be “Broken Lance” starring Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, together with special cinemascope shorts and newsreels. Other cinemascope features to follow will be “Carmen Jones,” “The Racers,” and “Soldier of Fortune.”
[To those who have forgotten the location of this rendezvous,
this Drive In was located on the southeast corner of Musgrave
and Troughton Roads. Cluster housing has taken its place, as
time marches on and Drive Ins fade into memory as a thing of
the past].
What were the
Australian Rules and Rugby League Clubs in 1957?
Answer:
The Australian
Rules teams in the Brisbane area were-
Mayne,
Windsor, Wilston Grange, Sandgate, Coorparoo, Kedron, Western
Districts, Yeronga.
The Brisbane
Rugby League teams were: Valleys, Easts, Souths, Norths,
Wests, Wynnum Manly, Brothers.
Now take a
tour of Brisbane and see how many of these Clubs are still
left.
Letters to
the Editor
A Slap Happy
Express Makes Workers Late
We regular passengers from Petrie, and all country centres from Strathpine to Caboolture, are losing wages due to the late running of the “Slap Happy Express,” which should leave Caboolture at 6.28am. The express is a workers train but it is seldom on time. Regular passengers are late for work at least three times a week. I am reliably informed that the engine crew and guard get overtime in the same circumstances. Often the guard blows his whistle and waves his flag at least three times to get the train moving. People are leaving the outlying centres to get closer to town. One Caboolture man who travelled into Brisbane to work for a grocery firm had to buy a home at Redcliffe or lose his job. One day one passenger was arguing with the guard at Northgate. The passenger said that the train was four minutes late. The guard said that it was only two minutes late. The train is timed to leave Northgate at 7.25am, but while they were arguing, the starting whistle of the MacKenzie and Holland (Australia) Pty. Ltd. engineering works at Northgate blew at 7.30am.
Often the train loses time between Bald Hills and Zillmere, a naturally fast run without curves or grades.
The “Slap Happy Express” is packed after it leaves Zillmere; a second workers’ train is required. The 6.55pm train from Zillmere could be extended to Petrie and leave Petrie at 6.45pm to allow workers to get to work on time.
M. Morgan,
Gympie Road,
Petrie.
(Railway Department Secretary Mr. K. Lingard said he could not comment. He said it was very intricate affair and he would investigate.)
Billy Graham
Crusade
New York May 16 (AAP)- People streamed from the balconies and surged down the aisles to the platform at the Madison Square Garden meeting last night when Evangelist Billy Graham called for those who would “make decisions for Christ.” Dr. Graham said after the meeting, the first of a scheduled six week mission in New York: “It was the largest first night response I have ever seen from the pulpit. It was overwhelming. It was beyond anything I had anticipated. Prayer,” he said, “was responsible.”
About 18,500 passed Dr. Graham. Many had lined up for hours
for admission. One hundred police were stationed outside the
building, and 80 inside, but the meeting was orderly. The
auditorium was draped with flags and the platform from which
Dr. Graham spoke was banked with flowers. For his sermon, Dr.
Graham took his text from Isaiah 1, 1-20 which includes this
passage:
“Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of
evil doers children that are corrupters. They have forsaken
the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto
anger, they are gone away backwards.”
Dr. Graham stabbed his finger at the huge crowd as he said:
“The times in which we live are parallel to the times that
Isaiah lived in.”
Wage Case
Case opened before the Industrial Court seeking a £2 a week
increase in the present Storemen and Packers wage of £13/9/-
New York: May 17 (AAP)- Dr. Billy Graham told 18,000 people in
Madison Square Garden last night that “New York was crying for
cleansing from its evil.” It was the second night of his
spiritual revival campaign. The audience was 5,500 fewer than
on the first night.
“Jesus puts his finger on the trouble in New York when he says
that we are morally sick,” he said.
“I am appalled when I hear of murders, the rapes, the
assaults, and robberies that are taking place in this city;
nearly a million crimes committed here last year.”
But he said that what troubled New York troubled the whole
human race.
Our Gem
Hunters have Fishermen’s Luck or better.
By Keith
Dunstan
The American hobby of “rock hounding” has come to Brisbane. Maybe we are paying too much of a tribute to America there. Rockhounds have been in action since the beginning of time, but it took the Americans to make it a popular hobby. In America, there are now three million enthusiasts who spend their weekends scouring the countryside looking for precious or semi-precious stones. They can buy make-your-own jewellery kits at the corner store. As a hobby it ranks second only to stamp collecting. Our “Rockhounds” however, come under the impressive title of The Lapidary Club of Queensland, and just so that you won’t reach for your dictionary, a lapidary is a gentleman who cuts and mounts semi precious stones. The President of the Club in Brisbane is Mr. Doug Robinson, a local jeweller. There are 50 in the club, and soon Mr. Robinson expects to have 400. He believes that no similar areas in the world holds such opportunities for the Rockhounds as Queensland. We have the opal, turquoise, topaz, sapphire, amethyst, jasper, chalcedony, ruby, garnet, almost every stone you can think of, to the precious diamond.
The Lapidary Club every so often holds picnics and members go
off together and camp out in the open near places like
Stanthorpe, Canungra, Dayboro, or even as close as Ipswich.
They look for rocky outcrops, dawdle in creekbeds, and wander
like schoolboys looking for three pences. These people have a
touch of the urge that drove the old time prospector- the hope
that any minute they might stumble on to something tremendous,
the thrill of finding something for nothing.
From what I have seen, these rock hounds have better luck than
the average fisherman. For example, around Canungra and
Tamborine, they have been finding the lovely amethyst, which
varies in colour from light to deep purple. Amethustos means
“not drunken,” and the story is that the ancient Greeks wore
amethysts around their necks as an aid to sobriety. These days
they are worn very often by bishops. It is an ecclesiastical
gem.
Then jasper, a rich, reddish brown stone they find around
Miles. It was very popular in the 16th century. In
those days doctors used to tell patients to hang it around
their necks in order to strengthen their stomachs. As for
garnet, Mr. Robinson says that the Club finds that on farms
near Lowood. It is best to wait until after good rain and a
farmer has ploughed up his field. They sometimes turned up in
the soft earth, they find the stone, garnet, a beautiful blood
red.
The diamond, small and for industrial use, more than anything
else, can be found near Stanthorpe, and on the Atherton
Tableland. The stones, when first gathered from a prospecting
dish, looks anything but promising. A diamond looks like a
piece of washing soda.
“Dead Eye” Beryl Andriske, 9, whose skill at marbles has routed all comers at Geebung State School, girls and boys. So far she has won 1002 marbles in the current season, and does not look like being beaten.
If you were one of the hundreds of readers who telephoned the Courier Mail yesterday regarding the picture of Geebung’s marble champion, the name definitely is BERYL despite the boyish look. To clarify the position, here’s Beryl Andriske and her nine year old twin sister Glenda, who is one of the victims of her “dead eye” shooting. Meanwhile Beryl is going merrily along to lift her winnings to the 2000 mark.
Courier Mail Saturday 25 June 1957
Billy Graham
Battles with the Devil
Young Man
with a Bible packs Madison Square Garden
New York: If the ghost of old Billy Sunday is stalking Madison
Square Garden these days he must be learning a lot about
latter day evangelism.
Gone from the big arena are the gory pugilists, the
grunting wrestlers, the circus clowns, the ice hockey heroes,
the hot dog vendors, and the screaming fans.
In their place is one remarkable man, standing on a
stage against a solid white backdrop of a 1500 voice choir.
Every night since May 15, 1957, he has been packing
about 17,000 people into the Gardens. Nothing less than
Ringling Brothers’ circus has been able to do that.
The tall, broad shouldered athlete under the high
spotlight is BILLY GRAHAM.
If he wasn’t the world’s best known evangelist, he
would not seem out of place as a high priced advertising model
for anything from well cut clothes to toothpaste- or perhaps
in a movie role as a college football star.
Billy isn’t selling suits or toothpaste, but religion.
But Billy himself says that, since he’s selling the greatest
product in the world, why not give it at least as much
promotion as a bar of soap? And that’s what has happened.
The Billy Graham organisation has handled the New York
invasion with all the high powered efficiency of a national
sales promotion campaign. And it’s running with the smoothness
of a well oiled railway system.
It is a far cry from the days of yesteryear, when
evangelists thundering hell-fire and damnation depended
chiefly on lung power and rhetorical fireworks to convert the
hordes of sinners.
About 40 years ago battling Billy Sunday stormed into
New York. In a hastily erected building on upper Broadway, the
small, lithe man pranced and shouted, shadow boxed, and
wrestled o the floor with the Devil, and mesmerized his flock
with fishwifery dramatics. New Yorkers in general he described
in one burst as “vile, iniquitous, lowdown, groveling,
worthless, damnable, rotten, hellish, corrupt, miserable
sinners.”
And all liquor sellers, he said, were “a weasel-eyed,
butter-and-milk, white-livered, whisky-soaked gang.”
The country boy from the cornfields of the Mid-West was
the idol and joke of a whole generation.
He had been a star in the Chicago White Stockings
before he abruptly left baseball to enlist his energies in
God’s cause.
At his meetings he always told the story of the country
boy whose downward path began at a “fancy undress ball” when
he met a jezebel with “hair like a raven’s wing, a neck like a
swan, teeth like a ledge of pearl in a snowdrift, wearing just
enough clothing to pad a crutch, who, with difficulty,
persuaded the young man to take his first glass of champagne.”
Billy also introduced a good measure of jingoism. He would yank an American flag out of its holder, and whip it back and forth overhead, shouting, “We are enduring it now for the cause of justice. It has never flown for anything else.”
Then the entire audience of 20,000 would rise with a
roar and launch into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as
Billy capered with joy at having won the first skirmish in his
“battle with the Devil” in New York.
Well, there are no more Billy Sundays but the Devil is
apparently still around these parts.
His current antagonist is doing battle but with greater
weapon power.
Billy Sunday used a cannon; Billy Graham uses push
button warfare.
Every 40 years some fierce eyed revivalist storms New
York to brand it the citadel of sin.
It doesn’t happen more often because New York is a name
that strikes fear and trembles into all the most stout hearted
evangelists.
They call this city the “revivalist graveyard,” which
isn’t as contradictory as it sounds.
Many a good missionary has floundered here. Evangelists
steer away from its shores, until they are at the peak of
their careers.
Whether this is such a Devil ridden city is a debatable
point; it has been pointed out that New York has the highest
percentage of church-goers of any city in the United States.
Broadly two factors do most to keep the evangelists
away.
For one thing, it is hard to be heard over the hurly
burly of all this city’s distractions.
For another the population is 45 per cent Roman
Catholic, and 25 per cent Jewish.
Neither faith has any use for the mass evangelism these
visitors practise.
Roman Catholics have been told by spokesmen of their
church not to go to Billy Graham’s meetings. Some of his
preachings, it is said, are heretical.
Jews have been told that the meetings have nothing of
value for them.
Among Protestants, there is not complete unanimity
about Mr. Graham. The critics concentrate on the “emotional
excesses and commercialism” of the Graham crusade, and express
doubts that many people would be permanently “saved.”
But Billy Graham managed to win the cooperation of 1500
local ministers in this crusade.
This points to an important feature of Graham crusades.
He first makes sure that he has a strong body of clergy behind
him before he moves in.
The churches are involved in an integral part of the
Graham evangelical technique: an elaborate follow up system.
The converts who hit what Billy Sunday called “the
sawdust trail to salvation” after each meeting are handled by
a small army of “counselors.”
The converts fill in cards. The information is passed
on to the appropriate churches which are expected to follow up
each convert.
Of the 300,000 people who had been to Graham’s meetings
in the first two weeks, about 12,000 stepped forward and
“declared themselves for God.”
Ad. Men in Action
Mr. Graham’s preparations went a long way beyond the churches. His organisation used all the promotion techniques of Madison Avenue- hub of the advertising world- in the assault of his toughest proving ground.
The same methods will be sued in Australia if Mr.
Graham goes there- as he hopes to do.
For a year before the crusade began, his organisers set
up office near Times Square and started preparing the ground.
As a result. long before Billy himself arrived, New
York was plastered with posters, the crusade had time spots on
radio and TV, convoys of buses- as well as planes and trains-
to bring adherents from every corner of the country had been
organised, the clergy had been organised, classes for about
5,000 “counsellors” had been organised, the nightly roster of
1500 singers for the choir had been organised, round-the-world
all night prayers for the eve of the opening had been
organised, and funds were pouring in.
Plenty were needed. Cost of the campaign will run into
over a million dollars, plus extras, such as the televising of
a recent Garden meeting, which cost $200,000.
But this was underwritten by Graham’s wealthy backers,
of which he has many.
One Texan has left his chain of supermarkets to help
Graham in New York.
His campaign committee includes men like newspaper
magnate William Randolph Hearst Jnr., and Henry R. Luce,
publisher of Time and Life.
Bank presidents, heads of corporations and business
houses are among the backers.
When the helpers take up the collection in the Garden,
they pass around paper buckets, which are promptly stuffed
with dollar bills. But that isn’t enough to take care of the
Garden rent.
Graham himself gets nothing extra for coming to New
York. His organisation pays him a flat $17000 (about £8,800) a
year which is not excessive by local standards.
On the credit side, the Graham crusade has received a
spate of publicity unprecedented here and immeasurable in
terms of dollars.
Almost every local newspaper and national magazine has
run feature stories on Billy Graham.
No other individual apart from his friend President
Eisenhower has had such a concentrated wealth of publicity.
This has helped to make Billy Graham one of the best
known men in the United States.
A recent Gallup Poll showed that 90 per cent of the
population could identify him, an honour accorded few
Americans, other than the nation’s chief executive in
government.
More than four million adults said that they had seen
him in person. About 50 million said they had seen him on TV
or heard him on the radio.
With the great pre-Crusade build up, there was not much
for Billy Graham to do but get up on stage and preach. He does
just that.
He has no use for the physical and vocal acrobatics of
Billy Sunday. He is urgent and articulate but not emotional as
evangelists go.
A miniature microphone in his lapel, he speaks with a
smooth, driving delivery.
Occasionally he shakes his fists, shouts, or points
heavenward and hellward, but he keeps away from bygone
histrionics.
Even the most misbegotten old sinner would not deny
that he is one of the most dynamic speakers ever to set foot
on a stage.
The soft pedal influence is seen throughout the
meeting. Applause is banned. “If you want to applaud, do it
deep down inside you,” one of his aides tells the
congregation. “Treat this place like a cathedral.”
The whole meeting runs with the precise efficiency of a
TV “spectacular”. The timing of the speeches, the organ music,
the songs, and the silences, is superb.
It seems that Billy Graham prefers to associate himself
with the respected memory of the 19th century
evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, rather than that of Billy Sunday,
who was called by his official biographer “A Gymnast for
Jesus.”
The Graham technique is working the “Miracle of Madison
Square Garden.” His seemingly impossible six week run has just
been extended to 21 July (1957) three weeks beyond the
original closing date. And his aides say that there is every
possibility that he will continue battling with the Devil at
“the Garden” until the end of summer.
New Paul’s Hav-a-Heart with Grilled Nuts now available,
and still only 6d.
Melbourne: A “ghost” has appeared to seven people on a lonely
dirt road outside Warrandyte, an outer suburb, in the last
month. One man said last night that his hair stood on end when
he saw the “ghost.” Another was so shocked that he had to stay
home from work next day to recover. Three dogs which live near
the spot where the “ghost” appears now make a detour through
the bush rather than pass it.
‘It Exploded”
Mr. David Kent Briggs, a journalist said: “A friend and
I were driving down the road when we saw this odd thing shaped
like a long drawn out triangle. I drove into it and it
literally exploded around the car. Shining fragments seemed to
cling to the car for the next 100 feet or so and then
disappeared. The whole shape suddenly re-appeared in front of
the car and then drifted into the bush. It was about 6ft long
and silvery yellow.”
Canberra: Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, and Hobart will have
television in late 1959 or early 1960. Federal Cabinet’s
decision to proceed with this second phase of television in
Australia was announced in Parliament yesterday by the
Postmaster General Mr. Davidson. The four cities will have
both commercial and national yv1. If as in Sydney commercial
TV stations open first, Brisbane and Adelaide could have TV
about the middle of 1959. Each of the four capitals will have
a national TV service and at least one commercial service.
There will be a public inquiry in each of the four capitals
before the Government grants commercial licences. Country
television will be the third phase in the Government’s TV
extension programme.
Bald Hills
Celebrates 100 Years
By Noel
Turnbull
One of Brisbane’s thriving “bush” suburbs, Bald Hills (population 1413; 12 miles north of the G.P.O.) will celebrate its centenary next month, October 1957.
On 6 October 1857 three families of the relatives
arrived at Bald Hills to settle after a long trek through
thick scrub from Brisbane.
Now, descendants of these families and later settlers
in the district are preparing to celebrate the 100th
anniversary of
their arrival. The history of their community is told in a
booklet prepared by a great great grandson of one of the early
settlers. He is Mr. Garth Carseldine, who is accountant and
personnel officer at Brisbane radio station 4BC.
How the name Bald Hills originated is not definite.
Most popular theory is that it was so called by cattle duffers
because the hills, with their sweet grasses, stood out from
the impenetrable scrub of the South Pine Valley.
It made an ideal resting place for their sojourn.
Aboriginals called the hills “Borlil,” but it is not known
whether this was an imitation of the white man’s name.
The three main families in the early settlement of Bald
Hills were the Duncans, the Stewarts, and the Carseldines.
One man who never lived at Bald Hills was responsible
for the heads of these three families coming to the area. He
was Thomas Gray, a bootmaker with a business in George Street,
Brisbane, near the intersection with Queen Street.
The building on the site of his shop continued to bear
his name, as Gray’s building, up to the present time of
writing (1957).
Thomas Gray left Dundee, Scotland, in September 1841 in
the migrant ship, Ann Milne. On board also were Angus
Duncan and his family, and John Stewart and his two sisters.
The Duncans and the Stewarts settled in the Hunter River
Valley of New South Wales, while Gray worked in the Lower
Burnett District (also then part of New South Wales) before
buying the land for his shop in George Street.
In 1845, marriage linked the three men. John Stewart
married Angus Duncan’s daughter, Jean, while Thomas Gray
married Janet Stewart.
Twelve years after arriving in the Colony, disastrous
floods struck the Hunter valley. Many of the settlers moved
from the district either to New England or to Moreton Bay.
Gray had seen the Bald Hills locality earlier and so
advised John Stewart to come to Brisbane. With his brother in
law David Duncan, Stewart looked over the area and bought land
at Bald Hills. They returned to New South Wales, collected
their wives, belongings and another member of the family,
Charles Duncan, and arrived back in Brisbane in the steamer Yarra
Yarra late in September 1857.
They immediately began the slow journey in horse drawn
drays to their new intended homes. Their route crossed
Breakfast Creek by the old punt near the mouth of the creek
(capable of carrying ‘one horse and a cart and about half a
ton of load’), to the high ground at (later) Albion, then out
along roughly the course of what became known as Sandgate Road
to German Station (later Nundah), to Zillman’s Waterholes
(later known as Zillmere), where they turned west going up the
route now occupied by Zillmere Road to Cabbage Tree Creek (now
Aspley). There they crossed the creek, proceeding along the
later course of (old) Gympie Road to Bald Hills.
Years later one of the Carseldines cut a shorter track
which approximated the later route of the present Gympie Road.
He left Bald Hills along a cattle path, went through Aaron
Adsett’s property (now Chermside), and then out through dense
scrub to Kedron Brook.
On 10 October 1857, the ‘Moreton Bay Courier’ recorded that
“three families from the Hunter River district bringing with
them three superior draught horses, settled on Tuesday last on
freeholds on the Bald Hills, near Sandgate.”
The following year, 1858, William Carseldine arrived at
Bald Hills as a fencing contractor for John Stewart. He liked
the area, and decided to settle there.
He was first led to the settlers by bootmaker Thomas
Gray, whose talk of Bald Hills greatly impressed him.
The early settlers camped together on the top of the
rise. The homes were made of wattle bark, and daub (mud)
within sight of each other because of the fear of hostile
natives in the area. Bald Hills oldest resident, Arthur
Carseldine (80 at time of writing, namely 1957) remembered how
the walls had special “peepholes” in them for the rifles in
case of attack.
The first 40 years after 1857 were noted by a series of
“booms” encouraging closer settlement and development of Bald
Hills.
The first stimulus was the land boom in the 1860s, when
and was auctioned, first in Sydney but later in Brisbane Town.
The Gympie gold rush in 1855 provided another stimulus
to development of Bald Hills. The community had begun simply
as a farming and dairying area, but settlers had some
difficulty in finding a market and getting their produce to
it.
Until the 1880ss the settlers did not realise the value
of the rich soil down on the flats just north and west of the
Hills, bordering the South Pine River. These flats were
covered in dense scrub and the settlers considered that the
cost of clearing the thick scrub too much for what they saw as
a projected small return. The rapidly growing town of Gympie,
with its demand for fresh food, provided a market, provided
transport could get the produce there. Thus came a demand for
better transport to and from Bald Hills.
This led to Cobb and Co surveying a route to Gympie,
traces of which can be found by thinly following what is still
in parts known as “old” Gympie Road. In 1867 the first coach
of Cobb and Co passed Bald Hills. This provided a great
stimulus. The first shop was opened at Bald Hills a year later
in 1868. Then in 1872 the first direct mail service from
Brisbane to Bald Hills began, the shop becoming the Post
Office It continued in that role until the late 1930s. The
residence of the owner of the shop, James Carseldine is still
standing (at the time of writing), having been given a
somewhat modern touch up, but still the oldest surviving
residence in Bald Hills. Part of it is occupied (1957) by
“Johnnie’s Snack Bar.” The second shop opened in the late
1880s when the construction of the North Coast Railway brought
further stimulus to the area. From then on a steady little
community began to grow, and the service community gained a
blacksmith, saddler, butcher and even a fancy goods store.
The Railway itself was opened in 1888, with Bald Hills
having its own railway station, next being Zillmere about
three miles away. (The station Carseldine was added between
these two, decades after this article was written). The first
station master was Edward Louis Moriarty, father of the
Railway Commissioner in 1957#.
Between 1905 the first telephone line reached Bald
Hills. It was a party line shared with Strathpine and Petrie.
Today Bald Hills is part of the greater Brisbane automatic
distribution system.
The Bald Hills State School was opened in 1866. It was
the fourth to be opened in Queensland. Children came from as
far away as Sandgate initially. Classes had actually begun in
Bald Hills two years earlier when the Presbyterian Church, one
of the first in the State, was used as a school. Now 219
children are enrolled.
The Carseldine family claims a unique record for
attendance at the school. For 75 of the 91 years that the
school, to 1957, has been open, a Carseldine has been enrolled
and for 48 years there has been a Carseldine on the teaching
staff. There has never been a year to 1957 in which there has
not been a pupil or teacher from the Carseldine family at the
Bald Hills School.
[Footnote: The suburb now located between Zillmere and Bald
Hills was named Carseldine after the Carseldine pioneering
family. This closely settled suburb has its own railway
station, Carseldine and also the Carseldine Campus or College
of Advanced Education.]
Ancient
Railway Carriages
Seven metropolitan railway carriages still is use in the Brisbane area were more than 70 years old (i.e. 1880s vintage) State Parliament was told yesterday.
Twenty four (24) more carriages were more than 60 years old
(dating from the 1890s), 154 more than 40 years old (1910s
vintage) and 234 more (the Evans cars) over 30 years old.
From December 14 to January 13 the railways will carry passengers from Ipswich, Corinda, South Brisbane and Pimpana to Southport for a flat return fare of 6/- adult, 3/- child. This drive to recapture passenger traffic to the South Coast from buses was announced by the Railway Commissioner (Mr. Moriarty) yesterday.
Normal excursion fares from South Brisbane to Southport and return were adults 12/- and children 6/-. Day of issue return fares are South Brisbane to Southport adults 19/-, children 9/6, from Ipswich to Southport £1/ 7/- and 13/6, and from Corinda to Southport £1/ 4/- and 12/-.
Bus fares from Brisbane to Southport Are 18/6 each way or £1/ 17/- return. The 64 mile bus journey to Coolangatta occupies 2 and a half hours.
A vacation special train will leave from South Brisbane at 8.20am and arrive at Southport at 10.8am, 1 hour 48 minutes for the 50 mile journey, stopping at Yeroongpilly. A train will depart Southport at 4.50pm and arrive at South Brisbane at 6.46pm. On Fridays during the period, the return train will leave Southport at 6.27pm and arrive at South Brisbane at 8.31pm. The return train will stop as required to set down passengers between Kuraby and South Brisbane.
Additional services to Townsville and Cairns will leave Roma Street at 6.45pm during this period, preceding the usual Cairns Mail which departs Roma Street at 9.30pm