Smiths Creek, Nymbool, Queensland

In Nymbool Notes, Jan 14 1931, a correspondent to The Cairns Post recorded in a telling opening sentence.

Our little village has been so undisturbed for so long that many people who once were interested in its fortunes will have forgotten its existence. The fall in metal values added to the general depression and all-round apathy seems to have killed whatever chance it had of seeing capital and machinery ever lifting it out of the despondence of the last decade.There has been no store or hotel for some years, and the school closed last year owing to lack of attendance.

My mother's oldest brother bought the school building at a Queensland Government auction in that year for his mother (and father too was that beneficiary) to house and host the remaining family (of my grandmother's twelve children) and their visitors and adult children and spouses. Superimposed on the bottom RH corner of the background image of Smith's Creek (photographed two years ago) is a photo (photographer unknown) of that school in 1930 after its transport next door to the location of my grandparents' inadequate home for the population explosion they were in the throes of dealing with as their family multiplied...home and away...while around them the town, Nymbool, was on its last pegs.

This same residence is where I was taken on my earliest holidays in the very early 1950s ... to Grandma's with my parents, siblings and what seemed an endless supply of aunts, uncles and cousins. Every evidence of the township had almost gone otherwise.

My grandma was the Nymbool postmistress. The Post Office is mentioned in the Cairn's Post 'Notes'...Although there are no stores, the Post Office attracts a few of the people working on the creeks...

My aunt who was the youngest of the 12 siblings took over the post office eventually. The licence was relinquished in the early 1970s and not renewed.

My grandad was a ganger (a foreman) for the railways. He had many skills as a bushman and horseman.

I wanted to show you a collation of images as insight into the environment of my childhood background ...and blippers who have enjoyed access to such a place and call it home in some part, or ancestral land, will understand the indigenous people of Australia who use the word 'country' convey a complex meaning to identify what is important to them taking stock of past, present and future.

I think on that silence of privilege. Birds twitter, grass rustles and trees creak, a lizard or a snake etc darts into a bark dug-out with a skittering sound. I mean that natural silence of the environment when not even an aeroplane flies overhead. Yet my grandmother had the name of the town spelt out in a garden bed for pioneer aviators to check their bearings by it. Smiths Creek Mine battery crushed ore to extract a variety of minerals. Smith Creek Pty Ltd's mine ceased operations in 1902.

I do recall on a visit as an adult (everybody gone) a tumultously loud exultation of wildly pink and grey galahs in a flock swooping low at speed overhead and the valley seems to be filled with them in that moment.

You can glean from a map on the top RHS an impression of the town as it was at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th and there were a number of hotels in this location, still 6 in 1910, always a measure of an Australian population and the need for guest accommodation in a booming mining town on a railway line. Smiths Creek is represented on the map to the RHS of the town allotments by the distinct double (meandering) lines that extend off image at the bottom edge and another creek Corelli is represented on the LHS of the town by narrower, but double (meandering) lines. Corelli and Smiths Creek share a junction.

The bold line at the bottom of the map shows the old railway track and the train station.

Second at the top of the images (LHS) there is a domestic photo taken looking towards the back of the residence where there was a breakfast table on the verandah and the kitchen was housed to the RHS of that image; four young people are grouped posing, two of my aunts with their 'young men' who became their husbands. My first memory of my grandmother is of her on that verandah and consciousness of my self. I was about 3 years old.

My Scottish-born grandmother is standing on the front steps of the residence in another image and one of her pet galahs is perched on the staircase railing. My mother told me many years ago that my grandmother took the first pair of galahs to Nymbool from Georgetown, a town further north towards the Gulf or Carpentaria. Grandma Jane's parents and Grandad Bill's family were pioneer settlers of Georgetown in the 19th century.

Like so many stories we are told when we are children, we begin to take them with a grain of salt as we grow to the age when thankfully some of us know for sure (without realising what the trouble is) we know everything. Later, I saw the immense numbers of galahs in the valley and thought the story a pure romance that the population could have begun with my grandmother's pet galah pair.

One day, a light bulb flickers. We wonder if something might have even a grain of truth. Recently I read somewhere that galahs were not distributed the length and breadth of every pocket of Australia and the image of the flock returns. I have learned the galah cross breeds. I no longer entirely discount the story. Maybe there were no galahs in the valley when my grandfather and grandmother rode into the fledgling town of Nymbool on horseback with their first child (a baby).

The grave site (the top image) is that of Daniel McKinley d.1923, one of two left with visible inscriptions in the bush area we call the cemetery.

Attempting to identify who the indigenous owners of the land are under the Native Title Act and what provisions are made for ownership I surmise from a mix of online theses and the standard Tribal Language divisions of Australia link to language divisions map the group may have been Awamin bordered by the territory of Gugu-Bahdun of the Burdekin River territory and the rainforest tribal dwellers Kuku-Yalanji of the area of the adjacent East Coast as far north as the Daintree River...but interesting that the Kuku-Yalanji extended as far west as Chillagoe in Queensland, which includes open savannah territory and similar extreme dry margins interspersed with watercourses.

Ambling Camera btw is hosting the Square September challenge here and this collage is posted as a SQUARE image... :)