Back in the days before the coastal route was upgraded, of course, the road headed out from Marlborough through the uplands, winding back down to the coast at the Sarina Range and ensuring there was less disruption to vehicular traffic during The Wet.
And it’s that two to three month Wet Season that’s a significant part of the feeling of separateness. We’ll sit here sweltering as the humidity hovers around the hundred per cent, as the flood waters rise, shaking our heads as news of similar events in southern and central Queensland flows through and places like Melbourne and Adelaide sweat it out in temperatures close to forty Celsius.
Six months later we’ll be complaining when the temperature drops into single figures, but faced with two or three months of almost invariably blue skies and, maybe, as much as a week of single figures between early May and late August, people living between Sarina and the tip of the Cape will definitely be seeing themselves as better off than our southern cousins.
Assuming, of course, that you’re not into winter activities that involve snow and ice.
But there are other elements apart from the weather and Wet Season isolation that set the North apart from the rest of the country. They might have lessened over the past fifty years, but if you look closely they’re still lurking around the vicinity.
Going back to the fifties and early sixties the North wasn’t a place to stay if you had ambitions beyond what could reasonably be expected at a local level. For a start, until the early sixties secondary education in most smaller centres only went as far as Year 10 (the old Junior public examination). Want to go beyond that? Two choices. Move out of town or do it by correspondence.
Given that only as far as Year Ten scenario it probably comes as no surprise to find well-off families sending their kids away to boarding school much earlier. In the case of families in more isolated locations that was, more or less, unavoidable. Kids from Bowen might have found themselves boarding at a school in Charters Towers, Townsville, Abergowrie, Yepoon or, if the family was able to afford it, in Brisbane.
These factors sat on top of a fairly clearly defined pecking order when it came to educational achievement and subsequent employment opportunities.
The first hurdle, up to 1963, was the old Scholarship exam at the end of Year Eight, which was still in the Primary domain. It was a concept that dated back to the era when secondary education wasn’t for everybody and kids with demonstrated academic ability could receive a Government Scholarship to pay for their secondary education. Pass the exam and you got it, fail and it was either a case of try again otherwise you found yourself out in the workforce.
There were still, at this point, a variety of jobs these kids could go into, unskilled work that wasn’t going to lead anywhere, but it was a living.
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