Shortly after I arrived in Bowen, a colleague, talking about a son who happened to be in my class, remarked that the kid played cricket and tennis so he’s probably not going to have any trouble fitting in. There’s an underlying assumption there that’s so obvious it probably doesn’t need to be stated, but runs along the lines of when his career path delivers him into a new town he’s got avenues to start making a few acquaintances.
Second, when I finished Year Twelve at Pimlico High in 1968 I probably had a circle of around two hundred acquaintances when you included the three class groupings that comprised the Year Twelve cohort, and people I could put names and faces to in other year levels or from the city’s other high schools, friends of friends and all that. We’re not talking best friends here, just people you could probably greet by name or nickname and might be inclined to have a brief chat to. Something along the lines of long time no see, or whatever happened to so and so?
After an unsuccessful year at University and two at Teachers College, and taking out a year teaching on Palm Island, I spent the next thirteen years teaching in Townsville, twelve of them at Aitkenvale, which was, for a fair chunk of that time, the largest primary school in the state. An enrolment of around twelve hundred kids would probably involve, say, six hundred pairs of parents and there’d be a certain multiplier effect that comes into play when you allow for comings and goings and families whose two-point-something kids moved through the school between 1974 and 1984.
This was, of course, the area where Townsville’s urban sprawl really started to kick in, and would, more than likely, be an area where anyone from that two hundred or so cohort of acquaintances would buy, build and raise a young family.
Yet, in the course of twelve years I met one out of that two hundred or so as an Aitkenvale School parent. She’d met a bloke in the Army, married, moved away and been posted back. There may well have been others whose children went through the school but I find that single figure strange. Seriously, you’d expect more.
And that was just in the school environment. Out of the school environment, teachers tend to drink on Friday afternoons, and the Vale Hotel on Ross River Road wasn’t just a watering hole for the sports-inclined members of the teaching fraternity. I ended up playing pub cricket with the Vale-based Centurions, played indoor cricket two nights a week in 1981 and 82, spent a lot of time in bars and, unless I’m mistaken, the number of people out of that two hundred or so cohort who I encountered anywhere between 1968 and the beginning of the Facebook era would have left spare fingers on two hands.
Another factor that contributed to the notion of separateness was the not quite coincidental coincidence of the wet season and what you’ll still hear referred to by long term residents of Bowen (and, I suspect, other regional centres away from Townsville) as The Slack, a period from around New Year to early March.
Over the past fifty years, seasonal factors in Townsville’s economy have diminished substantially (as they probably have in Mackay and, to a lesser extent, Cairns), but shift your gaze to the Burdekin, Herbert River, Bowen, Proserpine or the sugar growing centres between Cardwell and Mossman and you’re back in an area where a substantial part of the local economy is based on seasonal work.
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