That was equally true of Townsville in the early 1960s, when the city had two export meatworks, but through the rest of the region, with sugar cane as a key crop and harvesting still to move into the mechanised era, there’s no way the sugar mills were going to be operating in The Wet, and with the wet season disruption to the rail network there’s no way to guarantee a supply of cattle to the meatworks, so they’d close down some time around October/November and reopen in February/March.
With farm work and the only major industrial facility in a town like Bowen in a wet season hiatus, you’d have been looking at a pretty skinny start to the New Year if you were in the retail sector. Get over Christmas and there’s the prospect of back to school, and the half-yearly rates notice (assuming you were a landowner) before things picked up again some time around March or into April. It was the sort of situation where a retailer might well be tempted to close the doors and head off on holiday for a while, and if they were going to be operating the business you’d find the actual proprietor rather than the hired help manning the premises.
Seasonality, of course, also meant migratory work forces, the sort of thing Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll explored. In the early sixties, cane cutting was still done by hand, and once the harvest was complete the workforce either escaped to the south (as a holiday or in pursuit of seasonal work in other areas) or settled down to wait out the wet while keeping the post-Christmas expenditure to an absolute minimum.
It was much the same with the meatworks, though in that case your work force probably loaded the family into the car and headed for a processing facility in Sydney or Melbourne, well away from wet season disruptions to supply, with the resumption of the kill at Lakes Creek, Merinda, Alligator Creek and Ross River marking the end of the slack in Rockhampton, Bowen and Townsville.
The seasonal factor and weather-related isolation weren’t the only factors that delivered a sense of separation. There was a very real feeling that those people down there just don’t get it, and, in the opposite direction, an image of Northerners as an unsophisticated bunch with parochial rather than cosmopolitan attitudes.
We hadn’t been in the area that long when my mother remarked, over the dinner table, that the girl working in the fruit department at Woolworths in Flinders Street didn’t know what ladyfinger bananas were and making the remark with a note of shock at the lack of sophistication such ignorance implied.
In the opposite direction, my mate Cloncurry Jim, who’d left school half way through Year Eleven (or Sub-Senior as it was then) to work in an accountancy firm had reason to speak to someone in Sydney who’d remarked he’d heard we were having trouble with our native servants up this way, evoking some image of the antebellum American South or some outpost of the Raj where leisured planters sipped mint juleps or chota pegs under a swishing fan operated by a muscular individual of Nubian extraction.
That remark was probably prompted by some news report down that way about a relaxation of the restrictions on the movement of indigenous people, since the mid- to late sixties saw the beginnings of an exodus from the mission settlements where the Aboriginal and Islander people had been kept out of sight and out of mind.
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