Bananas and sugar cane

It’s surprisingly difficult to hire a car on a Sunday in Cairns, especially if you want to return it before 8am the next day, so full credit to the car hire place that was able to do it for me – even if they were a bit disorganised in a Fawlty Towers (but more competent) kind of way. No complaints, would use again.

So while some of our big family group headed to the Australian Armour and Artillery Museum to look at tanks and fire guns, most of the rest of us drove south out of town.

After a little while, suburbia disappears and you’re left mostly with sugar cane plantations (with little train lines and enough level crossings that the Big Build chiefs in Melbourne would be kept busy for centuries) and banana plantations.

As far as I know, these simply don’t grow anywhere near Melbourne due to the climate, so it was really interesting to see them.

We made a stop at a servo. The car hire guy had said to leave the tank half full, as that’s how it was when I got it due to the previous renter and a quick turnaround – so we filled up the car near the start of the trip rather than the end.

Then we kept going until we entered Innisfail, following directions from my phone to get us to the cemetery.

We were searching for the grave of my great grandparents (on my father’s mother’s side), Tam “Charles” and Rose How Kee.

Tam arrived from China in 1878 as a young man. Rose arrived in 1880. They married in Cooktown in 1891. Over the years they lived in in various spots around Queensland: Townsville, where their children were born, Halifax, Thursday Island, before moving to Innisfail.

Tam died in 1938 in Innisfail; Rose in 1951.

How do you find a specific grave in a large cemetery? Preferably you have directions. I had a reference for Section, Lot and Row from an old web page hosted on Angelfire – remember them? The page is a long huge table and difficult to navigate on a phone, which is the only device I had with me. I had copied out the relevant info, but when we got there found I also wanted to check the source, for any other relatives also buried here.

(I’m not knocking the page. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create it, and it really helped.)

In theory this information linked with a map from the cemetery web site of the different sections, though it is light on the detail needed to actually navigate your way around the place with any great certainty. And the Row didn’t exist.

So it took a little while of walking around in the drizzle trying to find the right section and find other graves from around the same year. Heck, we didn’t even know if the gravestone was in English.

If we’d planned this more carefully we’d have come on a weekday when staff are available, or asked in advance.

But eventually we found it. The gravestone has fallen over, but the writing is still very readable. For my sister and I, finding our great grandparents was a special moment.

We then headed into the centre of town to find our next site of interest.

In 1928 two of Tam and Rose’s sons, Harry and Eddie, opened a store on a prominent corner in Innisfail which got some publicity at the time, with the Johnstone River Advocate and Innisfail News proclaiming it “The march of progress“.

One of its innovations was an express delivery service which sounds rather like the DoorDash of its time.

A MOTOR CYCLE DELIVERY.
The firm is also introducing an express delivery, upon which a motor cycle will be employed to deliver small items wanted expeditiously. The result will be that a telephone message from an irate housewife, whose husband has forgotten to fetch home the butter, will bring the missing article to her residence within ten minutes.

Watch out, forgetful husbands!

The building still exists, and the part of it on the corner is a cafe where you can have lunch… which we did, and most delicious it was – just the thing after some grave hunting.

Part of the original signage is still present (and evidently restored), as shown by this photo of Tam & Rose’s daughter Emmeline (my great aunt) and some friends, in August 1929, the year after it opened, vs myself 95 years later.

After lunch we had a wander around the town. Being Saturday afternoon, in a country town, most of the shops were shut. We found the waterfront, near where the North Johnstone and South Johnstone rivers merge to head towards the ocean.

Then we drove back into Cairns, and a rest at the hotel.

(PT options? There’s a Greyhound bus from Cairns to Innisfail, but only three times per day on Sundays. So the timing didn’t work, and it involved a lengthy walk at one end. And more expensive for a group than the hire car. Definitely not a goer.)

Then we headed out again to meet a relative: I’ll call him Uncle Billy for short, though I think he’s actually my first cousin once removed. We met him and his sister Fern at the big-indoor-place-where-betting-is-done*, and after chatting for a bit moved to the Golden Boat restaurant, which I’d been told by another relative is the best Chinese restaurant in Cairns.

Billy is a great raconteur, and just as has been the case when I’ve spoken to him on the phone, we were highly entertained by his stories, and insights into his part of the family.

He’s also quick on his feet, managing to sneak off and pay the bill before anybody could stop him, then refusing point blank to take any money. A couple of us in the family are now referring to this as “Doing a Billy”.

An enjoyable evening, and one that set us up for the following day’s activities.

*Jeez, it seems the ISP still blocks the C word.