Another day on Thursday Island.
Some of us wandered down to the shops to hunt for souvenirs.
Mona’s Bazaar had some okay stuff, including the colourful shirts we’d seen a lot of people wearing. They’re a bit like a uniform for some people, it appears particularly for First Nations people – but also for everybody else.
School kids wear a school version, staff at the council and running the ferries and the shops and running the tours wear a company version. And there’s tourist equivalents. (I ended up buying a more conventional t-shirt.)
We looked into the Gab Titui Cultural Centre – under renovation but their galleries and gift shop are still running. Some terrific art on display.
From there we had an appointment with a local artist, Rosie Ware. Her studio was not far away, but up a VERY steep hill. The walk was worth it for the views back out over the sea, and for the art she had on display.
In terms of organised activities on this day, the only other thing was a lunch with an elder. This didn’t quite go to plan as the indigenous elder originally scheduled wasn’t available, but we hit gold instead when we got Ronnie, a Chinese Australian elder of the island.
Indigenous culture is important, but for our family group, Ronnie was able to give us a picture of life on TI when our parents and grandparents had been here. The schools the kids likely went to (segregated at the time, but the Chinese were treated as honorary white kids), common practices in terms of language (most Chinese arriving in Australia quickly switched to speaking English, including at home) and confirming that very few families came back to TI after WW2. Ronnie’s was one of them.
And he gave us some leads on books to read for background info. A really great lunch, and it was a pleasure to meet him.
And bless him, he gave me vibes of my late father.
And it was reminding me that we’d been pondering a couple of family history questions while we were on Thursday Island.
Gladys and Norman
An uncle and an aunt who sadly didn’t make it into adulthood are buried in the TI cemetery. But where?
We’d already hit a huge stumbling block: research done for us indicated the graves were unmarked.
We decided to walk up the hill to the cemetery anyway and have a look around. We’d come through briefly twice on the tours, but that was the newer section, so even if the graves are unmarked and there’s nothing to see, it seemed worth another visit.
We stomped around the older section for a bit. It’s hilly and overgrown, but interesting. A mix of gravestones, some legible, others not, some in English, some in Japanese and other languages.
Eventually the blistering sun got too much for us.
A little later we called into the council offices to see if anybody from the cemetery management would have any clues for us. The relevant person wasn’t immediately available, but I got a phone call back a little bit later from Don, who was very helpful.
He told me there was a comprehensive survey done of all the graves in the 1990s, so the good news is they know where everything is.
But… they don’t know who is in each grave. There were previously some pretty good records, but they got moved to Cooktown (during the war?)… and were then lost in a fire.
Don was able to say that our relatives would have been in that older section of the cemetery we’d looked around.
So, mystery not solved, but we’d found roughly the right place.
The shop
Second mystery: the family had a shop for 25+ years. Where was it?
We have records of there being a shop from at least 1915 to, we think, the end of 1941. But we just don’t know exactly where, and it’s not helped by (apparently) a lack of street numbers for at least some of the period.
But we had a clue: a photo of two kids in a chair, taken on Douglas Street, TI, next to the Metropole Hotel, built 1892, burnt down in 1946.
Here’s our photo (looking roughly north-east), with another showing the Metropole, from a different angle (looking roughly north-west).
The photo is labelled May and Ken, and the boy looks like Uncle Ken, who was born in 1927. So that dates it as about 1930. (I’m not sure who May was; perhaps a family friend.)
Another photo showed some of the kids a few doors west, outside the Victoria Memorial Institute – also now gone – demolished in the 1990s and replaced by the council offices.
Neither photo positively identifies the shop. But I’m prepared to make a couple of assumptions:
- Why take a photo with a couple of kids and a chair at a random location?
- It looks like an indoor chair. Why would that be taken from elsewhere?
- So… let’s assume that the photo was taken outside the shop.
It seems plausible to me. We know from other photos that between the Victoria Memorial Institute and the Metropole Hotel there were several shops. Most of the streetscape has changed – the buildings have all gone and been replaced.
The oldest one I could find in a similar position to the photo was built in 1946, the same year the Metropole burnt down – possibly the fire didn’t just damage the hotel, but also other buildings. Perhaps this 1946 building is a similar structure to the old shops that used to be here.
The interesting bit is the tree. A lot of old photos show palm trees along Douglas Street. But the c.1930 photo shows something else – another type of tree (I’m no arborist) planted in the street, leaning back towards the buildings. There’s still a leaning tree at roughly this location.
Could it be the same tree? I’m not sure. Perhaps unlikely – over 90+ years, wouldn’t the trunk have become wider? And it’s not very big.
But my bet is the shop was here somewhere. We might never know exactly where, but somewhere here on Douglas Street, which is pretty good I think given so much time has passed that there’s nobody left to ask, and we haven’t found any records to confirm.
Our last night in TI
In the evening we had a visit to the top pub.
Lots of towns have a top pub and a bottom pub, either end of a hilly street. But the Torres Hotel claims to be the northernmost pub in the entire country.
It sounds the claims and counter-claims on this are a rabbit hole you can burrow down if you want to – such as how you define a “pub” – but we put that aside and stopped past for a drink.
After a day running around it was quite pleasant to sip on a drink, chat to family and be glad we missed being in Melbourne for the giant factory fire.
We also got a photo of one more family-related landmark: the Old Court House, on Victoria Parade. This building was brought over from Somerset on the mainland, where it was originally built.
More significantly for us, this was where my grandparents were married. At least that was one location we could positively confirm.
And we caught another sunset. Nice. It still seemed difficult to believe this was mid-winter.
Dinner back at the villas, and we were aiming to be set for an early start tomorrow for our next move. We had more amazing places to go.
