by Thea Hayes
The leases are on sand banks or reefs, so they are completely submerged at high tide. The oysters were mainly grown for our consumption, except for the peak oyster season at Christmas when they would be sold to friends and local restaurants. Taking four years to grow from baby spat to full plate size, the amount of work was incredible but the camaraderie and benefits were immense.
The Ningi group was like a commune and at Christmas we would have a party out there splashing around. There were many tinnies (small aluminium boats) with flags flying, all the workers celebrating the year’s hard work, with hundreds of dozens of ‘Ningi Nuggets’ (oysters) being shucked and consumed au naturel, of course.
Stewart told me that the oyster industry in Moreton Bay dates back to the 1890s and was a valuable industry employing European and Indigenous peoples. In fact, there would not be an Indigenous family on Straddie without an oyster growing background. Oyster middens around the bayside of the island lay testament to the oysters consumed over thousands of years. The other native oyster, the quampi, sometimes contains a tiny pearl and a lot of old timer families have match box packets containing these pearls.
I was now working only two days a week at Mt Olivet in Brisbane. I had my red Toyota Rav4 parked at Cleveland ferry terminal, ready to take me to work. On the island I had an old bomb, a Holden that I bought for a thousand dollars, which I parked at Dunwich when I went across to the mainland.
In 2007, Jason and Trina helped me buy a new kitchen at Ikea for the upstairs flat, using a plan that Trina had drawn up while doing an Interior Design course in Toowoomba. My grandchildren Baxter, Charlie and Hughie, poor little slaves, were given some of the many parcels to carry up the stairs. When it was installed, I rented the upstairs flat and lived downstairs.
One of my friends, Margaret Bettington, had decided we should play bridge, so we all started learning together. There were about eight of us, all living on the island or visiting frequently. We would play formally every Friday morning, and then frequently play a social game together with a bottle of wine. We all loved it, but we didn’t take it too seriously. Consequently, we didn’t progress too far.
Every second year the family came to Straddie for Christmas. It was wonderful, spending every day on the beach watching my grandchildren playing in the waves, swimming and building sandcastles. Christmas dinner, New Year celebrations—all great memories.
23
Becoming a jetsetter
My life continued at Straddie, catching the water taxi to the mainland every week for my two shifts at Mt Olivet in Brisbane; staying with fellow nursing friends for my one-night stay in the city. We would come off duty at 10.30 p.m., chat over a glass or two of wine to help us relax after the heavy eight-hour shift, and then get up at the crack of dawn to be back on duty by 6.30 a.m. After my second shift ended at 3.30 p.m., I would drive to Cleveland and catch the water taxi back to Dunwich to pick up my other car and then head home.
The rest of the week I spent enjoying the life on the island, renovating the downstairs flat with my handyman, playing bridge a couple of times a week, and making the occasional trip to the oyster lease.
I enjoyed trips to Toowoomba to see family and every couple of years I would visit David and his wife Sharon in Darwin, continuing on to Katherine for the Agricultural Show and the Brahman Dinner to catch up with Territorian friends. I was in Darwin for David’s graduation in nursing at Darwin University, feeling so proud, and in Sydney the same year for Penny’s graduation in Environmental Science from Sydney University. Penny and Patrick had their first child, Sam, in 2006. Penny took six months off work before putting Sam in a childcare centre in the city, across the road from where she worked.
I suggested they employ a nanny.
‘I’m not paying a nanny $200 a day,’ Penny replied.
‘Gosh, is that how much it would cost? It would be cheaper to fly me down from Brisbane,’ I said jokingly.
The next thing I knew I was a jetsetter, flying to Sydney every second week to look after Sam for two days, while Penny went to work in the city. I thought it was marvellous. After my two shifts at Mt Olivet I would fly to Sydney; meet friends for lunch; catch a movie or go to the New South Wales Art Gallery, which I loved. I would then catch a bus to Penny and Patrick’s. On the alternate week Penny employed a young mother whose baby was the same age as Sam.
What a happy baby Sam was—so easy to look after. We would often go to Neutral Bay with Sam in his pram, to buy a cup of coffee for me and a babyccino for Sam. Patrick’s mother Penny Too would often come over from Centennial Park and the three of us would go to The Oaks Hotel at Neutral Bay for lunch.
Everywhere I went, my computer went. Every fortnight when I flew to Sydney to look after Sam, I would arrive two hours early so that I had plenty of time to write. I had started writing my memoir.
24
Adventures in Kenya
In 2008, my son-in-law Patrick’s mother Penny Too and I went on a Classic Safari Tour to Kenya. After flying to Johannesburg, where we stayed the night at the Hotel International, we took a flight to Nairobi. While waiting there for our flight, we couldn’t help observing the other travellers around us, wondering who would make up the twelve members of our group. We weren’t to find out until after our two day stay at the ‘House of Waine’, a beautiful boutique hotel in the leafy suburb of Karen, away from the chaos of Nairobi twenty miles away.
The next day we went on a tour to visit the Elephant Orphanage where we saw baby elephants coming out of the bush to get their bottle of milk. We also visited the Giraffe Manor, an amazing hotel where you can dine with the giraffes, which is associated with the Giraffe Centre, a home for endangered giraffes, and also operates a breeding centre.
We had lunch at Karen Blixen’s restaurant, two kilometres from where we were staying. Karen, a Danish writer, is best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while living in Kenya.
The following day we were taken to a light aircraft airport to fly to the Masai Mara. There we met the rest of the group, and sometimes you can’t pick your travelling companions, but we all ended up getting on well—four couples from Lane Cove in Sydney, an elderly couple from America, and ourselves.
Our guides were Hamish Grant, who owned the safari company, and Kerin Barnard, a young tour guide, who picked us up in their two vehicles, and drove us to the safari camp, showing us our tents with their two single beds, access to our own bathroom with bucket shower and toilet.
Every morning at 5.30 a.m., a house-boy would bring us a cup of tea, and by 6.15 we would be in the vehicles on safari, having breakfast—beside a creek with twelve hippopotami wallowing in the water—then up on a lookout 1600 metres high with a 360-degree view of the Masai Mara—or some other ‘Out of Africa’ scene.
At around 2 p.m. we would be taken back to the camp for lunch. The meals were magnificent, with all sorts of different wines and spirits to choose from at lunch and dinner. Then back in the safari vehicles to see more—a lion with four lionesses and six cubs; two lions walking through the grass; lion cubs playing and wrestling with one another; elephants; ten Cape buffalo; hundreds of zebra; giraffes feeding and pruning the trees; a family of hyenas with their black babies; a cheetah hunting and killing a Thomson’s gazelle, and many more. We saw every imaginable animal in Africa.
We were there for the Great Migration or the Wildebeest Migration—the annual event of two million wildebeest, zebras and gazelles moving through Serengeti and the Masai Mara ecosystems. On this particular day, we had driven down to the river to find several hundred zebras waiting to go across but terrified of the crocodiles. Coming down to the edge of the water the zebras would see the crocodiles and get spooked. We waited for an hour and nothing happened so our guide decided we would leave. We only drove about a mile when suddenly a call came from the other vehicle to say that the zebras had started moving. In the distance hundreds of wildebeests could be seen coming in a line towards us. They all swam across the river, zebras in one line,
wildebeests in the other with the crocodiles swimming around getting closer and closer and suddenly grabbing some poor little zebra or wildebeest. It was horrible to watch, but this migration was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Five thousand animals crossed the river that day and it happens every year.
Hamish Grant grew up on his parents’ property Gogar Park, a dairy farm, located on the western slopes of the Great Rift Valley. It had been in his family for three generations. We flew to the Great Rift Valley and drove to Hamish’s home, where we stayed in thatched huts, having meals on the large patio of the colonial style farmhouse and being treated as family friends rather than tourists. The next day we drove to Lake Bogoria, where we saw the incredible sight of thousands of pale pink flamingos, with many healing geysers making the water boiling hot.
We travelled to Lake Nakuru, which is not far from Gogar Park. At Lake Naivasha, the flamingos were a beautiful pink, due to the mineral difference in the waters. There were up to three million flamingos, standing in rows, strutting around, dancing in groups and washing themselves in the water. We also saw our first rhinoceros, with a backdrop of hundreds of flamingos, a herd of buffalos and hundreds of storks and pelicans—a magnificent sight.
The next day, after a picnic breakfast, we drove around looking for leopards. We were fortunate enough to see a male leopard trying to climb up to a very savage female high in the tree. He tried continuously, finally climbing back to the ground and sprinting away. The female leopard, according to Kerin, probably said, ‘You have to take me out for dinner if you want me’, so he was probably off to make a kill.
The last week of our tour was spent at Samburu in north central Kenya, where the elephants and the zebras are very different to those in the Masai Mara. We camped across the river from a tribe of Samburu people—they seemed such happy people, the girls quite pretty, the men very tall. On our last day they walked across the river, the men and the women, to put on an afternoon of dancing and music for us. The men jumped six feet in the air as they danced, followed by the women, wearing their traditional beaded collars or necklaces.
We stopped at Johannesburg on the way home and had a private tour of a Soweto slum, the Apartheid Museum and Nelson Mandela’s home.
The whole tour was a wonderful experience.
25
A crash landing
One evening in December 2008 while on duty at Mt Olivet, I suddenly found that I was bleeding from the rectum. My nursing friends tried to convince me that it was probably nothing: haemorrhoids, anti-inflammatories? No! I didn’t agree. I always thought of the worst-case scenario. I was really worried. I knew I needed a colonoscopy as soon as possible. Here I was, a trained nurse, seventy-three years of age, who should have known better. I’d had some changes in my bowel habits, but I’d never had a colonoscopy, which everyone should have every few years after turning fifty.
I rang my daughter-in-law Liz, who was a sister in charge of several wards at St Vincent’s in Toowoomba. Liz was able to book me in for the procedure a few days later. I drove up to Toowoomba; had the prep and the colonoscopy, and the next day drove back to Straddie, taking my twelve-year-old grandson Robert with me, thinking everything would be okay. However, the following morning I had a call from the surgeon. The polyp he had removed was cancerous. I was devastated. Robert was so comforting, dear boy. The doctor’s recommendation was to see a bowel surgeon who specialised in lower rectal surgery. I booked in to see Dr John Lumley at the Wesley Hospital.
Liz said she would come with me.
Dr Lumley did a biopsy of the polyp area under general anaesthetic, to determine if there were any cancer cells still present. My cousin Barbara and husband Jim very kindly asked me to stay with them at Fig Tree Pocket while I was waiting for the results, which took five days. It was a nerve-racking time, thinking the worst. But at last the call came through and I was absolutely over the moon when Dr Lumley said that the area was clear of cancer. Talk about relief. I was instructed to visit Dr Lumley every three months for a check-up, for the next twelve months at least.
After finding everything fine on the first check-up, I put the whole experience out of my mind.
And then my life changed.
26
A dolphin, a whale and a Territory vehicle
It was my day off from Mt Olivet in June 2009. Most of my friends from Straddie were away; they had all gone in convoy from Stradbroke Island to Lake Eyre, where for the first time in years there was water in the lake and pelicans by the hundreds.
I was asked to go, but I couldn’t get off work during the week. Damn it! We were always short staffed at Mt Olivet.
My neighbour across the road, Liddy, asked me to look after Archie, her twelve-year-old wire-haired terrier, for the day.
‘No worries,’ I said, as she and Stuart drove off.
Now I’m really alone, I thought.
‘Well, Archie, why don’t we go down to the beach for lunch?’
Ten minutes later, with lunch in one hand and Archie’s lead in the other, I walked up the road to the forty odd steps that lead down to Frenchman’s Beach. I hesitated, thinking about Archie having trouble getting back up these stairs—I would have to carry him. We moved on to the small park that looks over Frenchman’s beach, which often had views of dolphins and whales at that time of the year.
As I rounded the overgrown box tree, with its branches drooping over the footpath like untidy plaits of hair, I saw a vehicle.
It looked like a Territory vehicle, with its canvas cover and two large wheels at the back. Anything related to the Northern Territory excited me.
I experienced a strange feeling.
‘Come on, Archie, good dog,’ I said, as I caught my breath and led him to one of the two tables in the little park overlooking the sparkling blue ocean.
A man in country gear began to walk towards us from the Territory vehicle.
‘There’s another whale,’ he said as he looked out to sea, including me in his gaze.
Just then a pod of dolphins broke the surface of the water, somersaulting into the air. We were both mesmerised by this spectacular performance; looking at one another, we started talking.
He was fit, not terribly tall, and handsome with sad blue eyes, the colour of the sea. They peered out from beneath his cap to look at me. His name was Bob.
He had such a relaxed way about him that I felt completely comfortable in his presence, so after two hours of entertaining conversation about our travels through life, I offered an invitation.
‘Would you like to come home with me for a cup of tea?’
‘I’d like that very much.’
Back at the house, we continued to find out more about each other, over a cuppa.
Then Liddy appeared at the front door.
‘Who’s the owner of that vehicle?’
‘A guy I picked up in the park.’
‘Thea!’
Liddy raced home to tell Stuart, who looked out across the road, saw Bob’s vehicle, and said, ‘That looks like the vehicle of the murderer of Tony Falconio.’ Tony was an English tourist who had been murdered on the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory while travelling with his girlfriend.
Liddy came tearing across the road to tell me what Stuart had said.
‘Thea, he could be an axe murderer.’
‘Well, Liddy, come in and meet him.’
She did, and she agreed with me that he had a very honest face.
I knew I had no worries that evening with Stuart and Liddy keeping an eye on what happened across the road. We had a drink together and Bob left, asking if I would join him in a drive around the island the following weekend. I had to refuse. I had to go to Sydney to look after Sam, but he returned the weekend after.
And that’s how Bob came into my life. A boy from Geraldton, a very westerly point of Australia and a widowed girl from North Stradbroke Island, a very easterly point of Australia.
The beginning of another wonderfully exciting time in m
y life.
27
Bob
Bob was born in Western Australia at Dalwallinu, the wheat-growing shire of the west. His parents owned and ran a 21,000-acre broadacre farm, where Bob grew up with his three brothers and one sister.
At a very young age Bob was taught the workings and running of the property by his father Edward Sydney Black—or Ted, as he was usually called. In his leisure time he hunted rabbits, kangaroos and foxes and from the age of five or six had started to develop a deep knowledge of the bush birds around him. Bob remembers seeing the mallee hens building their nesting mounds and showing no apparent fear of Bob and his brothers, who were playing practically on top of them. These birds are now almost extinct due to clearing, foxes and cats.
Bob also told me about the time his father said, ‘Come outside, I want to show you some Cape Barren Geese that are out near the grain shed.’
They had been blown 1000 kilometres north by a southerly storm from the Southern Coast. Bob and his brothers fed the geese with grain for five days before they left. This love of birds became a passion.
Bob married a New Zealand nurse, and after his second child was born they moved to New Zealand, where he bought his own property in the Central North Island on the north west corner of Lake Taupo. He ran his own Angus stud, along with a Romney Sheep stud, for twenty-seven years. Matthew, his third child, was born in New Zealand. After his divorce, Bob moved back to Geraldton where his sister Edna and brother Ian lived. He started in real estate and continued very successfully, before working for six years as a first mate and tour guide on a Kimberley tour boat. During this time, he had a relationship which ended sadly with the death of his partner from mesothelioma. Bob set out to travel Australia by caravan. He wanted to find every species of bird in Australia.