|
|
|
Over the next twenty years, from 1962 to 1982
JOHN MCKENNA
John McKenna did not return to the Trawler in Princes Charlotte Bay, he lodged at the campground with his family in Cairns. Days of imbibing rum left him little recollection and no sense duty or responsibility. He frightened his family being Draconian and was negligent in looking after them; he made little sense when he talked. He created pandemonium late at nights, after particularly heavy drinking sessions when he had a tendency to treat his wife harshly and abuse the children. His daily rum was earned by freelancing petty scams; he cheated tourists, offered himself as a guide, changing money to foreign visitors. He sold watches, guaranteed not to work within the week and souvenirs; he found hotel rooms for a fee and took deposits for non-existent fishing trips.
He pilfered money from his wife Ella after she obtained a job in a small dress shop. She discovered, much to her surprise that she was a natural in dealing with fashion and, as the owner came to trust her judgements opened a second shop and made her the manager. She left the two children with a woman in the next caravan, as McKenna was too impaired to safeguard them. He became inept and helpless as he was silly drunk by six in the evening and paralytic by ten.
Cowboy's wife, Rita, had a hairdressing job nearby and over some months she and Ella McKenna formed a neighbourly bond, they became confidants in their mutual solitude. They gradually gave each other cordial assistance, support and subsistence when the need arose.
McKenna became a disorderly drunk and was incapable of carrying out his scams when he stopped caring for himself.
After a year in Cairns he was a foul smelling gutter alcoholic begging for drinks and was incessantly arrested by the police. He returned to the campground sober from a jail cell only until he could scrounge money for drink again. Mrs McKenna was an enabler, never accepting that her husband had a drink problem, she let him have spare money, even supplied him with gut-rot mentholated spirits when money was scarce. As matters deteriorated the family searched for and broke his hidden bottles but he would beat them, until they were replaced. Desperation for a drink and personal poverty drove him to lie in the street waiting for his children to come out of school to beg them and their classmates for loose change. He became unable to function as a human being. He stopped going to the toilet and fouled his trousers, he became feebly violent and had to be lashed to a chair or a bed, mainly to prevent him hurting himself.
Increasingly he was admitted into hospital as Cirrhosis began to destroy his liver. As his liver expanded it made a noticeable protrusion in his stomach. As it ceased to function properly his skin bruised all over and he became covered with open sores through lack of nutrition. In hospital he swore and abused the staff until they so heavily sedated him that he did not know his own name. When he slipped out of a drug-induced haze he discharged himself.
When life became unacceptable for the McKenna family Ella and her two children moved into Rita's flat to escape him, applying for a council house for themselves. He found them and, on being locked out, kicked the door in demanding drink money. They all moved again to another location and heard, with great relief that he had died in the street one night choking on his own vomit.
He died in 1964, a little under two years after his last big confident trick nearly killed all the crews of the trawler and the Dolphin. The two abused women; Ella a widow and Rita now divorced made a solid life for themselves and the two children in Cairns. They thrived in their freedom and success and by 1982 had become confident matrons with one child in university and the other training to be an accountant.
LEO DELMONT
Disappeared from Cardwell after selling the stolen catch and unsuccessfully trying to sell my boat. One would expect a thoroughly bad character like Leo to come to a sticky end; one really hopes he will. But who knows?
DES MONTY
Des Monty initially had a very rough time after arriving in Sydney in 1962 still trying to find himself. By 1965 he had virtually made himself a neuter cutting himself off from any human relationships. With great difficulty he accepted, about this time, that he would never be a man that others admired. He grew into a shadowy person, a small part in an insignificant background. Life became easier for him as he settled in a single rented room with his own gas ring and shared ablutions.
He was employed as a clerk checking invoices in a wholesale warehouse; his corner desk was in a quiet, dusty area over the bulk store, he spoke to the others only when required. Eating and drinking little he became painfully thin, his shoulders hunched over.
His only entertainment and a little extra earnings, on the same three nights each week, was to play a slow piano in a public lounge.
By the time he was fifty-ish he was as a damp mark on wallpaper, mostly unseen. People who regularly saw him at his work, other tenants or customers at the lounge bar would not have been able to describe his appearance.
JIM
Jim became a station hand in the far outback, past Camooweal. This was the life where he was happiest. He had worked the wonder-lust out of his system, experienced the big city and decided that he was overly saturated with Eastern Seaboard civilisation.
As sheep shearing demand diminished he became one part of the team on a King Ranch working the seasons of round-ups to looking after the cattle when the wet flooded the land or a when a lengthy dry burnt it.
By 1982 he was a senior hand headed for promotion to Forman on a new station that King Ranches had recently purchased.
JACKIE AND HIS SON THURSDAY
It was ten weeks before they could manage a lift on a coastal boat the two hundred miles north to Thursday Island. Jackie was never to leave his village again. Surrounded by his own people he succumbed to his disease enfolded with love and caring. He was happy and contented as his life had been full and his son a good man. Thursday was there; he held his father's hand and closed his eyes. [Just as I did for my father in '59. ]
Over the years that followed Thursday started his own family and sailed the seas around his island home crewing on small commercial boats.
COWBOY
After his wife's attack Cowboy returned to Sydney and obtained a job in a speciality bespoke tailor and men's outfitters selling suits. A fastidious person he loved being clean and smartly dressed again. For eighteen months he enjoyed himself with an inexhaustible supply of women, parties and pub-crawls. He became urbanised again forgetting completely his grubby adventure in North Queensland as a bad dream.
One night in mid July 1964 he was laughing happy with one arm around a busty redhead and a beer in the other when her angry husband burst through the crowd and smacked him over the head with a full bottle of beer. As the bottle broke the husband jabbed it into his face screaming, “You will not be so pretty to my wife now!”
Cowboy lay in hospital for weeks with the head injury and deep facial lactations, when he returned to the tailors shop he lost his job. He was so badly scared it was thought that he would frighten off the customers. His smartness began to deteriorate when he found that he had lost his appeal to women. He did, eventually, gain work in a large department store, which allowed on their staff a percentage of disadvantaged personnel. For the next eighteen years Cowboy was always on time and always nice to the customers. He married, in those long years, a plain, mousy girl from haberdashery overlooking her musty odour.
TED MILLER
Ted Miller headed home to his family and enrolled in a trade college becoming a carpenter making doors, windows and new house framing.
He graduated in the middle of his class and obtained a job with a town builder who started him, as a joiner, building a group of six houses. Over the years he moved to different and larger scale builders throughout the state, living where the work required.
He married but never managed to settle becoming an itinerant worker living rough on the sites and going home to his wife occasionally.
Howick Island was a tenacious memory evoking a lifetime of restlessness.
GEORGE PEARSON AND LESTER BOYLE
They worked passage on a tramp steamer for three months around the North Pacific Ocean until it docked in an American port when they jumped ship.
Lester Boyle hitchhiked north to Vancouver in Canada where he headed overland working his way to Fort Erie, Ontario. He disappeared soon after he began these travels; he was last heard of working as a barman in the Rocky Mountains at Jasper where he may have settled.
An intimidated and timorous George Pearson joined his father, a large man he had always been dominated by, in the family hardware store in Chillicothe, Ohio. He worked hard and handled the customers well learning the trade for which previously he had only felt contempt. His repetitious and soulless life was entombed by marriage to a local girl in 1967. He fathering three children and purchased a wooden clapboard house to hold them all while settling into the town life. The years past slowly and by 1982 he had developed into the shape of a pear, thin on top with preponderate lower quarters, the result of stodgy foods and inactivity. Apart from being on two local charities he was voted onto the council and was expected to serve the town in future years. His only diversion to the tedium was a monthly, one-day visit to Columbus, the state capital, to buy store goods from a wholesaler. He only smelt the wood pulp that permeated Chillicothe, for a half an hour period on each return, before getting use to it and again serving the community for another month.
CAPE YORK PENINSULAR in its entirety is to be turned into a wilderness and wild life reserve. The State Government formed the basis for the park by buying many of the huge cattle stations but at the same time it also granted highly polluting mining leases for open cut silica sand, bauxite and leases for logging operations. Aboriginal people have been granted large unproductive areas for themselves in the expectation that nothing of value will be discovered on the land in the future as has happened in Armhen Land.
THE TRAWLER Over the years it rotted slowly where it was beached in the Kennedy River mouth, even the metal parts disappeared into the muddy river bottom.
A fisherman sighted THE DOLPHIN in January 1963 who reported it to the Department of Harbour and Marine at the port of Cairns. As required by marine law as the registered owner I had reported it lost at sea. The letter from them, dated 15th January 1963, stated:
' Referring to your letter dated 27th September 1962 a local fisherman reported to me today that he had seen a wreck on the south-western end of Bewick Island, latitude 14° 26' South, longitude 144° 49' East. He reported the wreck as being all smashed up and appearing to have been on fire, wreckage was strewn for about 100 yards and a net with a mesh of 2 ½ ' was wound around part of the hull. There was no motor to be seen. A piece of wood was found with the registration number on it.
END.
 |  |  |
|
|
|