The Kid From Port Douglas

By Sandra Penny McCallum

You are transported into this huge-hearted girl’s world and gasp at the earthy honesty of a child condemned to a life of hard-working business-owning parents as she goes on to unfold the similarities in her own eventual career and life path. Some of the stories will break the hardest of hearts or produce the heartiest belly laughter. The author has an easy literary style whilst also embracing some controversially high-brow topics, in contrast, emerging as infamous winners of reality TV. Military parade life, travel petty officers and parade grounds, Switzerland, Kensington High Street, Port Douglas, Hotels, Mareeba and Wales. Also some incredible stories of family war heroes; of Changi Prison and the Red Baron. And of Taffy Lloyd, the last man on the beach in Dunkirk. Every page has its own charm, you will consider it a well-chosen book, so curious reader, enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398458901

Sandra Penny McCallum

Sandra Penny McCallum, the Australian-born author of this earthy autobiography, calls herself a global gypsy and murmurs jestfully of her current exile in the Algarve of Portugal, having left Australia 20 years ago. This wonderful time and place have inspired the need to write as a catharsis well overdue. This book was inspired by an exhilarating life story and an interest in pre-history, a fascination and study of aspects of the English Renaissance, and some incredible life stories.

Book preview

About the Author

Sandra Penny McCallum, the Australian-born author of this earthy autobiography, calls herself a global gypsy and murmurs jestfully of her current exile in the Algarve of Portugal, having left Australia 20 years ago. This wonderful time and place have inspired the need to write as a catharsis well overdue. This book was inspired by an exhilarating life story and an interest in pre-history, a fascination and study of aspects of the English Renaissance, and some incredible life stories.

Dedication

Virginie Boreham RIP ‘Gini’

Lloyd and Margot

My wicked stepmother

Father

Diana

Copyright Information ©

Sandra Penny McCallum 2023

The right of Sandra Penny McCallum to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398437968 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398458901 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd ®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

The Kid from Port Douglas

Night Train to Lisbon, she read on the board,

In a small town with the sea, that was all.

The board that she read was so full of delights,

And promised a journey ahead.

The promise was only a night at the flicks,

Where one could learn how the rich got their kicks.

At that billboard she glared on her way to the beach,

In a town of mosquitos and mangoes and stench.

She fell asleep with that board on her mind,

Saw pictures that spoke of a glamorous life,

Courage and romance and beautiful things,

The rancour of childhood disabled her wings.

To Lisbon one day, she’d go on that rain,

Live the big dream, explore the unknown.

The kid from Port Douglas could vanish for good,

The big world was waiting, embrace it she would.

When the Cobb and Co coach returned to port Douglas in the early sixties, Grandma was not to be denied the experience as she was born hardly 100 meters from where the coach stood. My sister and I accompanied her in the coach. It was a special day.

Foreword

It is very popular to write one’s memoirs currently. This one unleashed itself upon me, and there was no saying no to it. We’ve travelled many miles, my laptop and I, and my husband has dined and sunbathed alone many times while I, with a bowl of peanuts and a bottle of something nice, tapped away in a hotel room, regurgitating years of mental compilations via my keyboard, and running riot with ridiculous life tales, some happy and many not so happy or at all funny. It is also a genuinely historical account of my pioneering great-grandfather who helped to get the, now very famous, Port Douglas back on its feet after its gold rush days and economic reign, then subsequent demise in the late 1800s.

My memoir covers Port Douglas, the navy, Switzerland. North Wales, London, the Court House Hotel, Cairns, The Lodge Gwespyr, Mareeba, Bryn Woodlands, The Catalina, Mossman, husbands, Lloyd and Margot, wicked stepmothers, and broken hearts, emerging as infamous winners of reality TV.

As personal stories go, I hope you like it. Hardly written for personal aggrandisement, it is merely my recollections and never an effort to dig up the proverbial mud; nor will you find parables on the arts of seduction or the joys of copulation. A critic and very dear friend who once was a reporter with Kerry Packer’s empire in Sydney, passed me a backhanded compliment over coffee about my book being surprisingly well-written. I’ve always been pleased to surprise, and equally chuffed by his backhanded compliment.

Voltaire said something like, ‘People don’t want to read the whole story, just the good bits.’ I’m sure he meant the juicy bits, so I have indeed leaned on the advice of Voltaire, who may have also called me, as he did Rousseau, ‘the vilest paper scribbler to whom madness ever granted a pen.’ I love the rich wit of the French. The most amusing people never intended to be funny, similarly my cousin says that opera was never meant to be serious (tell that to Wagner or know that he’s turning in his grave). My point is that overwrought comedy and Americanised canned laughter is generally not considered funny outside of America. Humour comes out of different boxes, and we often prefer the one to which we have been conditioned. I’m sure you’ll laugh at my stories of the navy, my European adventures and business escapades. And the golden anecdotes of Mareeba and Wales, all true and told from the heart and some stories will break the hardest heart.

It is with an author’s license that I leave some sleeping dogs to lie; dogs that sleep soundly and will eventually takes their secrets to their graves. I have blurred names and places to protect those whose stories simply had to be told. The early Port Douglas stories are the perceptions of a small child who spent hours in the pub being seen and not heard but taking everything in. Should my little book be sentenced to the flames on publication, along with my dreams and my money, writing my first book has been an exhilarating journey, also a most enriching one. I thought I had typed the last line on the day our hotel changed hands in Wales, and I was making my way back to Australia via Portugal, without these events, the story would not complete itself. But the story did not end there.

Curious reader, read on.

Chapter 1

The Road to Port Douglas and the Iconic

Restaurant on the Hill

‘My old man said follow the van’ was the chorus of our little family as we sang on our way along the Cook Highway up to Port Douglas in a black Wolseley 4/44, following closely behind Willmot’s furniture removal van in 1966.

When Father was courting my stepmother-to-be, on very special Sundays, we would go as a family to a beautiful restaurant for lunch on the hill in Port Douglas. It was an utterly charming luncheon garden venue with heavily draped pink tablecloths and serviettes folded in full fan, Hawaiian music, and delicious reef fish served on huge platters beneath swaying coconut trees and a full view of the wharf and inlet beyond. In those days, Billy Goat Hill was mostly grass, and so the views of the inlet could be seen from the garden and beyond to Newell Beach. As we left the restaurant, my father would buy us trinkets and little, tiny, dried seahorses from Sara Bodwin’s Shell Jewellery collection, which at that time adjoined the restaurant. The Bodwins later built the boutique next door. Sara was of an artistic nature and a most dramatic woman, a relic of the very British Sackville-West era and always immaculately draped in a tropical gown, wielding a cigarette via a long holder, and smothered in her own hand-made shell jewellery. She and Martin ground away on their machines all day making these beautiful pieces which they sold mostly to southern tourists.

Two years on in my parents’ marriage, we were all packed up to go and take a lease on this restaurant with the Bodwins for landlords. They were all very posh with a finest blood line, terribly, terribly British with huge plums in their mouths, and my ears perceived one day a most impressive revelation: ‘a not-so-distant cousin to the queen’. They were like many other British aristocrats who fled England to a new frontier, I assume, leaving considerable baggage behind; Australian shores have received many such aristocrats since its short life began 250 years ago. These ones arrived with the aristocratic pastime of getting pissed and outwore their welcome in the two pubs in town. Alternatively, they would have claret in huge mega-gallon carafes delivered from Fiorelli’s in Cairns. I found it very annoying when they stored them in front of the dressing-up drawer which was full of Sara’s dazzling gowns, presumably from her days in London hobnobbing in Royal circles and relegated to the rag bag for us when we were invited to play dress-ups with their children, Kylie and Merissa. Later, Merissa was sent off to boarding school because her mother said she was ‘boy crazy’. They had a wonderful house with a big fireplace in their lounge and loads of chocolate biscuits. Everyone was chummy and chatty at first, but it did not take long for the social relations to dry up when the restaurant got into trouble and our rent was late or non-forthcoming.

Whilst in the early restaurant days in Port Douglas, gay couple, Ernie and Leo, opened the Fisherman’s Wharf Café at the wharf on Wharf Street. It was all happening on the wharf and not the hill, surrounded by bright lights and gaudiness, booziness, and loud music which we could very disturbingly hear on the hill. ‘A bloody smorgasbord,’ Father would solemnly repeat. ‘They’ve got a bloody smorgasbord.’ Consequently, I was indoctrinated at an early age not to like smorgasbords, and even today prefer to order a la carte. The food on the wharf was ghastly, but everyone went there because it was fun, it was different, and it was the ‘in’ place to be. It was not fun for my parents, though; they went broke in their classy outdoor restaurant with its Pacific Island tones of ‘Aloha Hawaii’, with nasty debt collectors calling, threatening to take away your kids’ beds if some cash was not quickly fund. Imagine threatening to take the kids’ beds away’! It was an awfully cruel world for some of us. However, we are all well-read, and excellent chess and scrabble players, thanks to the time we spent waiting for customers. My sister and I washed up and so we didn’t mind that no customers appeared; in fact, we resented it when they did. We were poorer than church mice because church mice don’t get themselves into debt buying restaurants.

Our predecessor of the restaurant was Bruce Ellen, self-styled chef and entrepreneur. He and Joany lived further down on the hill past Randall’s Shell Shop on the site that was eventually bought by the people who created the vast tourist boat empire which helped tourism and put Port Douglas back on the map. Their massive silver catamarans would dash people out to the reef, with customers arriving back late in the day, lunched and suntanned and thoroughly satisfied. So well done and successful was the operation that it multiplied and grew. And grew. And grew. This company name is now famous all over the world.

My parents were not chefs, but they learned to cook ‘monkey see, monkey do’ from Bruce. It was not a difficult menu – just fish and steak and not much more – but they did it very well. We had some quite salubrious customers; James Mason was one, and I think Helen Mirren was with him when they were filming at Dunk Island. Father used to shake martinis for posh customers and send either my sister or I to the pub to get their wine.

Bruce had a wood lathe and on his retirement from the restaurant, thanks to us buying him out, my father used his lathe and turned vases and lampstands out of Silky Oak and Black Bean, which he sold at a boutique in Lake Street, Cairns, to supplement the meagre takings at the restaurant. He made beautiful things out of red cedar from the Daintree, and later began making squatters’ chairs for the locals. He was a proper craftsman. Vera helped design things, and he made them.

Bruce was past the age of retirement when he left the Nautilus. After years of cooking every day and night, he was in a state of severe malnutrition, and once the police were called to calm him down following an outburst. On his retirement from cooking, he had a more stable existence with regular food and he quite recovered, a very decent chap. Sometimes Father would stop the car half-way down the hill at their place in the early days in Port Douglas after the night’s work at the Nautilus, take a flagon of wine and drink with Joany and Bruce. My sister and l usually fell asleep on the veranda while they chatted and laughed the night away. They were four people from completely different backgrounds, and I believe Father was the only Australian. Bruce was from the north of England, I think, Joany had fine roots, and my stepmother was an extremely refined cockney. So, it was Bruce who coached my parents in the kitchen to begin their new lives as restaurateurs. I wonder if they did not rue the day, they ever drove up that hill. Bruce on his retirement took it easy and carried on with his lathe, often in the company of my father, and I believe they got on quite well. Father told us Bruce used to take his health into his own hands and administer his own colonic irrigation by way of the garden hose, though Father never put it quite like that; he said he used to stick the hose up his arse; anyway, potatoes, potartoes. In Port Douglas, everybody was aware of each other’s eccentricities and talked about them openly. With my little ears flapping, I thought one day this would make a good story.

When we left the posh restaurant on the hill some two years later, gay couple, George and Colin, were the new lessees. They made a big splash and had Gough Whitlam for dinner. For those who may have forgotten or are too young to remember, Gough Whitlam was the Australian Labour Prime Minister in the seventies who, I add, got the sack, and vowed that neither he nor God would ever forgive the governor general for giving him the sack, and we might leave politics there for the moment.

Meanwhile, at the iconic restaurant on the hill, everything was ‘wonderful, darling’ and ‘absolutely smashing’. I saw restaurateurs come and go in our years in town and concluded that people buy restaurants to enhance their social life, eventually lose interest and go back whence they came with their tails between their legs. Port Douglas had claimed another victim and kept their cash. Father called it ‘leaving town with a wet arse and no fish’. When it comes down to the hard, thankless, unpaid hours amid pouring rain, the venture fails, and then bleak never looked bleaker. He said that to survive in this town you need to be ‘as cunning as a shit house rat’. When I asked of Father why that rat was said to be so cunning, he answered that to live unnoticed in a shit house, one would have to be cunning. I always loved my father’s sense of humour. There is no glamour in maintaining flamboyant table settings on a wet and dreary day with no tourists in town, with not a soul on the street from December to May, often the Cook Highway was closed with rockslides or water damage. My parents stuck it out through thick and thin, and I remember the tough times when barely the necessities prevailed. I remember sewing up my school shoes with black cotton and wearing the same school uniform until it could no longer be mended.

Another restaurant in town was the Badilla with its proprietors, the Winkelos. They were a Dutch couple with a story that has escaped me, but I recall it involved someone escaping from somewhere. They used to wear interesting clothes: he in a lap lap, or no lap lap at all, especially at the rock pool where we used to swim. It sticks in my mind that she was very tall with iron-grey manicured hair, exposing enormous pendulous breasts, which she would cover with her shoes when we children arrived at the rock pool for a swim, to their obvious irritation. Much taller than he, she served in their restaurant, as glamorous as nature would allow, and never wore shoes. They were typical of the people who arrived and evolved in the town, marching to the beat of their own drum. Perhaps this town itself could bring out or creating eccentricities in folk with a lifestyle of drinking and socialising and doing nothing else; or so it seemed to me. I thought they only came to Port Douglas to get drunk. Every home had an individual personality inside, and they all formed their own peculiarities, usually discussed in the pub. Some were as pretentious as all get out, but there was no sameness in any of them. Unlike modern suburbia, no one was keeping up with the Joneses because this town had a heart of its own. And most people had arrived there at the end of the line in some respect.

Ricky and Bella Morriset had a guest house on the hill. Were they English, or what my father used to call Pitt Street Pommies? This happens when one acquires an English accent purely for effect, a popular thing to do in the sixties. There are many more reasons currently to boast relationship to a native Australian, and the British are not so popular anymore. You did not get a free house with the British, just a free farm.

Long-time resident, Clare Fuchs (‘Fooks’), was a customer of mine in much later years at the health food shop and said to me one day in her very strong Swiss-German accent, ‘I am going to my fee-lous-a-fee group tonight.’ After weeks of my repeated enquiry as to her philosophy group, she eventually shared with me and took me along. Twenty-seven years later, I am much richer for knowing Clare. ‘You don’t need money to be rich,’ said Clare. In the old days, the kids used to deface her name on the Shelling Club list outside the post office by scratching out the ‘h’ and changing it to a ‘k’. Clare Fucks. I thought she had a very unfortunate surname.

One wet day a car pulled up outside the Court House Hotel, and two shattered-looking people came into the bar, soaking-wet up to their waists, and ordered a drink. Their car had gone off the road and ended up in deepish water. They introduced themselves and these two people became two very well-known and beloved local entities. He had been a cartoonist for The Bulletin, she an actress, and in the years, he produced many works of art depicting the locals by caricature in vast murals which still line the walls of the same pub they walked into soaking wet.

The one and only millionaire in town was Ted Burley who had a big house on the hill and a great big Mercedes. Hardly a big fish in a little pond, he was a mighty Blue Whale in the swimming baths and made his million in what came to be known as the biggest mining farce in Australia, whereby most shareholders lost fortunes. I remember it was something about buying shares in a mine that had no gold in it, all smoke, and mirrors. When Ted was working in the mines, his wife had a laundry, and I listened to her story in the pub one afternoon when she said the miners’ socks were so dirty they could ‘stand up and look at you’, when she was describing her hard-working life in a mining town in Western Australia before the golden eagle of fortune landed squarely at their feet. They were characters of an unusual kind; some called him a crook and labelled this Poseidon Adventure a nefarious affair, but I thought he was a lovely man, although for some reason he eventually met a lonely death in the park opposite the pub. His wife was a gambler and flew regularly to Wrest Point Casino in Hobart, Tasmania, when it was the first and only casino in Australia in the days when you only went to a casino if you had serious money. She would not have to travel very far these days to find a casino, with practically one in every town catering to those in their flip flops who live by the wheel of fortune.

We initially lived on Macrossan Street next to the Golden Acre, or the ‘greasy spoon’, as Father put it. The proprietor ran this greasy spoon and made his own pies in the sixties, and we heard many different stories about why he had only half of one ear. Did he put it in an envelope and send it to his girlfriend, or lose it in a bar room brawl? Or did it caught up in the mincer and go into in the pies? Who knows? And there was his mother, the invincible Belle, still playing the piano and enjoying a beer at the Central Hotel well into her nineties. What a wonderful lady was Belle – she was such a lady, a vibrant one.

Our family had returned to the old stamping ground that was Port Douglas. The biggest part of me wished we had remained within the comfortable and predictable bounds of suburban