He may buy Mays and he may not!

 

My not-so-old Chinese friend wants to "Escape from the City". He's looked at "Riverbend" and he's looked at Mays Wharf. Before he goes completely cold on the idea, I'd better share with him some of the history of Mays Wharf which I discovered in Stuart Magee's little book "The Clyde River and Batemans Bay":

... just downstream from where the Buckenboura joins is a most interesting old homestead and the remains of a wharf. The wharf is called Mays Wharf and before that it was Wrays Wharf.

Timothy Wray was a Donnegal man. In 1891 he married a girl in Sydney where he worked as a diver. By a diver, I mean one of those blokes in an overall canvas suit, lead weighted boots, and a steel helmet with a window at the front. As a matter of fact, Timothy's diving suit is now in the Hiskisson Maritime Museum.

He came to Batemans Bay in about 1900 and set up as an oyster man, using his skills and his suit as a diver. You might well wonder how he went about oystering in a diving suit, and I'll tell you shortly, but for now I want to talk about that fine house.

Timothy bought 80 acres at the junction of the rivers, leased another 1000, but did little with the land. It is, I believe I may say without offence to anyone, difficult land to do much with.

Wrays Wharf marked at the top of the chart just above Chinamans Point - how appropriate is that, Tong?

Shortly after he arrived he set about building the house, and bricklayers were brought down from Sydney. The bricks were made on site from local clay. It's a full brick house and very strongly constructed. Rather than wire ties between the inner and outer walls, at every few courses they laid the bricks transversely to bind the two walls together. There are three bedrooms, lounge and living-room, each with a fireplace joined to one of the four chimneys. There was a verandah all round and a bathroom at one end of the verandah. The toilet, which was way down the back, was not lacking in character and was a two-holer. Have you ever seen one of those? They are what you might call a pally institution. Well, Timothy had nine children, so I imagine there was an impatient queue at times.

The heart and soul of the house was the kitchen. It was big, and you didn't just cook there. You served the meal at a table which coped readily with twelve.

One of Timothy's nine was Eric. He married a girl by the name of Middleton who taught at a school which had been built behind the house, and whose father was the teacher at the school at Nelligen. The Eric Wrays, in turn, had two children.

The Eric Wrays died intestate. That left a problem which could only be solved by the sale of the property. I think there may have been an intermediate owner for a while but it was bought in about 1965 by William May, more commonly known as Pat.

On his assessment of the land Pat May called the place Poverty Farm - which name still appears on the government map and on the gate. His sons, Alan and Dennis, who run the property today say that on the basis of their experience they have no good reason to change the name of the farm.

Meantime, the name Wray has continued unabated. One of Eric's children was Timothy too. He continued in the line of oyster men though using techniques a little more updated than his grandfather. His widow, Mrs Gwen Wray, lives today in Wray Street, Batemans Bay, She's not sorry her family is no longer oystering. It's a wet, cold, hard life she says.

I don't know enough about it to argue, but I do know this. If there is a finer oyster than a Clyde River oyster I have yet to find it, and I have been looking hard for a long time.

WRAYVILLE is still written above the entrance door

So much for Stuart Magee's potted history of Wrays or Mays Wharf. The Mays no longer own Mays Wharf although a quick search of the local telephone directory reveals dozens of Mays as well as Wrays still living in Batemans Bay and up and down the Far South Coast.

I do believe the Innes family who operate the Innes Boatshed and the Clyde River tourist boat bought the property in 2003 for $940,000. It has been for sale for some time now for $1,980,000.

A mere bagatelle for my not-so-old Chinese friend if he ever decides to "Escape from the City".

Googlemap Riverbend

P.S. Well, my Chinese friend did not buy Mays Farm which has since been impacted by the December 2019/January 2020 bushfires. The owners have withdrawn it from sale until repairs have been carried out.

 

In memory of an old friend

NOEL * 28 October 1920 † 11 August 1995 Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn's rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die. Noel's war service in the 42nd Battalion, his war grave at the Bundaberg Cemetery and his record at the Virtual War Memorial.

 

It was a dark and stormy night ...

 

This most widely known incipit in English literature is perhaps the best way to describe that particular Canberra winter's night in August 1995 when the phone rang and a woman's voice asked, "Are you Peter Goerman?"

"Yes", I replied.

"I'm Noel Butler's sister", the woman's voice continued, "I'm sorry to tell you that Noel passed away last night".

I was too stunned to ask about the when and where and how or the caller's phone number. I mumbled a shocked "Thank you for calling" and hung up.

 

Brown's Funerals kindly made this old newspaper cutting available to me

 

And that was the end of a friendship which had endured for twenty-eight years during which we kept up a regular correspondence and met perhaps a couple of dozen times. While I travelled the world, Noel spent all those years in Wewak in the Sepik District, before Papua New Guinea's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I first met Noel aboard the Greek ship 'PATRIS' which had been scheduled to leave Sydney and call at Port Moresby on its way through the Suez Canal. But history and the Eqypt-Israeli war of 1967 intervened and the Suez Canal was closed to all shipping. So the 'PATRIS' never got to Port Moresby but sailed through the Great Australian Bight and around the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town) instead. However, a good number of 'Territorians' from the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea had already booked a passage and the shipping line at great expense flew them down to Sydney to join the ship. And so it came that I spent some four weeks aboard the 'PATRIS' in the company of a whole bunch of hard-drinking and boisterous 'Territorians'. Having barely scraped together the fare, I had no money to spend on drinks but I did mix with the 'Territorians' night after night in the ship's Midnight Club to listen to Graham Bell and his Allstars. I was spellbound by the stories those 'larger-than-life' 'Territorians' told about the Territory and my mind was made up that I would go there one day.

One of the 'Territorians' was Noel who then lived in Wewak in the Sepik District. If New Guinea seemed remote and exotic, then the mystical Sepik District was even more remote and more exotic! It sounded all very Conrad-esque and straight out of "Heart of Darkness"! Noel had been sent up to the Territory as a soldier during the war and had never left it! After leaving the army, he tried his hand at coffee and tea in the Highlands and had held numerous positions of one kind or another ever since. He epitomised the typical 'Territorian' with his Devil-may-care attitude and his unconcern about the future, about money, and about a career. Somehow, for those people, the Territory provided everything they wanted from life and the rest of the world was a place that they visited once every other year during their three-month leave.

Our love of chess made Noel and me shipboard mates and we spent many hours hunched over the chess board as the ship ploughed its way towards Europe. And as we played game after game, I learnt about the Territory and listened to stories of some of the Territory's 'old-timers', including one Errol Flynn of whom I had never heard before. It seemed the Territory attracted three types of people: missionaries, moneymakers, and misfits. Which category would I fit?

Eventually the ship docked at Piraeus in Greece where Noel saw me off at the railway station as I was bound for Hamburg in Germany. I spent the next few miserable winter months in Hamburg and then in Frankfurt before finding a way out again: I got a job in southern Africa which, as I saw it, was almost halfway back to where I eventually wanted to go: New Guinea. From Noel, with whom I had stayed in contact during all this time, I had heard about PIM, the Pacific Island Monthly which was read by one and all in the Territory. I bought a copy and decided to place in it a tiny classified ad which from memory ran something like this: "Young Accountant (still studying) seeks position in the Islands." The response was hardly overwhelming but the two letters I did receive were enough. One was from a Tom Hepworth of Pigeon Island Traders in the Outer Reef Islands in the then British Solomon Islands Protectorate who described to me in glowing terms the leisurely life on a small atoll in one of the remotest part of the South Pacific. The other letter was from a Mr. Barry Weir, resident manager of the firm of chartered accountants Hancock, Woodward & Neill in Rabaul on the island of New Britain in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea who, subject to a satisfactory interview with their representative in Australia, offered me the position of audit clerk. That was it!!! I passed muster at the interview and in the dying days of the year 1969 I left Australia for New Guinea. I was on my way!!!

 

Noel on the Wewak Golf Course at Christmas 1975

 

Rabaul was everything I had expected of the Territory: it was a small community settled around picturesque Simpson Harbour. The climate was tropical with blazing sunshine and regular tropical downpours, the vegetation strange and exotic, and the social life a complete change from anything I had ever experienced before! Easter 1970 gave me the chance to visit Noel when the Rabaul tennis club chartered a DC3 to fly to Wewak for some sort of tournament. I got a seat aboard and visited Noel on his own little estate along the Hawain River some ten miles outside Wewak. It was a wonderful place: Tilly lamps at night and a shower gravity-fed from a rooftop holding tank which was refilled by the 'haus boi' with a handpump. A native village was just down the road and far into the night small bands of villagers would pass the house strumming their ukeleles. An alcoholic beachcomber by the name of McKenzie (who was said to be an excellent carpenter on the few occasions when he was off the grog) lived even farther out than Noel. He had no transport which however did not stop him from walking all the way into Wewak to quench his ever-present thirst at the Sepik Club. On his return late at night he would stagger in to Noel's for a few more noggins to propel him on his way. In later years some friendly people in town fixed him up with a donkey which used to carry him home safely. The Territory was full of characters like McKenzie.

 

left to right: Cerebos Salt, Noel, moi at Christmas 1975
on Wewak Beach next to the old Windjammer Hotel
(Photo taken by Brian Herde with his beloved BRONICA)

 

I went back to Wewak on two more occasions and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea".

 

Brown's Funerals kindly made this old newspaper cutting available to me

 

Perhaps this struggle is something else that we shared. I, too, still think almost every day about those many faraway places in which I lived and worked. The years spent there have left me unsuited in many respects for life in the deep south. I feel suspended between my past life in the islands and my present life in mainstream Australia, and I still seek a place where I can feel truly content.

 

 

Noel finally came to rest in the Bundaberg Cemetery. Rest in Peace, Noel!

 

P.S. Noel's older sister, Constance Mina Ronan, also passed away in Bundaberg in 2002 - see here. The world is a poorer place for their passing.

 

Noel's War Records

Noel's father passed away on Saturday, 28 October 1944 - see following notice in the Cairns Post - and Noel recorded as his next-of-kin his mother Constance Mina Butler of St Mary's School in Herberton

The funeral was held at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, the same church in which just five years earlier Noel's only sister Constance Mina (Peggy) had married Andrew Ronan.
Isn't it amazing what the internet yields up with a bit of searching? :-)

Cairns Post of Saturday 11 November 1939

17 Totness Street in Torquay is the address of the Hervey Bay Croquet & Mallet Sports Club, founded in 1960. Perhaps Noel used it as a forwarding address or, just as likely, worked there for a while after he had left his job with the Department of Works in Lae and Mumeng, and before returning to Kainantu in early 1961 where he bought some land to grow coffee in which he failed and then began work in Wewak in December 1961.
P.S. I did contact the Hervey Bay Croquet & Mallet Sports Club, and their secretary, a nice lady by the name of Jenny Campbell, told me that they only moved to Totness Street in 1988. There goes another hypothesis.