It's been a long journey, and along the way I made many different friends in many different places, including several on Thursday Island all those years ago in 1977: David Richardson, "Canadian Jim", Ron Taylor, Brian Pearson, and Millie and Lance Fulwood.
Millie and Lance Fulwood ran a small grocery shop along the waterfront on Thursday Island's Victoria Parade no more than a hundred metres away from the taxpayer-funded and tax-exempt monopoly of the Island Industries Board's big supermarket.
I was then the Island Industries Board's accountant under the dick-tatorship of the crotchety old bastard Cec Burgess, a former missionary, who, having discovered the difference between a debit and a credit, had been their accountant before me, and then become the manager.
All supplies came up from Cairns once a week by ship, and shoppers had to be quick before things ran out again. I never forgot the day when the Fulwood's shop had run out of something and, in order to satisfy their own customers' needs, bought the missing items from IIB's supermarket.
On hearing this, crotchety old Burgess flew into a rage, forbidding them to shop at 'his' supermarket, and slapping a 'maximum of 2 items' on certain lines of merchandise. As if being government-funded and tax-exempt wasn't already enough for him, he was out to destroy them.
I have no idea how long Millie and Lance Fulwood kept going against such unfair competition, although I know that by the time I was getting ready for a return trip to T.I. in 2005 - click here - they had already left.
I myself left the island after less than a year. Unlike Eric Hansen, author of "The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers", who, after surviving Cyclone Tracey while working on a prawn trawler, got off at Thursday Island and stayed. As he put it, "I recognized a rare opportunity. Seldom does one have the chance to enjoy the company of people who have so completely given themselves over to the cultivation of the low life in such style and with such gusto. They had elevated this sort of behavior to an art form and I wanted to be part of it."
He became the maintenance carpenter at the Grand Hotel. His job? "To get up each morning and repair the damage caused the previous night by the patrons of the public bar", he wrote. "With the shattered windows, doors wrenched off their hinges, vandalized toilet stalls, and miscellaneous damage from fistfights and late-night break-ins, I often found myself hard-pressed to have the place in reasonable order each day before the next onslaught began at noontime."
Eventually, and long after me, he also left Thursday Island, and for exactly the same reasons as mine, although I had not previously analysed mine as precisely as he had his. He wrote, "Then one day, I suddenly left Thursday Island. It was beginning to feel like home and I knew that if I stayed much longer, I might not leave. I couldn't imagine my time on the island getting any better, and so I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to leave before the bottom fell out of the experience. It was as if I was afraid the circus would leave town or that the magic would dry up and disappear. For most of my life I have felt like a human magnet for the sorts of people and experiences that I encountered on the islands of the Torres Strait. For years, I was convinced that it was perpetual motion that opened me up and made me vulnerable and receptive to odd and unusual encounters. For years, this compulsion to keep moving kept me on the road." Exactly!
All this came back to me as I sat in front of a blazing fire on a wintry morning at "Riverbend", and so I GOOGLEd "Milli and Lance Fulwood". I found this photo of Millie, older but still recognisable, and then THIS!!!
|
FULWOOD, Lance Christopher, late of Gympie and formerly of Thursday Island. Passed away peacefully at home after a long illness surrounded by his loving wife and family 30th November, 2014, aged 85 Years. Beloved husband of Emillia. Dearly loved father, father-in-law, "Dato" and "Big Dato" to his family. Much-loved brother, brother-in-law and uncle. Special in every kind of way; unbelievably great at writing; pretty funny guy; excellent at giving gifts; robust reader of westerns; draws fantastic pictures; amazingly caring; talented storyteller; outstandingly awesome at puzzles. Relatives and friends of Lance, Emillia and Family are warmly invited to attend Lance's Funeral Service to be held in the Cooloola Coast Crematorium Chapel, 236 Brisbane Road, Gympie on Tuesday, 9th December, 2014 at 10.00am. Donations in lieu of flowers to Lung Foundation Australia greatly appreciated.
|
David Richardson: gone! "Canadian Jim": gone! Ron Taylor: gone! Brian Pearson: gone! Lance Fulwood: gone! At my age, more of my friends are dead than alive!
