Bowraville

We went to Bowraville the other day, a small town inland and to the south of here. It’s easy to find. You just drive down the Pacific Highway for about an hour, turn left and keep driving for another twenty minutes or so. And you’re there. Similarly, you can reduce the directions for getting to us from Brisbane to “drive south on the highway for six hours, turn left at the Big Banana and we’re the fifth house on the right.” If you’re coming from Sydney, then you just drive north for eight hours and turn right at the Big Banana. That’s the sort of country it is.

It’s a small town and very quiet, the kind of place where, although thriving, you’d expect tumbleweed to greet you on the main street but it is just quiet and not abandoned at all. It was founded by cedar getters in 1850 though, of course, indigenous people were living there and still do. Cedar was known as “red gold” but real gold played a part in the town as well. In 1881, two brothers looking for stray bullock found traces of gold in a stone in the remains of a still-warm campfire and staked a claim. This was then promptly disputed by the men who had built the campfire as soon as they heard about it. But there was still mining in the area until the 1960s.


Bowraville Theatre

The buildings are old, for this country, and well-preserved. It has most things - a town clock, a hotel, a couple of lodging houses, a butcher, food store, a couple of cafes, and a race course. It also has a theatre, recently restored and re-opened by the town’s arts council, after more than 40 years. In its previous existence as the Raymond Theatre, the audience was segregated, the indigenous Gumbaynggir people sitting on inferior seats nearest the stage. The practice was highlighted in the sixties by a group of student civil rights campaigners known as the Freedom Riders and, eventually, the owner closed the theatre rather than face de-segregation. Now it’s been fully restored and, following a cleansing ceremony to mark the break with the past, there’s a programme of films, bush poetry readings and music.

The chair of the arts council is Dorothy James. Now in her seventies and not shy about it at all, she comes originally from Mumbles (and turned out to have gone to the same school as Sara’s father; and Sara’s mum knew Dorothy’s brother). After we’d all seen the theatre, she took us back to her home outside the town, a bungalow perched on the side of a valley with views from a wide verandah down to a creek and up the other side of the valley over fields and hillsides. In Britain, you’d call it isolated. She has a lively cattle dog, Ruby, and an old horse for immediate company, and has family living on a farm nearby. They were away for a weekend when we visited and Dorothy was happily looking after their ponies, dogs and chooks ie chickens. You got the impression this was all in a day’s work and more than welcome.