Dalveen 4374 Kay Spence: April 2013

It is with much regret we have put our mother's house up for sale at Donnybrook, a little fishing village a short 18 km drive (approx 21 minutes) from Caboolture (that's the city Keith Urban used to call home). Or just 10 minutes to the Bruce Highway where you can head north to the Sunshine Coast or south to Brisbane. The drive from Donnybrook to Brisbane is approx 65 kms or 54 minutes drive - although this is to the CBD. I live at Wavell Heights which is in the northern suburbs of Brisbane so the distance is only 55 kms and takes a mere 43 minutes.

Donnybrook House Circa 1960

Swimming in the Pumicestone Passage Circa 1959

The house was built in 1959. In those days you reached Donnybrook via Caboolture along a dirt road (corrugated) and the trip from Brisbane to Donny say at Easter took approximately two and half hours. Even longer if you stopped at the pub at Caboolture to have a few reviving ales before setting out on the last 18 kms. Of course the highway from Brisbane to Caboolture had two lanes in those days - one going north and one going south. These days it's three lanes in both directions most of the way and really only reduces to two lanes either way just as you bypass Caboolture.

My mother had this house built as a holiday home. In those days there were three bedrooms with two sets of double bunks in each room. There was no lounge. Just a small cramped "l" shaped dining/kitchen where you tried to cram about 5 kids and at least 8 adults at peak periods such as public holiday weekends etc. There was no electricity, no town water, no telephone, in those days. We did have a wood stove so if you wanted a hot bath you could get the boiling water from the tank on the side of the stove. The water tank at the back of the house wasn't very big so it was at Donnybrook that we learned to conserve water - only turn on a tap when you were ready for filling a container and never leave it on while you were cleaning your teeth. The toilet was of course in the back yard - much to our chagrin. A hot day soon taught you it was a much better idea to trek down to the camping ground and use their septic toilet block than sit out in that hot smelly little piece of "hell" in our back yard. Of course nowadays we are connected to the sewerage system and have a toilet in the bathroom and also we have town water and electricity and the phone connected!!!

The job we kids all learned to hate the most was the cleaning of the "grease trap" before we returned home. If I start reminiscing about that I can still recall that pungent odour of greasy water my mother would ladle out of the trap into a bucket we had to then transport to the back of our garden to tip into the swamp that lay just behind our house. Of course in the early 1960s there was quite a bit of building going on at Donnybrook. Slowly small fibro fishing shacks began appearing magically up and down the streets of Donnybrook between one holiday and the next. By the mid 1960s, my mother had come to the conclusion that the small cramped kitchen just didn't work. So she had the wall between the kitchen and one of the bedrooms knocked out and this became our open plan bedroom lounge dining kitchen area. She kept one set of double bunks, installed a fold out divan which became a double bed at night and also placed a couple slightly more comfortable chairs to make up the lounge with the divan. The other set of double bunks were cut in half and one placed in each of the remaining two bedrooms. There were now enough beds for 14 guests - and still there were occasions where doubling up of children or married couples in the single bunks were required. The beds in the lounge area were kept for those who could sleep through a cyclone. When there was an all night Euchre party involving six players, the backups (which usually consisted of three or four adults) would take their turns to have a "camp" in one of these beds for a few hours returning to the game when someone else needed a "camp".

Fishing on the Donnybrook foreshore Circa 1963

What this home was all about was "extended family" and "fishing" and "eating" and "drinking" and "singalongs" and "darts and quoits" and "euchre" and "reading books and comics" and listening to "portable transistor radios". Downstairs in the laundry area where the dreaded "grease trap" pulsated were the "ice boxes". The local shop sold ice by the block and every couple of days we "kids" would drag our soapbox go cart down to the shop to pick up a couple of blocks. I believe there was a lot of "child slave labour" practised by my mother and also my mother's adult friends and relations in those days. If we weren't dragging the go cart down the shop, we were sent down the shop to collect the milk and loaves of bread, we were dispatched about 250 metres to the water to get fresh sea water onto the yabbies which had been pumped out of the mud bank earlier that morning by - you guessed it - me - apparently I did such a great job. I still seem to fall for that line even in my sixties.

When we came to Donnybrook for the school holidays we always stopped off in Caboolture. Mum and my Aunty and sometimes other Aunties and Uncles who weren't necessarily blood relations but good friends could quite easily while away a couple of hours in the beer garden. Donnybrook was tantalisingly close but there was no shifting adult bums from around tables having a refreshing ale or two. No matter how much we whinged and complained our pleas just fell upon deaf ears. Sometimes my Aunty would give us a few shillings to go to the bakery for a pie or cream bun to sustain us. We usually spent all our pocket money on comics which were inevitably all read by the time we left Caboolture. To this day I still think of Caboolture as the most boring town in the world - even though it has grown in size to claim city status. It was always a very boring stopover as far as we were concerned. I'm sure this is not the case it's just the memory of a 10 - 15 year old.

This story will be continued in the next post.

Donnybrook House for Sale - see below link

http://www.ljhooker.com.au/KYJF2E/2-bedroom-house-for-sale-donnybrook?