We arrived at Ingham on a Sunday afternoon during the fury of an intense tropical storm – after the most boring journey ever undertaken by a son and heir determined to remain near the bosom of his family. Lightning and thunder came in a continuous barrage as wind thrashed the trees and buffeted the car. And so awash were we that the windscreen wipers were utterly useless, their efforts obliterated by the torrent.
This was the heaviest downpour I had ever experienced and from my little cubby-hole in the back seat it almost seemed as if we were driving under water.
Dad crept along the main street in the downpour, looking for somewhere he could ask directions. Being Sunday the shops were shut, of course, so there wasn’t much traffic. After a while we stumbled on the Police Station. Dad found a park nearby, then jumped from the car and sprinted to the shelter of the building.
He needn’t have bothered. He was drenched before closing his door.
As he disappeared into the building the deluge abruptly ceased, the hammering from the iron-roofed buildings diminishing as the storm moved away to the mountains. Soon he arrived back with the local sergeant. In the extreme humidity the sarge looked as wet as my father.
“Follow this street straight back through town,” he said in a voice that would have graced a gravel truck. “Keep going until you come to the end of the bitumen. Go on a couple of miles from there and turn right. You’ll see the sign.”
“HOPELESS FARM”, it read.
Closer up I saw it had originally been “OPEL’S FARM” but someone had carefully changed it. The alterations looked almost as old as the initial lettering and for those in the valley it had long since been adopted as the property’s name.
We bumped along the track indicated for about four kilometres, canefields on one side and undeveloped land on the other, and soon came to a group of buildings. Among them were machinery sheds and a workshop, two houses of indeterminate age (one somewhat older than the other), a couple of smaller ancillary buildings and what appeared to be a workers’ accommodation block.
Towering over the whole establishment were five of the biggest trees I had ever seen. Leopard trees, Dad said, but I couldn’t see any leopards.
Behind the buildings a moderate sized creek flowed along a deep ‘V’ shaped gully that meandered across the valley to the Sherbert River. A road cut into its steep-sided bank led down to a pumping station situated above a small lagoon.
The Opel land had been purchased by the company owning the undeveloped area to the east, we subsequently learned. Their plan was to amalgamate the two properties, with Hopeless Farm becoming the operations base from which to expand and develop this larger sugar cane project.
We were to occupy the older of the two residential buildings, a comfortable open-style weatherboard house set above ground-level on a concrete floor. It had recently been painted, both inside and out, and new floor tiles, cupboards and overhead fans had been installed. Louvered windows all round and a large breezeway through the middle provided ventilation.
The company had taken on my father as an all-round mechanic/fitter, with responsibility for maintenance and repairs to the vehicles and farming machinery. It wasn’t long before he’d become their general handyman as well though, fixing as necessary taps and light switches, septic tanks and drains, etc,. He also took on the building maintenance and helped with clearing and levelling the new cane fields whenever an extra hand was needed.
Dad certainly must have enjoyed it; he went to work each morning with a spring in his step and a look of utter contentment on his face. I had never seen him in such a relaxed frame of mind.
One Sunday afternoon he decided to clean the accumulated dunnage from the little workshop building’s side room. Apparently, over time, it had become a sort-of hold-all storage shed. Amongst the things he discovered there were some old machine tools, in particular, a light mechanical hacksaw, an ancient pedestal drill and – buried against the back wall – a small belt-driven lathe.
“You wouldn’t read about it, Shirl!” he said to Mum, his eyes warm with wonderment and memories. “It’s the same as the one I began my apprenticeship on.”