Photo Album

Mornington Island 1979

We had barely begun our working holiday caravanning trip and while I was doing a small job in Sydney, when an invitation arrived from Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria to look at an accounting job with the local Mornington Island Shire which also operated the local store and canteen, a bank and airline agency and also acted for the Federal Government as paying agents on "Pension Day" when the whole island population lined up for their booze money. I flew up all the way from Sydney to Cairns where I overnighted before taking "Bushies" flight the next morning, overflying Karumba on the way. Mornington Island has been the only place where I've seen young sprouting coconuts growing under the protection of padlocked wire-cages. Why? Because without that protection they would've been grubbed out and eaten by the locals before they had had a chance to grow into a tree. The Mornington Island Shire was the successor to an old church mission which had run the island in the past. Financial records were less than transparent and there was an overall impression of mayhem with lots of useless hangers-on holding positions well beyond their range of expertise. The whole thing had echoes of my previous assignment on Thursday Island except that Mornington Island was a lot more backward and isolated. There was not an inch of bitumen on the whole island which was flat and featureless. The job itself would've been a great sinecure for some ageing accountant who had already lost his balance(-sheet) but not very attractive for somebody who was still trying to make his mark on the world. And so I said, "Thanks but no, thanks" and we continued with our caravanning trip.