Ian Jones has been reporting on events in and around Goondiwindi for 38 years. In that time, he has uncovered many local secrets. Here is the first in a series of columns that will reveal some of what he has found.
Do you have a secret spot?
A hidden hideaway?
A place which you call your own, despite the fact it is not always quite so secret?
For many families in Goondiwindi, at least for those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s and no doubt before, just one of them, was Sandy Camp on the Goondiwindi Common.
The last time we looked it was fenced off, admittedly, that Sunday drive was a long, long time ago.
Not for us Little Bondi off the stock-route’s Salisbury Bridge east of town. (Named after Alfred George Salisbury -1885–1942 – who led the Australian 9th Battalion at Gallipoli. He was among the first men to land. A plaque, easily missed, on the Queensland side of the bridge commemorates the war hero.
For it was a well-known spot of “debauchery”, numerous headlines in The Argus reported on “wild teenage parties” and “water littered and ruined by broken bottles” and ensured my maternally pessimistic and fatalistic mother Mary, would never encourage regular, long-term visits.
Which meant of course, we just rode our bikes, perhaps in the hope of discovering what “debauchery” meant.
Just what did those delinquents do out there which caused such social horror?!
And how could we get in on the act, aged 12.
Sandy Camp, perhaps, not surprisingly was, well, sandy.
You could even, at the tender age of 10 or so, walk a third to halfway across without falling off the continental shelf.
A triangle hung seductively in a giant old tree on the opposite bank.
It inspired dreams of derring-do when I was six or seven and I watched with frustration and want as my brothers and sister swam with much laughter and banter across to deepest darkest NSW.
EE Cummings described the longing for spring, or in this case summer, as the distant “far and wee” call of the whistleman.
That triangle and the sound of frollicking syblings splashing in the “mudluscious” waters of the Macintyre River was my call to the mystery of adolesence.
Anyone mention debauched parties at Little Bondi?
I was 11 or 12 when I was welcomed into the triangle club.
Later I found it was not a patch on the skyscraper-drop from the triangle at the bottom end of Frideswide Street.
As irony would have it, a mere 200 metres from where we lived.
It had been a “secret” too.
