Recently, as a local public servant sensed my impatience with the spin that makes no sense to those who lived in the real world of decades past, he asked who I was and where had I come from. This question was put with interest, not rudeness, so I asked him had he ever driven either the Palmerstone Highway or Tully Falls road in North Queensland. He had, so he was told my father and his team had built both with picks and shovels during the Great Depression as sustenance workers. I was the eldest daughter of a man who, to this day, has no equal. He left home aged 12 years and finished with a fleet of vehicles that carried all required to construct the Koombooloomba Dam Kareeya Power station. His integrity, his enormous self taught abilities, and work ethic were realised when a massive cyclone washed away the supply line to the Atherton Tableland, the Kuranda railway line. He drove day and night to supply food and freight to my home town for the two years it took to replace the rail service. I will never allow my heritage to be besmirched by those who would, in doing so, take away a heritage left to me by my father. All he was, all he taught me to be, lives on in the opinions pages of newspapers. Where else can one defend the indefensible? Where can untruths be aired, who has the courage to challenge those who see their power as absolute? Only those who have been gifted with a teacher of renown, someone who undertook with excellence to raise a family, turn on the lights of the North, and leave behind a daughter, made in his image!!
Melba Morris
Allora
