Maryborough

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Picture Gallery: Scenes around the old town, Maryborough:

Wharf Street, Queens Park and the Bond Store (Google Street View)

Maryborough

Maryborough is a town with a sprawling, open feel; you approach through suburbs where palm-shaded, picket-fenced houses known as 'Queenslanders' line the roads and rural outskirts are just beyond backyards. Closer in, the streets of the old town centre and port district give rise to a feeling that history hovers around its colonial buildings, invisible but almost tangible. The old courthouse, the Bond Store, Customs House, the Victorian-styled Queens Park and a cluster of pubs, all date back to the 19th century when the town was in its vibrant heyday.

Declared a port of entry to incoming migrants in 1859, Maryborough became a major hub for the Pacific Island labour trade as the expanding sugar cane industry absorbed workers as fast as they could be delivered. While outwardly formalised by legislation and overseen by officialdom, the trade remained a medley of exploitation where the fates of workers depended on the largesse, or lack of it, shown by their employers and the recruiters that supplied them.

The railway that features in A Flight of Dolphins came to a dead end in the port district of Maryborough and connection to the main north-south railway involved convoluted shunting and reversing, with locomotives swapping from one end of a train to the other or reversing the train out of town. Unsurprisingly, this part of the network no longer exists.

For more about Maryborough, see Queensland Places and Heritage Gateway

Book references: A Flight of Dolphins, Part 2: Ruthlessness, Part 3: Insight

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Maryborough

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