Mike
Nostalgia | February 14, 2025By Claire M Brereton
Mike works as a deckhand on the Southern Morton Bay ferries and runs a popular bed and breakfast on Macleay Island.
Mike’s sense of humour sparkles when he confides about forty per cent of the kids in his class at school were born in December 1945.
“Their dads probably returned from the Second World War in March 1945 like mine did,” he winks.
“I will never admit to being old,” he jokes.
Always quick to reveal his egalitarian outlook, Mike acknowledges he has lived a privileged life.
His maternal grandparents emigrated to Australia from Scotland in 1915 with little money and no family support because his grandmother’s well-connected family had disapproved her choice of husband. Luckily Mike’s grandmother had a windfall soon after arriving in Brisbane.
She purchased the winning ticket in a lottery and won a house and land in Wynnum. Here the couple raised and educated their family. Mike’s father became an engineer and later joined the family business established by Mike’s grandfather.
Mike’s early memories include going for a ride in a horse and buggy along the esplanade at Wynnum.
Mike completed school and commenced an engineering degree at University.
“In those days if you failed one subject you had to repeat the entire year, and I managed to fail one subject twice,” Mike smiles.
In 1968 a wooden marble bearing Mike’s name changed his entire life.
The marble of doom was drawn from a barrel and because Mike was no longer at university, he was unable to avoid conscription into the Australian Army.
In 1965 Mike had registered in response to the National Service Act 1964 which had legalised the practice of selecting young men by birthday ballot for compulsory conscription into the Australian Army.
“I spent two years in the Army trying to avoid Vietnam having previously been a university student protesting against the war,” Mike confides.
Surprisingly Mike enjoyed his time in the army. He loved the outdoors and learning survival skills in a picturesque National Park.
“I spent most of my time being an enemy at Canungra, dressed in black pyjamas with a conical hat on being a target,” he jokes.
During this time Mike lived at the Gold Coast which suited him well.
“I’d managed to get myself married in 1966 because there was a little baby on the way,” he chuckles.
Mike’s marriage lasted sixteen years and during that time he left the army and completed his Engineering Degree while his wife completed a law degree.
“We became a fairly well to do middle class family -until we got divorced,” he smiles.
“I had about 10 years running around being a wild boy,” he reminisces.
During this time Mike ran the family business which manufactured motor car and truck radiators.
The business also had a fabrication shop which produced one off jobs for sewerage work, water treatment work, and they even built some of the lighthouse towers off the coast.
By the mid 1990’s Mike could see trouble on the horizon for the Australian manufacturing industry and he put his business on the market.
Fortunately, the timing of the sale to South African and Indian buyers produced enough money for Mike to live on ever since.
Mike already owned and sailed a catamaran which he now kitted out for the high seas and installed a state-of-the-art GPS equipment.
He went cruising on this catamaran for ten years with his girlfriend, who was also an accomplished sailor.
The couple had a few adventures along the way such as losing a rudder off Lady Eliot Island and limping into Gladstone.
They faced the challenge of riding out a big tropical storm at Knight Island, and another one at Cape Bedford.
“Lightening was making a sizzling sound on the water all around us,” he says.
Despite precarious situations Mike and his partner never succumbed to doubt and panic.
“You don’t really feel fearful, but you do know you have 200 litres of gasoline on board,” he concedes.
They sailed around Australia to the Kimberleys taking on odd jobs such as driving a fishing boat out to the Swain for three months.
They experienced a category four cyclone in Coral Bay but had the foresight to chain their boat to a cyclone proof mooring and went ashore to safety. The boat survived the four-metre cyclone surge.
After their travels Mike found work in Mackay as an engineer during the coal boom. He was resurrecting old equipment because new equipment was scarce at that time.
The couple bought a house in Kinka Beach on the Keppel Coast in Queensland.
“We had an acreage block and could catch barramundi in the coastal wetlands in our back yard,” Mike smiles.
“These wetlands were associated with a causeway and over a period of fifty years the wetlands filled up with sand,” Mike informs.
The drainage pipes allowed the tides to come in rapidly and bring sand, but restricted the outgoing tide. The sand could not escape the wetlands when the tide went out and the wetlands went from being 10 meters deep at high tide, to three meters.
From the Keppel Coast, Mike and his partner did a trip to Cape York in his small four-wheel drive.
“We drove our little Daihatsu Terios equipped only with road tyres,” he laughs.
“It was the dry season; the road had just been graded and my sister who lives in the Daintree told us other people had driven there in two-wheel drive cars under those conditions,” Mike explains.
When Mike was sixty-two the couple moved to Macleay Island in 2007 where Mike saw a job advertised for an ambulance driver offering minimal hours.
“I had a coxswain certificate, and I got the job, but it was a twenty-four hour standby job at about twelve dollars an hour,” Mike says.
At the same time he had applied for a deckhand job for a ten hour day that paid double the ambulance driving hourly rate.
“I decided not to do ambulance driving, and for the past seventeen years I have been a deckhand four days a fortnight,” he says.
Mike recalled some deckhand incidents. On one occasion the ferry stopped, and the crew pulled a dead body from the water.
In another incident the ferry crew rescued an indignant person who claimed to have been tipped out of his small aluminium boat colloquially known as a tinny.
“We noticed a tinny driving in circles around a person in the water,” Mike says.
They stopped the ferry and pulled a waterlogged man from the water. The soggy fisherman angrily claimed the police barge had sped by causing the wash from the barge to rock his boat and tip him out.
The ferry captain radioed the police barge which promptly returned to collect the fellow from the ferry. The officers, showing no apparent remorse, seemed overly focused on breathalysing the man -who was innocent of any alcohol in his breath.
“The police were probably trying to prove it was not their fault,” Mike scoffs.
Needless to say, the ferry captains were aware of the hazardous wash behind them and always travel slowly past other boats to be courteous and safe.
Mike finds the Southern Morton Bay Islands a very relaxed place to live and he does a lot of sailing and boat repairs on his days off.
Mike and one of his his lifelong friends were repairing their boats at a boatyard one day when they saw a Jubilee sailboat.
“I told my mate we should buy one of those, reminding him how we used to lust over those Jubilees when we first started reading the Sea Craft Magazines,” Mike recalls.
His friend soon sent an email reporting that he had purchased one for $2000.
“I said if they are that cheap, we might as well buy two,” Mike smiles.
“When saw I saw my mate’s boat, I knew why it was so cheap it was only a wood heap, so I bought one for $5000 and rebuilt it to the tune of $20,000,” he laughs.
Other people on the islands saw their renovated boats and started buying them. Now the Southern Morton Bay Islands boasts a fleet of twelve Jubilees.
“We have the second largest fleet of Jubilees in Australia,’” Mike boasts.
“The largest fleet is in Ballarat on lake Wendouree,
“We take our Jubilees to the Queensland Championships every year and we also travel down to compete in the Australian Championships,
“We have been five times and I think I came fourth once,” he recalls.
Mike is still enjoying life, however in 2017 Mike’s long-term partner succumbed to cancer. He was her carer throughout her illness.
Then in 2020, Mike’s specialist broke the news that Mike possibly has three to five years left.
He had been diagnosed with the same idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in his lungs that his mother suffered from.
When he told his friends they decided to organise Mike’s living wake at the local boat club. He had 90 family and friends in attendance celebrating his lifelong achievements.
Five years later Mike is still enjoying life. He is on a voluntary medication trial for the disease and planning a trip to Italy later this year with his good friend Maree.
Although his health has taken a downward curve, Mike’s indomitable spirit is still firing on all cylinders. “I only need to use my oxygen to do my pushups and other exercises in the mornings,” he laughs.
