The following article titled "10 Years From Now … What Price Yamba?", dated 27th January 1977, was written by "Y.P." (The Yamba Phantom) for inclusion in the Bulletin of Yamba Golf and Country Club Ltd. The article describes people and events from past years and ponders about Yamba in 1988. There is a minor difference between the original article and what appeared in the magazine. The article also includes some inaccuracies but it is transcribed exactly as it appeared in the Bulletin.

 

10 YEARS FROM NOW ... WHAT PRICE YAMBA?

 

Not so many years ago our Golf Course was a hopeless marsh.

Plenty of folk now remember Yamba before electricity arrived in 1930: before the bridges ended the ferries, before the meat safe stood aside the ice chest, then the refrigerator and the deep freeze.

Still around is Don MacMillan’s bicycle wheel trolley which he pushed with the mail up the hill to the Craigmore guest house, which was the Post Office and just about everything else. Mail used to arrive at a wharf where the Calypso Carvan Park is now.

Mrs Schaumann up in Clarence Street was the little girl who switched the electric light on. That night the river was lit by lanterned craft and the kegs ran dry!

Mrs. Woodburn’s father built her house (opposite the tennis courts up the hill) in the early 1900’s – all local timber. She recalls as a girl how the highlight of a weekend was when the ladies packed the lunches and the boys pushed the trolley along the Angourie railroad out to the Blue Pool. And ... “the trees met overhead like a cathedral.”

Jack McConnell, Yamba’s long-term barber, tells of sunsets from his home up near the water tower when you could see the mullet so thick in the rosied river that you could walk on them to Iluka.

Grandchildren of Captain Francis Freeburn, Yamba’s first pilot (and first resident) tell of how the Captain would jump clothed into the sea off Yamba Head when the weather was wild. With a rope about him, he would swim out to the ship waiting to be guided in.

There are folk too with a greyer picture. Angourie was heavily populated with koalas and rare black possums. Both were shot to extinction – the possums for their skins, the koalas for no reason beyond their willingness to stay still to make a lethal shot easy. George Cox, 83, says that rarely would a sailing ship leave Yamba without a koala up the mast. To what fate, one wonders. He also recalls kangaroo drives. “Where are they all now?” he asks.

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Whiting Beach was once called Military Beach because of the armies of pelicans that frequently marshalled against the wind.

It was a long way to Gallipoli and France in 1914 for many names listed on the memorial overlooking Main Beach. For too many it was a one way trip. The best memorial for those and their sons at a later time is the good life enjoyed by Yambarians young and old today.

A few grey heads remember Yamba School when you hitched a saddle or just walked. Floods came up easily then and were a delight when yet another holiday was declared. You had to beat off goats at lunchtime – Yamba was full of them.

Your mouth has to water as you hear about the four bakeries that Yamba sported once. People came for miles for our local product. Also without compare were the sea-food meals – what happened to them? 

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And the yarns at night by lamplight under the giant fig up the hill. Shouldering cow-dung was your Aeroguard in those days.

The big Saturday night bonfire and sing-song outside the old Surf Club shed beat TV hands down.

Concerts of enthusiastic talent had the stage jumping in the forlorn picture show you see remaining.

The chewing gum upholstering the undersides of those seats would make a dozen tractor tyres.

We never had a blacksmith.

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But we did have a convent and several houses swamped by shifting sandhills in from Lovers Point. They’re still under there! “Mad” Ager fought a lonely battle with the sand. Thoughtless clearing of the banksia forest that held all the ocean face together from Lovers Point to the Lighthouse, gave the sand free rein. The old man ignored ridicule and spent many a night shifting his primitive windbreaks in all weathers. The hill his street takes you up today he built. All his efforts failed to save Yamba’s first 5-hole golf course. It’s under the hills behind to-day’s Story Park. Or, what’s left of anything around there after sand-miners mangled everything in their path a few years ago.

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The small Village down Rocky Laurie drive is a not-so-admirable result of 12,000-odd years tenure of our area by aborigines. Not much is said about these folk. You can hear about massacres and imported illnesses, but history’s pen has faded ink on this subject. At least an early writer noted that an armed guard had to protect the pilot’s daughter when she trimmed the kero “lighthouse” on the hill to keep the blacks away. Maybe they were short of kero …

There was a whopping depression in 1890 when the first section of the breakwater was completed. At this time Australia’s population      neared 3,000,000 and the first nugget was found in Kalgoorlie. But Angourie, Yamba and Iluka’s 2,000 workers simply vanished.

The ice making unit at Black’s pub in Wooli Street brought the first tourists. A cold beer was the big attraction. A photograph of this first    hotel is in the Story House.

World War 2 caused another depression. The army took a dislike to Lover’s Point and skinned it bare with endless target practice from the  lighthouse hill. 

In the ′70’s there was the big boom.

Suddenly developers discovered Yamba and the ‘dozers awoke and the trees came tumbling down.

The Bowling Club added and added on land that once was set aside for school expansion.

The Golf Club blossomed with wall-to-wall glitter and a restaurant to match. Volunteers watched the new professionals under greying      brows.

No longer was Yamba kero lamps and water tanks, the sewerage cart or the rowlock-trimmed clinker hire-boat. Mum knitting on the beach with Citronella on her forehead, with the kids bucket-and-spading on the shell-strewn edge, changed to “trannies” and bikinis. Fibreglass fume noise silenced the Chapman Pup. The corner store forgot its jar of broken biscuits.

If anyone honeymooned any more it wasn’t in the Pub whose walls could tell a thousand stories.

Campers were directed elsewhere by cryptic notices. A blackened billy became a curiosity – if you could find one.

The rates went up and up.

So did a few high-rise blocks. The whisper of another Gold Coast.

Then the “FOR SALE” notices began to rust as the whole country experienced a new look at itself.

Here we are now.

A tidy town. A wonderfully endowed community.

A new group has moved in. About one third of our permanent 1,250 are the “retired”.

The young don’t stay – like they don’t all through the North Coast.

How about a thought for 1988?

It’s only 10 Christmases away.

Will the oval have a grandstand?

Will the fish and prawns still be around?

Will there be factories on Angourie Road?

Will there be concrete, glass and sewer pipes through the Angourie Reserve?

Will we have parking meters, zebra crossings and traffic lights?

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Will folk be grumbling about the lack of Parks?

Will the school be closed? Will the gaol be bigger?

Well, in this, our very own magazine, possibly Yamba’s only voice, at least we can start off some thoughts. The Golf Club has the                opportunity, as the biggest single land Trustee of Public Lands and can take its place as a leader for the whole community.

Only a few weeks ago Yamba had its first zebra crossing so that the school children can face the traffic with safety.

The big question is, has the patina of the early pioneering get-it-together spirit of Yamba disappeared under the encroachment of the “progress” of the big cities?

Some of us, over a quiet beer at the Club say it’s not on!

Let’s give a thought now and then that our town has the right to choose its future. Possibly the greatest strength in this way of looking at things lies in the hands of our Club members – when you think about it.