Phil Jarratt visits Noosa’s most energetic historical association.
On a warm and sunny last-days-of-winter morning in Cooroy last week, inside the rather grand Heritage Centre, founding committee member of the Cooroy-Noosa Genealogy and Historical Research Group, known as the “Genies”, Mrs Winifred Wynn, 82, rises from her chair to make welcome the handful of new members (taking the group ever closer to 200 active members) with a short dissertation on the group’s humble beginnings.
“When the Cooroy Genies first started we shared a tiny space with the bowling club committee and a solicitor. We managed to get a computer, but it lived up a very steep flight of stairs … ”
“With no handrailing,” Bev Warner calls from the floor. The two stalwarts of the Genies have been working together for so long that the younger lady often embellishes Win’s sentences.
“That’s right, no handrailing, but we managed to get up there and use it, and we got ourselves organised. Then we started fundraising, using whatever means we could think of. We had Tupperware parties, lingerie parties, lots of garage sales, plant sales, even cow manure sales, but I’ll get to that in a minute.” (Chuckles from the attentive audience.)
In the quarter century since the Genies’ humble beginnings, genealogy has become a global phenomenon, spawning a multi-billion dollar industry of books, websites and reality television shows.
In an interesting essay published in The Conversation a couple of years ago, Canadian academic and film-maker Julia Creet posits that, “A return to the idea of human connectivity is, to some extent, a reaction to the forces of globalization, post-humanism and deracination – the idea that some may feel a sense of the loss of roots and a loss of racial difference … Our yearning has produced an industry that, in turn, keeps asking us questions in order to sell us the answers.”
But here at the coalface of this global movement in Cooroy, the Genies are all about family history for fun, and for building relationships within the community, early settlers and newbies all united in the common purpose of finding out if it is indeed true that great-grandpa had three wives or once drove a Cobb & Co coach.
Having set up in their hole in the wall in 1996, the Genies managed to cut a deal with the Girl Guides in 2000 and took up space below the Guide Hut, to which this writer was invited some years ago to address the members on Noosa’s surfing history. (At the end of the presentation, the group’s second oldest member – not the oldest, that honour still belongs to distinguished naturalist Cecily Fearnley in her mid-90s – presented him with a pair of her husband’s old and baggy boxer swim trunks, to much hilarity.)
Win continues: “The space under the Guide Hut was massive compared to where we’d been, but we still needed funds for a purpose-built centre, and we got word that a big nursery near the Big Pineapple was closing down and they were throwing plants out by the skip-load, so I asked if we could come and get some to sell. The owner walked us around 21 acres and told us what we could and couldn’t have, and the quantity was mind-boggling. We borrowed every trailer in town and some of them made three and four trips down there to get the plants, and we filled a huge greenhouse to the roof. We worked on those plants for the next six or seven years, potting and repotting, and we’d have two plant sales a year and that brought in more than $8,000.”
Tea and biscuits are about to be served, so Win is winding up now: “And then we got access to horse manure, and people would go out with a trailer and load up.” (“It wasn’t always dry,” Bev chimes in to raucous laughter.) Win: “We’d bag it up and sell it and it made a lot of money, and look what we have today. So, my message to all community groups is, don’t sit around hoping for donations, get out and make your own money.”
While president of the Genies, former media man John Hartley, 71, is a relative newbie, with only a couple of decades in town, the formidable duo of Win and Bev are living local history. Win’s grandmother and her father and siblings came to Cootharaba in 1922, after her dad’s return from World War I, and he worked the family farm until he married Win’s mum and they moved away for a time, before settling again in the Gympie region in 1936, just before Win’s birth.
She was introduced to Noosa at the age of three months, when the family rented one of the Parkyn’s holiday flats at Munna Point. Growing up in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, the highlight of Win’s year was the annual family holiday camping at Noosa Woods. Later, when she had married a Gympie policeman, Win and her family moved to Noosa in 1967, “just ahead of the Victorians”.
But Bev Warner, 68, can top that, tracing her local lineage back even further. “I’m a Ross from Tewantin,” she says proudly. Bev’s great-grandfather, Ben Ross was an early settler who worked at the Wilkins sugar mill near Cooroy. Her grandfather, Bill, and his half-brother Clarrie (the first white male child born in Tewantin, according to legend) had a butcher shop and slaughter yard in Tewantin, and her father, Ronnie, later ran the business. Bev married a local carpenter and they have lived in Tewantin, and now Cooroy all their married lives.
Over morning tea, I ask the Genies’ head honchos what had inspired their fascination with family history. Says Bev: “I lost my father when he was 49 and my grandfather the year after, so I always had this thought, if only I’d asked the questions I’d like to have answers for, because I’m by nature an inquisitive person.”
“What got me into this was my aunt,” says Win, “because we’d always wondered about our great-grandfather. We knew his name, and knew that he came to Australia in 1850, but we’d never been able to trace his father. Now I’ve got 32 folders of family records. Once you get started it never stops.”
Genies’ president John Hartley joined the group in 2009 and began tracing his family association with the pioneer days of the Hunter Valley wine region. “My great-grandfather was a winemaker in Rutherford, and a miner before that. My parents would talk about him and other family members from long ago, but it doesn’t really register until you get older and you want to find out who’s who and how they fit. In this group I found people who were on the same journey of discovery, so when I was asked to become president, I could hardly say no.”
In 2017 the Genies’ endless years of fundraising, plus some support from council and community agencies, enabled them to build the Heritage Centre in Emerald Street, Cooroy, where they have ample room to house their large local history collection of publications, oral histories, school records, photos and memorabilia that dates back to the earliest days of settlement, as well as conduct the day to day business of promoting and encouraging the study of genealogy, heritage and local history.
And although they are now welcoming new blood to carry on the work, the stalwarts of the Genies are still hard at it. Says Bev: “I missed the first meeting of the Genies but I turned up for the second and I’ve been here ever since. It’s been quite an adventure, not only for what I’ve found out for myself but what we’ve been able to help other people discover. We’re like a family.”
Adds president John: “Everyone has an ooh-aah moment when they find something really interesting in their family story. It’s always exciting to be a part of that.”
Cooroy-Noosa Genealogy & Historical Research Group welcomes members and offers research services to the public. For more information phone 07 3129 0356 or visit www.genealogy-noosa.org.au
