From the moment 22-year-old Richard Bray Parkyn took the gangplank down off the Dunbar Castle and planted his feet on Queensland soil in September 1878, five generations of Parkyns have never been afraid of having a go.
Whether it was Cornish miner Richard making his fortune managing Gympie mines and building one of the first Noosa River shacks on what would become known as Gympie Terrace, before reinventing himself as a farmer and later a Widgee Shire councillor, or his son Jack building the foundations of the Noosa tourism industry with the Miss Tewantin (the “sexiest boat on the river”), and later pioneering the caravan park concept at Munna Point, or his son Howard, a teenager in 1929, unhitching the chain to allow his mate Lionel Donovan to be the first to drive his Chevy Tourer across the brand-new Doonella Bridge ahead of all the dignitaries, before becoming the savviest Noosa businessman of his generation, the Parkyn boys (and gals) have never been known to take a backward step.
Fifth generation brothers Nick and Will Parkyn, now in their 40s, are adventurers who have inherited the achieving gene, and next autumn they plan to raft and hike around the far parts of the shire and Cooloola to dig up forgotten pieces of the Parkyn story and honour their much-loved forebears.
As Will told Noosa Today this week: “I think we’ve always been proud of our family history but as I got older I started wanting to know more about the stories and how they relate to each other so I could pass them down through my family. Time rolls on, people pass and things get forgotten. I wanted to get the story straight before that happened.”
Says Nick: “Reading the stories of the old deeds in local history books, and looking into the eyes of my ancestors in the old photos, is like looking in a mirror of sorts. Our ancestors’ blood runs in us and we are them, in part, living on. Learning a little of life in Tewantin and having family as local pioneers gives my brother and me a connection to the land as well. This trek we’re planning for early next year, and the inevitable highs and lows of the journey, will pay homage to them and to the waterways, and connect us through our DNA to those that paved the way.”
Although both the brothers grew up in Brisbane, Nick and his young family moved to Tewantin five years ago, making their home in one of the family properties just a stone’s throw from Parkyn Court and the site of the old Parkyn Wharf, and establishing his audiology practice across the street from Parkyn’s Hut information centre.
He says: “When I moved here I joined the Hut team and started reading the history. I was too young to talk much to Granddad (Howard) before he died, but when Grandma had a stroke we’d moved her to a nursing home close to us in Brisbane and I’d visit her once a week and talk about the family history. That’s really what sparked my interest.”
A few months back a cousin drew Will’s attention to the North Face Adventure Grant program, through which the giant outdoors company offers assistance of up to $10,000 for aspiring expeditioners.
Says Will: “It struck us as a good idea, but what would be our adventure? We knew that for us it had to be in Noosa and environs, but we also wanted it to be meaningful in some way about where we’re from, so we started thinking about using pack-rafts to combine a trails and waterways adventure around Noosa and Cooloola, and to add a layer of meaning for us, we would track our family story in Noosa, Gympie and the Mary River.”
By the early 1900s Richard Bray Parkyn was well established financially and had built his river “shack”, Miner’s Rest, on Gympie Terrace. He had also begun to buy tracts of rich farming land on the Mary River near Kandanga Creek and built a homestead on the property he named Gonamena Farm after the family home in Cornwall. He had shunned the land at an early age to work in the mines, but now he took early retirement from the Great Eastern Gold Mining Company and became a gentleman farmer.
The site of long-gone Gonamena will be the starting point of Nick and Will’s adventure, from which bend in the river they will launch their rafts and paddle down the Mary to Gympie over two days, where they will stay at the Mount Pleasant Hotel while exploring sacred family sites, such as the family home on Mellor Street, the remains of the Great Eastern and Crown and Phoenix gold mining operations and, of course, Richard Bray’s grave in Gympie Cemetery, restored in recent times by family member Bruce Smerdon.
From Gympie they will hike 24km to Wolvi and the site of Jack Parkyn’s farm on Tagigan Creek, where their great-grandfather and his Cornish bride, Daisy, set up home after marrying in Ipswich in 1912, followed by another full day’s hike to the upper reaches of the Noosa River, where they will relaunch the rafts and begin another long paddle downriver to Teewah Landing and Johns Landing, where Jack Parkyn once took tours on the Miss Tewantin. From there, they’ll be on the home paddle to Parkyn Court and a short hike up the hill to Parkyn’s Hut, where a few well-earned beers will be the order of the day, after more than a week of hard slog.
Fortunately the pack-rafts are relatively light, weighing in at a little over two kilos, but with variable river heights and wind conditions an important factor for lightweight craft, the expedition is not going to be a picnic by any stretch.
While this adventure is definitely a fifth generation idea, both Will and Nick have been supported by two family historians of the fourth generation, Bruce Smerdon and Keith Young, and a third, their dad John Parkyn, will join them for parts of the expedition.
Says Nick: “It’s been a bit difficult to track the landmarks on the route because there’s nothing left of the Gonemena farm and nothing left at Tagigan, but I think that has really lifted Keith and Bruce into another gear and they’ve been digging up a lot of invaluable information about the family sites.”
(Keith Young’s restoration and colorisation of many of the Parkyn family photos has been featured previously in Noosa Today, while Bruce Smerdon, in addition to restoring Richard Bray’s grave, has written an excellent monograph on the Queensland Parkyn patriarch, which informs parts of this article.)
The Parkyn brothers are hoping that a North Face grant will help cover some of their costs, but as Will says: “It’s gone beyond that now. We’re fully committed. This is the trip we have to do.”
