By Phil Jarratt
Fifth generation members of one of Noosa’s leading heritage families, brothers Nick and Will Parkyn will tomorrow (Saturday 23 March) complete a week-long trek around the shire and beyond in honour of their famous and much-loved forebears.
Hiking and packrafting down the Mary River to Gympie and then back down the headwaters and lakes of the Noosa River, the brothers are visiting the near-forgotten sites of their family history, starting at the site of great-great-grandfather Richard Bray Parkyn’s Gonamena Farm on the Mary near Kandanga, and finishing at great-grandfather Jack Parkyn’s wharf at Noosa Marina before wandering up the hill for Saturday afternoon celebration at the Parkyn’s Hut information centre.
Welcome to Planet Parkyn!
When Noosa Today first wrote about plans for the heritage trek late last year, they were somewhat grander than what has come to pass. A grant application fell through, so instead of taking a videographer along Nick and Will are shooting the adventure on their phones, and instead of more elaborate sleeping arrangements they are dossing down on their pack-rafts under a tarp with a net to keep the bugs away. “It’s saved us a lot of weight,” Nick, a glass-half-full kind of guy, said on Monday night from their camp at Tagigan Creek, near Wolvi, where Jack Parkyn built a cabin and set up home on the land with bride Daisy in 1912.
As I wrote of the marvellous Parkyn clan last year: “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.”
By the early 1900s Richard Bray Parkyn was well established financially and had built his river “shack”, Miner’s Rest. He had also begun to buy tracts of rich farming land on the Mary River near Kandanga Creek where he built the homestead 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.
At the site of Gonamena Farm last weekend Nick and Will launched their rafts and paddled down the Mary to Gympie over two days, where they explored sacred family sites, such as the old family home on Mellor Street, the remains of the Great Eastern and Crown and Phoenix gold mining operations, and Richard Bray’s grave in Gympie Cemetery.
From Gympie they hiked 24 km to Tagigan Creek, where they were setting up camp when I contacted them. As Noosa Today went to press, they were well into another full day’s hike to the upper reaches of the Noosa River, where they would relaunch the packrafts and begin the long paddle downriver to Teewah Landing and Johns Landing, where Jack Parkyn once conducted river tours on the Miss Tewantin.
As Nick told me last year: “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. This trek 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.”
