There’s a thing about the Rainbow Beach pioneers, like Bob Elmer and his wife Desley Allen.
They worked so hard – two or three jobs, businesses, making their own homes.
And they built a community.
Former publican at Tin Can Bay’s Sleepy Lagoon Hotel, Paul Deller, told how Bob saved him, rebuilding the hotel kitchen after the authorities threatened to shut it down.
He spoke on Desley’s behalf and his own at a special remembrance event at the Tin Can Bay Country Club on Sunday.
A qualified cabinet maker, Bob did all the interior work on their first home, in Maryborough.
That was after a hard day’s work, as he waited for Desley to get home from shiftwork as a nurse at Maryborough Hospital.
Then they did it all again at Rainbow Beach and moved there.
Bob was born in Gympie on 20 November 1941 and died at their Clarkson Road home exactly one week after his 83rd birthday.
Desley recalled that he hated every minute of school, but sailed through his cabinet making apprenticeship.
Building – from beautiful furniture to his part in the first steel barge of the Fraser Island Ferry Service – was his real genius.
Desley recalled it was pretty much love at first sight when they met in 1961.
Then followed a five-month working holiday in New Zealand.
It was their last break, except for two weeks every 10 years, for the next 60 years.
They had taken out a seven-year bank loan to buy the Maryborough house and paid it off in half that, Bob vowing that he would never borrow money again.
“From 1967, he spent most weekends at Inskip Point, helping his uncle establish the vehicular ferry service to Fraser Island, with his ferro cement barge,” Mr Deller said.
Bob and Desley were part owners of the barge. It kept them busy, along with fishing, finishing off the Rainbow Beach house, building a two-bedroom block house at Eurong on Fraser Island and rescuing vehicles stranded on the notorious Mudlo Rocks.
While he was at it, he rebuilt a 4wd truck, which he used to take fuel and building materials to the emerging Eurong Resort, also starting work on a 55-foot timber trawler.
And all that time he was in constant severe pain from a back injury that required major surgery in 1976.
The trawler, Phoenix B, was launched in 1982, with another Cooloola Coast personality, Val Dean as skipper and Bob the deckie as he learned how to operate it.
He also built his own 60-foot steel barge, the Scorpio – a legend in itself according to local historian Tony Stewart.
Later he tracked down and restored a tractor salvaged from the Cherry Venture, which ran aground just south of Double Island Point in 1973.
Amongst all that, he recorded his occupation on all official documents as “fisherman”.
Desley would reproach him: “You haven’t caught a fish for 40 bloody years.”
She was surprised that his Death Certificate records his life more accurately – it says “builder.”
A builder of many things.
