Queenstown is an odd place to most people. Nestled in a valley beneath strange, multi-coloured hills and great, bare, almost overpowering mountains, with stark reminders of its mining legacy all around, it is at the gritty edge of the Tasmanian experience. It is perhaps not unexpected, then, to find odd or unusual people living there. It’s been my privilege in recent years to get to know and become friends with some of these interesting people, and I would like to tell you of two of the men in particular. Both are dyed-in-the wool, or should I say dyed-in-the gravel, Queenstowners, who give much to the town and its character, and who wouldn’t live anywhere else. They are very different personalities, but know and like each other.
The first is Rory Wray-McCann, who describes himself as a “mineral artist, prospector and writer”. Over six feet tall, rangy and strong, with a prominent moustache and twinkling blue eyes, there is an air of swash and buckle about Rory Wray-McCann. He is usually seen around town or at home with his hat on. Friendly and sociable, he is that odd combination of a naturally talkative and articulate man with a speech impediment – he has stuttered all his life. He explains that he was treated by a hypnotist when he was 12, but it was not successful. He also explains that he learned to fight very early on, and that other kids soon learned not to laugh at him.
He continues to talk regardless, with pauses while he finds back-up words. He is known for his generosity, his enthusiasm in showing people and visitors his town and the West Coast, and his contributions to the town’s artistic life.
But he is probably best known as a mineral collector, and a walk around his large backyard is almost mind-blowing for the variety, quantity and quality of specimens he has accumulated from all the mine sites and localities he has worked at and visited over his life. He describes himself as perhaps the best-ever rock thief, and explains that he “ratted every mine I ever worked in”. When I asked how he managed to retrieve some of the really big specimens from underground at places like Mt Lyell, he explained, “My crib bag is big enough to carry 50kg!” Metal objects such as old drill rods and pieces of railway equipment are also part of Rory’s inventory.
Born in Melbourne in the late 1950s, one of five kids to Catholic parents, his volatile character led to him being expelled from high school and out into the work force before completing his education. A job underground at King Island’s Dolphin scheelite mine as a driller’s offsider was the beginning of a long career in mining, and his natural ability saw him running a six-man production mining team at this mine by age 20.
It was here that he met and married Jane, daughter of the mine manager, who became his long-term partner. (Jane is well known on the West Coast for her hard work, community contributions and abilities, and, as Rory says, deserves a story to herself). Jobs at various mines around Australia followed, including at several coal mines and the Peko Wallsend gold mine at Warrego, near Tennant Creek. Rory became a union spokesman here, and was involved in the first underground sit-in strike in 1984. After a return to the King Island mine, his urge to write and his writing skills led to him re-starting the local newspaper, and later taking up a copy-writing scholarship in Melbourne, at which he excelled. Writing and mining have been part of his life ever since.
Rory also played football on King Island, and later at Queenstown for the Lyell-Gormanston team. He describes himself as a fast big man – who loved to fight! His playing career was ended by a smashed ankle on Queenstown’s famous gravel oval, a week before the 1989 grand final.
Wanting to live in Tasmania, he almost landed a job with an ad agency in Hobart, but found himself shaft-sinking at Beaconsfield Mine instead, with some copy-writing work for The Examiner on the side. Stints at the Starra copper mine in Queensland, and an underground project at Wyong, NSW, preceded a return to Tasmania for tunnel work on the HEC King River scheme as a senior miner in the late 1980s. There were stints at Henty Mine and on the HEC Anthony scheme, before several years’ work as an underground miner at Mt Lyell. There’s probably more to this story, but he says he was sacked from Mt Lyell “for allegedly threatening the mine superintendent”. Finally, after short spells elsewhere, he and Jane bought a house and settled in Queenstown in the early 1990s, where they’ve become part of the community. Their three children are all Queenstown kids.
Rory continued writing through the 1990s, producing a satirical column, The West Coast Drum, for the local Western Herald newspaper. It was gritty, hard-hitting and usually controversial stuff, generally supportive of mining and not so supportive of politicians. A typical piece of prose comes from an article about a rock drilling competition: “To the uninitiated, operating an air-leg rock drill can be as challenging as wrestling with a 200lb echidna. They weigh like anvils, sound like a Gatling gun and look about as dangerous as an octopus on heat.”
My first contact with Rory Wray-McCann came when he took up an exploration license to do his own mineral exploration on the plains west of Queenstown. As a geologist at Mineral Resources Tasmania (MRT), I was required to assess Rory’s report on the results of the year’s exploration. The report was like no other I’d seen – lyrical prose, with interesting and humorous explorations of philosophical side issues and strange geological theories, with just a little on the actual exploration. It brightened my day.
I was later to meet Rory at several field excursions and seminars run by MRT, where he was never backward in asking questions of the geologists, as he worked hard at broadening his knowledge. He has collected geological maps and reports on the West Coast almost obsessively, filling his large informal office in a shed behind the house. He spends much time poring over them and trying to find the “grand design” behind them.
Talking geology with Rory can be fraught, as his active mind takes him out on grand theories and extraordinary explanations which can dazzle or bewilder an educated professional. It seems petty at times to interrupt by pointing out that what is known makes such a theory or explanation impossible. As with several good intelligent people I know, it seems almost tragic that such an active mind and imagination has not received the discipline of a full education that would provide the necessary limits to such thinking.
Art has also come into Rory’s life at Queenstown, and given him a wonderful outlet for his creative imagination – and a use for his voluminous mineral collections. His wall-sized murals, made by embedding a variety of minerals in a cement-like base, have been viewed by hundreds, including bus-loads at one of Queenstown’s Unconformity Festivals. They are truly astonishing – for the quantity and quality of the mineral specimens, the imagination required to plan the design (the first one I saw was called The Big Bang), and the sheer volume of work required to put it all together.
He continues to produce these works. Unique work by a unique man.
Anthony Crosswell is a different kind of Queenstowner. Born and raised in the town, he left school to join his father in the family grocery shop (Crosswells Store) in 1957. His wife, Yvonne, also a local, worked with him there when he took charge of the shop, and has been a co-worker on most of their many projects ever since. Known to most as Crossie (or Crozzy), he is a wiry and fit, leprechaunish man of 80 years, with a wide grin and easy laugh. He is passionate about Queenstown, its history and its people, and is particularly passionate about the environment around Queenstown. For many years he has single-handedly cut, removed and sprayed weeds along the roads around the town, especially the Mt Jukes Road to the south – something of a losing battle, it must be said. He has hounded the local national park rangers and council to do more about weeds and other aspects of the environment.
Another of the many signs of his civic thoughtfulness is his care and management of the impressive rhododendron gardens around the old Queenstown hospital just south of the town centre. Initially employed as stores supervisor and gardener (and part-time morgue attendant) at the hospital, after retirement, Crossie funded the purchase of many of the new rhododendron plants by selling bags of fern mulch to locals. The desirable mulch was made from the pruned leaves of the many manferns in the gardens, put through a home-made mulcher made from a 44-gallon drum and a washing machine motor: $2 a bag, with thousands of bags sold.
He continues to care and maintain these gardens, with the approval of the new owner (a new hospital has been built in the town centre), and takes pride in the beautiful display of spring flowers.
Crossie’s relationship to a long-term hermit at Queenstown, Jack Stevens, is also a measure of the man. Jack lived in a humpy in the bush several kilometres from Queenstown from the 1960s to the 1990s, scavenging food from the local tip. Crossie befriended the man and, in his quiet way, helped him with supplies when he came into town and sometimes “at home” on a semi-regular basis. One of Crossie’s helping-hand projects was to provide a tarpaulin to cover Jack’s crumbling wooden humpy, to keep out the rain and perhaps stop the place from collapsing and injuring Jack.
But in fairly typical fashion, Jack wasn’t happy with the new roof – he said the birds didn’t like it – and when Crossie next visited the tarp had disappeared. The extraordinary stories around Jack Stevens, written by Geoff Harwood, another Queenstowner who also became friends with Jack, have now been published by Forty South Publishing, The Last Hermit of Tasmania’s West Coast – Tales of Jackey Stevens.
Crossie is passionate and knowledgeable about the West Coast bush, which he and Yvonne have been exploring for most of their lives. With his boat, moored not far from his shack at Strahan, he has explored places like the Gordon River, hunting and finding relics of the convict, pining and mining past, as well as natural features. His search for mining relics has taken him to most of the wilder parts of the West. He has recently been documenting some of those finds, including such things as convict lime kilns, for posterity.
Gold prospecting, or fossicking, is a particular passion. Having a grandfather who was the official gold-buyer for the West Coast may have sparked his initial interest, but this particular passion seems latent in many people, from my experience. Crossie takes it seriously enough to have used a helicopter, piloted by a friend, to take him into the Garfield River, well south of Queenstown, to work the gravels with a small suction dredge. My friend Ken Morrison and I have joined Crossie in panning for the precious metal in places like Harris Reward, near the King River. That thrill of finding tiny gold specks in the bottom of the pan seems never to wane.
Our mutual interest in developing walking tracks around Queenstown, to encourage tourists to spend more time in the area, brought us together some years ago. It soon became obvious that Crossie was “the man” when it came to knowing about walking tracks, and actually doing work on them. An initial interest, with Ken Morrison and my wife Sib, was in re-opening the old pack track into the Garfield River, which ran for about 12km south from Queenstown across the King River. The original wooden bridge over the King had collapsed in the 1960s, but the well-formed track was still evident through the Harris Reward workings, just south of the river near the new HEC power station. Crossie had kept this track open, and the area has become a popular site for guided tours by another local. Over time, we have been able to map the extraordinary complex of old alluvial and bedrock workings at Harris’s, and expect that this lovely rainforest site, with its many Huon Pines growing through the old workings, will eventually become a genuine tourist attraction.
We also became interested in the nearby Confluence Track, which gives access to the dramatic junction of the orange-coloured Queen River, draining the Mt Lyell workings, and the pristine King River nearby. This informal track, which Crossie resurrected after it was abandoned by the Hydro, is now a popular destination for locals and visitors alike, and has great potential.
The Crosswells seem to me to be salt of the earth people, unassuming and unpretentious, but passionate, knowledgeable, active, able and committed. They are true West Coasters.
Keith Corbett is a Tasmanian-born geologist who has spent most of his life working in the state’s mountains. This has included a PhD study of the Denison Range in the South-West, and a masters study of the Mt Lyell Mine area. His interests since retiring include showing people interesting geological places, and working with others to develop walking tracks around Queenstown.
