NATURE’S GENTLEMAN

(Jack Borey, Dunwich)

One of a large family of Boreys from Portuguese and Aboriginal parentage, Jack was to combine the navigational skills of his father, Johannes Borey, with his mother’s inherent Aboriginal knowledge of Moreton Bay. In the words of Ray Barrett, one of his closest friends, Jack practiced conservation in times when the word had not been popularised.  Ray explains:

“Jack had a fisherman’s eye and he could see fish in what was just empty water to my untrained eye.  I remember I was with Charlie Campbell at the One Mile on one occasion, when Jack predicted it was going to be an early winter.  When I asked him why, he pointed out all the hardigut mullet coming in.  I still couldn’t see any, but Jack estimated there were enough fish there to fill 150 cases.  When I urged them to go and get them immediately, Jack merely said that they’d still be there tomorrow.”

Jack and Ray often went fishing off Peel Island.  With the efficiency of a true pro, Jack would line up his marker points, drop the pick and even bait Ray’s hook, much to Ray’s disgust.  However, when he immediately pulled up a huge sweetlip, Ray’s enthusiasm was ignited.  When they had caught four such sweetlip, Jack thought it time to up anchor and go.

“But we’ve just got onto them,” protested Ray.

“Can you eat more than four?”

“No.  I’m flat out eating one.”

“Well, leave ’em down there, they keep fresher in moisture.”

So they took the four sweetlip which Jack reckoned would feed his family and Ray, went back to the One Mile, filleted the fish and collected four or five dozen oysters.  The fish-heads and backbones he would put into the cooking pot with the oysters to make a delicious soup.  Jack would never waste anything.

Often, Jack would take his whitie mate, or townie, as Ray describes himself then, on his walkabouts through the bush on Stradbroke.  There were no roads then, and walking on the hot sand at the back of Myora forced Ray to up the pace.

“Slooow down, Ray, sloow down,” Jack urged.

“Why?”

“You’ve got to come back.”

Jack was a real bushie.

On another walkabout Jack and Ray went into the scrub.  They had to cross the stream coming down from the Brown Lake and Jack said, much to Ray’s puzzlement: “We’ll cross on the wallaby pads.” Apparently, the wallabies laminated the long spindly grass growing beside the creek, and by laying them one on top of the other, they were able to hop across on top of the water.  Jack and Ray were able to emulate this practice by taking a run onto the pads and cross the short creek.

When townie Ray would get tired of walking, Jack would clear away the leaves to make a fire, cook up some snags, boil the billy, and tell Ray to have a sleep while he’d go off into the bush.  When Jack returned, he’d pour the remainder of the now cold tea over the fire and replace the leaves which he had carefully put to one side in exactly the same way that he had found them.

“In the old days,” Ray Barrett recalls. “Jack Borey and I would swim at Myora springs which then had a waterfall from Brown Lake.  Jack was able to point out the different age stratas in the Aboriginal middens there, but now, since someone built a cement causeway over the creek, it has silted up and the middens are ruined.  So much for so called progress.”

At about 8.30 pm on April 1st 1961, the launch “Jennifer” with members of the Maile family aboard was anchored about 400 yards (metres) from the Ropeway Jetty at Dunwich.  With little warning, a storm blew up with gale force winds of up to 50 knots.  Amid heavy rain and lightning, the launch was carried towards the jetty and was damaged against a pipeline.  After an unsuccessful attempt was made to get Dorothy Maile on to the jetty, Alfred (Junior) crawled along the pipeline to the shore to get assistance. At 11 pm, without regard for his own safety, Jack Borey took a small row-boat and rowed out to the “Jennifer”. Intending to try to tow the launch from its position under the pipeline, Jack tried to throw it a line but the heavy seas made this impossible.  He then rowed to a diesel yacht “Patricia T” which was anchored nearby.  He boarded the boat and, after explaining the situation to its occupants, was able to enlist their help. Eventually the “Patricia T” was able to attach a line to the “Jennifer” after it broke clear from the pipeline, and the drifting boat was towed into the jetty and tied up.

Recognising the risk to which Jack Borey subjected his life in the high wind and heavy seas, and the danger of his small dinghy being swamped with little chance of personal survival once being thrown into the heavy seas, a submission was made to the Royal Humane Society of Australasia that Jack’s courageous and resourceful action be recognised.  In 1962, Jack Borey was awarded the Society’s Certificate of Merit.                

Jack was always invited onto peoples’ boats because he knew where the fish were.  He never refused, and he could never do enough to help them.  On shore, Jack was a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes’ Bayview Lodge 99 (being its secretary from November 1952 until December 1953) then the Stradbroke Lodge 142 at Dunwich. As well as comradeship, he advanced to its highest order, the ROH.

Jack Borey died on the 28th September 1979 and is buried in the picturesque cemetery beside the water at Dunwich. “When Jack died,” recalls Ray Barrett, his lifelong friend.” he was 63, the age at which I am now, and it was a great loss to both the island and to humanity.” Just offshore from the cemetery, at the entrance to the One Mile, the Jack Borey Beacon still remains a constant memorial to the unselfish contribution to bay life of John Henry Benjamin Borey, one of Nature’s gentlemen.

View of Peel Island from the Dunwich cemetery 1986 (photo Peter Ludlow)

Extract from ‘Moreton Bay People – The Complete Collection’.

OYSTERS IN THE BILGE – Part 1

(Ray Barrett, Dunwich)

It is the morning of January 16, 1991, and the United Nations’ ultimatum for Iraq to leave Kuwait has just expired.  Yet the threat of imminent war seems a long way from the peace of Dunwich and the glassy waters of Moreton Bay.  A long way, too, from the film and TV industries’ production centres for such a famous actor as Ray Barrett, but a refuge none the less from the pressure of his work. From the cool comfort of his waterside home at Dunwich, Ray reminisces about his early sailing days, “It was always my desire, like so many young fellows who came from sailing families, to sail on the bay; and building my own boat was the only way I could afford to do just this.”

In his early teens, Ray took his father to see a twelve foot skiff which was for sale for £14. His father could see that it was rotten, and so refused to buy the boat for his son.  However, he did purchase timber so that Ray could build his own boat, and over the next few years, working in his parents’ Kedron backyard, he completed five craft of ever increasing dimensions.

During World War II at the age of 16 he began working as a radio announcer at station 4BH.  On a top bracket weekly wage of £8, Ray conducted the breakfast programme, which required him to catch the 5.30 am tram so that he could open up the station at 6.  Later when 4KQ commenced transmission, Ray transferred there and received a £2 a week increase in his wages.  As well as his radio work, Ray was acting with the ABC and little theatre groups. It was at this time, too, that Ray completed building the last and largest of his boats – a 24 foot sailer which he named “Countess”.  Dunwich became one of his favourite destinations.

Always ready with a humorous story, even against himself, Ray likes to relate his navigational skills: “The entrance to the One Mile Basin at Dunwich is narrow and flanked by two long sandbanks.  I’d leave the retractable keel three quarters down and I’d keep the craft on a tack until I felt the keel hit one of the sandbanks.  Then I’d tack the other way until it hit the other bank, and so on.”

Early days at the One Mile Harbour (photo courtesy Ron Peterson)

Another of Ray’s navigation stories involves Norman Wright Senior: “Old Norm would supplement his income by taking fishing parties outside, and would go in all weathers and despite the pleas of any seasick passengers.  Once, while being challenged about his navigational skills by a “greenie” he was just professing his knowledge of the sandbanks at the mouth of the Brisbane River, when the rolling craft bounced onto a bank. Unperturbed, he took another swig of rum and ordered the pick to be thrown over!”

At Dunwich, Ray became very friendly with Bonty Dickson, Dunwich’s only shopkeeper at the time.  He often came out to the boat for a drink and sing song.  At the sound of his wife’s voice hollering across the water from his shop, Bonty would feign deafness and disappear below decks with the bottle of rum.

Another of Ray’s close friends at Dunwich was Jack Borey, one of a large family of Portuguese and Aboriginal parentage.  At that time the Aborigines used to live in a community at the One Mile in houses of driftwood and corrugated iron.  Jack used to run some oyster banks then and often, when he went walkabout looking for posts to use as stakes for his oysters, Ray would accompany him, a welcome escape from the hair-raising crew he had brought from Brisbane. Jack could easily recognise Ray’s boat as it came over beside Peel Island, and by the time it had dropped anchor beside Bonty Dickson’s oyster banks, Jack would come out in his little tarred wooden flattie which he used on his oyster banks and ask in his pronounced stutter “Like w-where do you want em, Ray?” and he’d pour a kerosene tin full of oysters into Ray’s dinghy and then come aboard. There were always dozens of oysters in Ray’s dinghy while he was over at Dunwich during the war. “My daily routine was to dive over the side with an oyster knife and knock off a few dozen oysters. We had them with a beer for breakfast.”

Waiting for water taxi at One Mile in 2020

Extract from ‘Moreton Bay People – The Complete Collection’.