Fishing up history

WE were fishing at Port Hughes Jetty on the Yorke Peninsular of South Australia, about 165km from the state capital of Adelaide.

I took a stroll along the jetty and met the Nugget family of three generations – grandpa, papa and son. They were setting up to catch crabs.

“I have been away from Moonta working in Western Australia for 34 years and now I am back to retire. My mum is 105 years old,and still healthy”grandpa Nugget proudly declared.

So, it is a family of four generations in Moonta, one of the three towns known as the Copper Coast or Little Cornwall near Port Hughes.

Grandpa Nugget flung the pot for trapping crabs into the sea and threw me these words: Fish up some fish, fish up some history of Moonta, if you haven’t been to Moonta, you haven’t travelled!

There goes the old wheeze, known all over Australia.

In his book Australia’s little Cornwall, Oswald Pryor wrote governors had used the quotation in after-dinner speeches, knowing it would always raise a laugh; politicians had relied on it to enliven an address to electors; ministers had worked it into sermons and it was a stock gag with stage comedians as well.

Driving tourist trial

My friend Walter Tarca who was kind enough to miss part of the fishing fun, brought me around Moonta for a driving tourist trial, passing a few streets full of the original cottages; an old railway station opened in 1909; Moonta Uniting Church built in 1873 which was once a Methodist Church and Moonta Wesley Methodist Church, built in 1865.

We ended up at the Moonta Mines Museum.

Here, there are 14 rooms to look through to learn about the Cornish miners’ lifestyles -- what they did, how they lived, their hardships, their families, their school life, their work in the mines, their life underground and even their last journey to their resting ground.

A walk through this school-turned-museum impressed upon me this truth -- the Cornish people lived life to the full because they knew a miner’s life could be short.

How was the miner’s work really like back in those days? These and many other questions were answered in this museum.

Really, museums need not be a boring place if the exhibits are stories themselves unfolding before your eyes; if the keeper is an interesting person and if the visitors can actively participate in their programme.

Moonta Mines Museum is one such excellent example.

The pickey boys

Have you heard of the pickey boys? Unravelling the secrets of these boys, aged from 10 years upwards, the Museum shows them (through exhibits) sorting through a ton of ore for a shilling (10 cents) with a stern-looking captain supervising them -- and ever ready to mete out a punishment if they bungled.

These poor young souls would work all day and then had to go to school at night. You had to go to school because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t get to go to work to earn that life-sustaining shilling! 

Have you every wondered why Cornish pastries are shaped the way they are --with a big handle?

Well, as I have discovered, the crust of Cornish pastries was made into a fairly large handle so that tin miners and farm workers could hold their pastries in their unwashed hands and not eat any of the dirt!

In a tin mine, dirt could contain tin, copper and arsenic dust -- all poisonous.

The miners worked hundreds of metres under the ground where there was no water to wash their hands. To avoid transferring toxic waste from their hands onto their food, they would hold a pastry by the rim, eat the rest of it

and then throw the rim away.

I did not visit the historical cemetery due to time constraint. But Walter told me that to many people, the cemetery is unique because of the large number of unmarked children graves there.

About 300 children, killed by diseases which raged through the town due to unsanitary conditions around the mines, were recorded in a plague.

Such is Moonta with every detail of its history engraved in the landmarks of the town and recorded in the Museum.

I miss Moonta but Waltar said Moonta misses its honoured citizens more in a message!

Gratifying book launching

Back home, I was, of course, delighted that the State Health Department had launched a book that chronicles the long and rich history of health services in Sarawak.

Heritage In Health also records some of the unique healthcare programmes such as the Flying Doctor Service; village health promoter programme; applied nutrition programme; environmental sanitation programme; malaria control programme and rural health clinic system to meet healthcare challenges faced by the state.

My friend, Chang Yi, who was excited about the book, asked: Is there any mention of Chempro?

Sadly, there was nothing on Chempro, the Community Health and Motivation Programme, developed during the years of American Missionary Lorraine E Gribbens in Christ Hospital Kapit.

Chempro was a key factor in

immunisation programmes, public health teaching and preventing communicable diseases in Kapit.

We missed out Chempro as well as Gribbens, the remarkable pharmacist, who had made a difference in the lives of many.

As Land Development Minister Dato Sri Dr James Masing put it on her passing on Dec 20, 2009: “Gribbens encouraged me and other Iban children to study hard, be devoted Christians and morally upright. She entrenched in us the feeling of integrity. I myself benefited from her motivation, words of wisdom, encouragement and kindness. I excelled in my studies after that.”

Heritage in Health may have missed out Chempro but it does not forget the many acts of the great nor, more importantly, the many acts of the small as well.

Both had helped immensely in shaping the state’s healthcare history based

on the memories of many conscientious medical personnel and available documents.

It takes wonderful people like Dr Yao Sik King, Dr Flora Ong, Dr Gracia Tiong, Matron Margareth Wong and their dedicated team to make possible the historical recording health services in Sarawak.

Lest we forget about the importance of recording history, let’s listen to what state health director Datu Dr Zulkifli Jantan said:

“Unfortunately, they have never been systematically recorded. With the passing of time, retirement of staff and relocation of offices, there was a real danger that this information would be lost to future generations if we did not undertake the tedious task of recording them for posterity.”

Indeed, according to one of the great literary minds, Mark Twain, history, although sometimes made up of the few acts of the great, is more often shaped by the many acts of the small.