You’ve got to love a town that builds a tourism industry around a children’s nanny. The town of Maryborough runs on Mary Poppins and her creator, Pamela Travers, who was born here in 1899.
Travers started life as Helen Lyndon Goff – cursory research indicates Pamela Lyndon Travers was a stage name. The town markets itself as a Town full of Stories and trades heavily on Travers being born here, even if she moved away as a young woman and never returned. Her father was a bank manager and the bank building in which Travers was born, upstairs I imagine, not behind the counter, is now a Story Bank, doubling as a Travers/Poppins museum. We successfully fight the overwhelming urge to enter. Instead we head for the Mary Poppins statue.
We also cross the street multiple times to get a decent photo of the Mary Poppins traffic lights. Sadly, the Mary Poppins Festival was two weeks ago so we missed the opportunity to participate in the Nanny Races and the Chimney Sweep Challenge, which is possibly just as well as I’m fairly sure Scott doesn’t know all the words to Chim Chiminee, and his Dick Van Dyke impression is far from award winning.
Of course there are murals featuring our hero who, given the amount of attention she receives, you’d think had split the atom. But to be fair to Maryborough they celebrate heroes and the history of the town in multiple tourist friendly ways. I juggle the Maryborough Mural Trail Map with its 36 stunning wall murals and installations; the Maryborough Story Trail Map – 41 sculptures, artefacts, installations, and Story points; the Maryborough Military Trail Map; and the Maryborough Walk Tour Discovery Trail – well, you get the picture. Safe to say there’s overlap but it all comes together to tell the rich history of a town settled by immigrants in the mid 1800s and which opened as a Port and Bond Store in 1847.
I love it: it’s colourful, beautifully maintained, reveres its history by keeping it front and centre, and it’s on a river so there’s water and boats so Scott’s happy.
Mercifully the river wasn’t named after Mary Poppins. Originally known as the Wide Bay River, in 1847 Governor Fitzroy, in that inimitable style of British bureaucrats, renamed it in honour of his wife Mary. Never mind it had been called the Moocooboola by the local Kabi people for centuries.
Our favourite museum – the only one we go to – is Brennan and Geraghty’s Store which, after 101 years in business closed in 1972 leaving the stock, accounts, ledgers, equipment and records in situ. Mr Geraghty lived next door and if someone knocked on the door he’d sell them what they wanted if he had it, but basically the old stock stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Looking at the shelves, if it hadn’t sold by 1972 it wasn’t going to sell. I kept expecting Arkwright to pop up behind the counter.
At least one other famous person was born in Maryborough and that was the poor sod who was the first ANZAC ashore at Gallipoli, Duncan Chapman. He gets a bronze life size statue at the catchily named Walk With the ANZACS Gallipoli to Armistice Memorial. The memorial itself is striking, with towering rusting steel columns representing the cliffs of Gallipoli. As you walk along the audio starts and you hear the thump of marching boots accompanying the personal stories of soldiers.
When we arrive to check in at the park, the owner is away. When he comes back he tells me he’s been burying his mother’s Clydesdale. You don’t hear that every day. Apparently the horse died of cancer of the penis which his mother has been treating for a year. I don’t ask what the treatment entailed.