Geoff Helisma

I’m 85-and-a-half-years-old,” says Nancy Bain, followed by an ironic chuckle, as we take our seats above the entry steps on the tour bus. The young-at-heart Bain has been a tireless worker for the Lower Clarence community since she settled at Taloumbi with her late husband, Hugh, in 1971. Today, she is a tour guide for 50 or so retired Probus Club members from Bundaberg, who are in the middle of a five-day tour of the Northern Rivers. The group sets out on annual tours – last year it was Toowoomba, the year before, The Granite Belt.
A Scottish immigrant, who came to Australia in 1965, Bain, who is a founding (and still active) member of the Maclean the Scottish Town in Australia Committee, is leading her penultimate bus tour of Maclean and Brooms Head. She also has another part-time job as a tourist officer at Ferry Park.
It was 1992 when Bain’s community work was first officially recognised – she was named then Maclean shire council’s Australia Day Citizen of the Year. “I believe in my community and that it has a great future for young and old, and while I have the health to carry on, I am happy to do so,” she said at the time. “I only need more hours in the day. Without the support of my family, of course, I couldn’t do as much.”
In 2000, she added the letters OAM (Order of Australia Medal) to her name. The Clarence Valley Review reported that Bain was “quite chuffed” and “very humbled by it”. “I will have to get bigger business cards to accommodate the initials after my name,” she quipped. In 2002, The Celtic Council of Australia bestowed its Duine Uasal (D Ua) award upon her, which recognises people “who have given honourable service to a single Celtic community”.
These days, Bain hosts a two-hour show at Yamba community radio station TLC FM 100.3, where she is a founding and current board member; and she is a member of the Clarence Valley Cultural Committee, Maclean District Hospital’s accreditation committee and management board and the Red Cross disaster team.
Before the bus pulls out of the Ferry Park car park, Bain announces my presence by way of a question. “He’s the journalist from the Clarence Valley Review, which is a free paper, which is good when you’re in a Scottish town, isn’t it?” The cadence of her Scottish accent lends an engaging quality to her cheeky humour. Some of the 50 or so sightseers agree; a small chorus of “yeah” accompanies the chuckles that greet her declaration.
“Just opposite us is Woodford Island,” Bain tells the tourers. “The first settlers came here when they escaped the persecution of the English and the [Highland] Clearances; they escaped from the Isle of Sky and they came down [to Australia]. They were supposed to be going to Parramatta, but they must have come into the river here, thinking this will do us fine. They landed on the corner of the island there, and they couldn’t speak a word of English.
“They used to send their children by boat to a little school in Maclean. They came home and taught them to speak English. They built some of our great buildings in Maclean that are still standing.
“This piece from the river … is the Henry Searle Reach – he lived at Iluka [Esk Island], born and brought up. In the late 1800s [1888], he went to the UK representing Australia … he won gold.”
Searle was twice professional champion sculler of the world.
“He died of some terrible disease [typhoid in 1889] on the way home – there were thousands of people at his memorial in Melbourne, the same in Sydney. He was well recognised in the rowing world.”
The bus pulls out of the car park and Bain points to the Maclean Rowing Club’s shed and says she “got the American rowing team to train here for the Olympics” and speaks about the Lower Clarence’s rowing culture.
The bus continues towards the Maclean township. “If you look up at those trees, you’ll see those horrible bats … they stink.” A muttered consensus rises behind us. Onward past the showground: “They’ve got their HSCs in there today. Sometimes we have up to 32 pipe bands at the Highland Gathering. Can you imagine what it’s like? It’s just magic.
“All our banners and tartan poles are painted by a woman from Brooms Head, Linda El Mir. You’ll see the tartan power poles; we’ve got 200 of them. I went to Nimbin 20 years ago and saw frogs and lizards [on power poles] and I thought, ‘we’ve got to get tartan’. It took us [Scottish Town Committee] three years to get permission. The white ones, my son is preparing them for repainting.
“That’s Witzig Gallery. They send their canvases to Papua New Guinea, people do the painting, send them back, and [the gallery] sells them. In Maclean we’ve got a church for every religion you can think of. This little fellow [Espresso Botero] grinds his own coffee.”

As the bus stops to turn right up Wharf Street, Bain points out the council chambers. “If you look to the left, you’ll see some buildings that look like septic tanks … that’s what they’re full of. Oh … some of them are alright.” The bus cracks up at this quip. “I like to stir the pot,” she says.People wave at the bus as it ascends Wharf Street’s long, steep incline. Bain passes a tea towel around, one that she has had manufactured. “It’s got pictures of Maclean on it. In one corner, it’s got the Pinnacle Rocks. The rocks are very, very important to the Aboriginal Yaegl people,” she says, as the bus pulls up adjacent to the rocks.
Onward to the lookout, Bain tells a joke about a NSW governor who once visited. “He said to his wife, ‘Darling, they want me to do something at the lookout, I wonder what they want me to do?’ And she said, ‘Probably jump off.’” (Laughs all ‘round) The tourers take in the view from the air conditioned comfort of the bus. Bain praises the various service clubs and organisations that have made improvements at the lookout.
The bus’s brakes and gears get a workout as it travels down Wharf Street. “We used to have the billy cart races down here when I did the Cane Festival (‘I ran the cane festival for 27 years.’). They used to land in the middle of town.
“’Jesus!’ someone gasps.
“You’d get a few of the guys drunk; they’d go so fast and hit things. Then we had a policeman, who was about to retire; and he said we had to stop it, or we’d have to put 10 tyres on each of the [power] poles all the way into town.”
Half way down the hill, the bus turns left and pulls up overlooking the Scottish cairn at Herb Stanford Memorial Park. “We have Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan up here. People sit there and put their pieces of tartan on there and the minister blesses it. It’s something that goes back to years ago. It was resurrected after 35 years, when Scots weren’t allowed to wear the tartan, play the bagpipes or speak the Gaelic language. It was death or deportation if you did any of those things. So when the repeal came through, that’s what we commemorate when we have Tartan Day.”
Travelling through the Maclean CBD, Bain says she “got funding from the Attorney General’s office for plaques” on some of the town’s historical buildings. “That used to be a picture theatre. You couldn’t get a coffee after 4pm, so I opened a coffee shop, the Tartan Lounge, open from 7am to 10pm, and did it for 10 years.
“Nancy is a nut (laughs from behind).
“We’ve got three hotels – locally known as the top, middle and bottom. On the left is the oldest grocery store [trading since 1883, now Spar Maclean] in Australia and that’s Woolitji House. That’s the little Scottish shop … and that wall was painted by Lynda El Mir for the Centenary of Federation. The plaques honour volunteer organisations that have been running for 100 years.”
Bain continues her banter during the drive to Brooms Head, as the rain-starved countryside passes by – she says there have been reports of whale sightings at the coast.
“Isn’t this gorgeous,” Bain says of the southward view to Sandon, as the bus pulls up at the lookout. “A lot of local artists paint that scene. The colours are beautiful. There are no whales today, though. When I came to live up here in 1971, there were seven people living permanently at Brooms Head. At the last census I did six years ago, there were 540 permanents.”
Time is running out – the travellers are soon due at Grafton for lunch – so the bus motors back towards Ferry Park. As it leaves Brooms Head, the group’s Bundaberg tour organiser, Ruth Jung, rouses a small applause “to thank Nancy. She’s also given me a DVD of tartan poles and a musical trip around Maclean (produced by her son) to raffle tonight.”
After the tour, I ask Bain if she has any memorable stories connected with her volunteer work in the community. “I organised débutante balls for 25 years,” she says. “We used to do 10 weeks training, when I taught them to dance and about presentation and etiquette – so that when they were sitting eating dinner they weren’t shovelling stuff into their mouths with a fork – all those sorts of things. Each year I used to try and pick a few who were decent and train them as the compares for the following year.
“A couple of times I had kids who had had problems. I used to take them to meetings, you know, at the chamber of commerce and the police consultative meetings that we used to have – it opened up their eyes to things that they could do. It changed their attitudes.
“One young fellow, whose mother said, ‘Nancy you might have a problem with him; his father and I have just separated,’ he was cheeky, but he wasn’t nasty; he was a joking kid. He enjoyed the ball, and at the end of the night he asked if he could dance with me. ‘Whatever I do in future,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing left to do here, we’ve had so much fun.’ So I asked him to be the compare … and he was very good at it – then I got him to compare the talent quest and the parade for the Cane Festival. He’s since gone to work in the UK in the railways. I’m proud of them when I see that sort of thing.”
She tells another story about “an Aboriginal boy, who came into Ferry Park dressed in a nice suit. He sort of looked as if he was dancing when he walked. He said, ‘You haven’t fallen of the perch yet? You don’t remember me, do you?’ I said, ‘Yes I do, your partner was Cassie.’ He said, ‘Do you remember me when I was little.’ I said, ‘I do.’”
The boy’s story began at a women’s gathering at Ngaru Village in Yamba, Bain recalls. “We talked, and I said to him, ‘I don’t have a religion, but I was brought up to never judge a person by the colour of their skin, the clothes they wear, or religion … but by their actions.’”
Bain wrote the affirmation on a piece of paper and gave it to him. “This kid comes into Ferry Park about five years ago and he said, ‘Do you remember that little piece of paper?’ I asked, ‘You’ve still got it?’ He said, ‘I print them by the hundreds … everybody should live by that piece of paper .Nancy,’ he said, ‘I’m a barrister now.’”
Bain makes it clear, however, that she “couldn’t have done those things without the help of others”.

This article was originally published in Scene magazine, November 2013.