I am a real Townsvillean. In 1877, my grandparents Annie and Thomas Hollis Hopkins arrived in Sydney from England. In 1881 they came to Townsville with three small children and started the Hollis Hopkins soft goods warehouse in Sturt Street to service the goldfields in Charters Towers. My father Spenser, 3 years old, was the eldest.
In 1886 our family home, a big Queenslander with verandahs all round and kitchen out the back, was built at 73 The Strand - next to what is now the Aquarius Hotel. My twin sister Helen and I (the youngest of seven) were born there. We had a lovely childhood playing on the beach with our dolls, chooks, cats and dogs. Our house had a grass tennis court on one side and a cow yard on the other.
In Mitchell Street there was a freshwater lagoon near the Strand Park, where we used to paddle our canoes in the lagoon. These were made by our brothers from corrugated iron. A chinese man had a market garden growing there which he irrigated with the water from the lagoon. He sold his produce locally. In front of this area was a big sand dune and a crooked tree which we loved climbing.
During the war there were guns (artillery) buried in the sand dunes and rolled barbed-wire along The Strand. There was a high sandbank along most of The Strand. Kennedy Street from Mitchell Street was an open stream going down to the beach with banks either side we loved to slide down. Later a concrete wall was erected to stop the erosion. Opposite our house we could see a lone coconut tree growing out of the wall, it looked very amusing!
We spent a lot of time down on the beach. There were three swimming enclosures along the Strand built to keep out the sharks, these were made firstly from timber sticks and later from Railway lines. Where the Tobruk pool is now there was a concrete swimming pool known as ‘the basin’. The Seaview baths was an enclosure opposite where the Seaview Hotel is now located. There was a dance floor over part of it and we swam underneath this to keep out of the sun as we burned easily. The third enclosure was at Kissing Point opposite the CWA. In the evenings my twin sister and I would walk along the Strand to annoy the lovers lying on the beach, at our young age we were naïve and didn’t know what they were doing!
We loved living on The Strand. We enjoyed many tennis afternoons with our friends with a barbeque afterwards. For some of our school friends from the South it was the first time they had seen the sea.
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