Lively Stan is coast's living history

Glenis Green

STAN Tutt has spent his own life breathing life into Sunshine Coast history.

He's written newspaper columns for almost half a century, published books on the region's heritage and – last year – published his autobiography In Company of Ghosts which parallels almost a century of Sunshine Coast development.

At 87, only his wiry frame has slowed down a little – the brain is still as quick and retentive as ever as he takes school and tour groups around his beloved Landsborough Historical Museum in his Sunshine Coast home town.

It was as a toddler, aged 2, that Tutt arrived in the Eumundi-Cooroy district in 1916.

He was born in 1914 in a cottage hospital in the South Burnett township of Murgon.

His family first lived in the Belli area then moved to Sunrise on the north-eastern slopes of Mount Cooroy.

"As a small boy I saw Dick Caplick, famed springboard man, and his companions fell acres of rainforest on the slopes of Mount Cooroy soon after he returned from active service in World War I," Tutt recalls in volume one of Sunshine Coast Heritage.

"I saw the banana boom of the North Coast. Breathed the scented wallum land when wildflowers were abloom in the spring. Knew the families of the pioneers – for I can remember the house warming in Henry Duke's new home and the wonder of the new Gloria gas lamps in Alex and Polly Luke's home at the foot of Mount Cooroy."

Stan Tutt ... survived two periods of active service in New Guinea during World War II.

Tutt not only observed, but also lived the life of a typical Sunshine Coaster in those times – working on a dairy farm, felling scrub in the Mary Valley, enduring the Great Depression and surviving two periods of active service in New Guinea during World War II.

Although he did not receive much in the way of a formal education during his period in New Guinea, he studied journalism through the Army Education Service.

As luck would have it, his tutor turned out to be the acclaimed Australian author Alan Marshall.

Tutt credits the arrival of the motor vehicle after the war with the start of tourism on the Sunshine Coast – before that the development focus had been on the hinterland with its timber, dairying and agricultural opportunities.

As a former soldier, Tutt said he watched with interest recently as the Federal Government offered troops headed for Afghanistan an extra $200 a day.

"I used to get a shilling a day and I faced just as much danger," he noted.

Tutt said improved transport – both rail and roads – had opened up the Sunshine Coast but he still saw a better means of water supply and sewage disposal as its biggest hurdle yet to be overcome.

He credits Alex McGinn with sparking his great love of history at the age of 14.

"He was digging and I was picking up potatoes and putting them in kerosene tins and old Mr McGinn, he told me the history of the Mary Valley," he said.

Tutt would also ride far on his pushbike to hear Will Simm's stories about local Aboriginals.

Stan Tutt outside the Landsborough Historical Museum . . . he credits the boom in motor vehicles after World War II with starting tourism on the Sunshine Coast

"My boyhood was so carefree, so different (from now). I didn't go to school until I was nine years old – until then I was one of three kids being taught by an ex-teacher under a mango tree at Mount Cooroy," he said.

"I started my formal education at the age of nine in grade 3 at the Cooroy school. I left to go to work at 14 for 10 bob a week milking cows and chipping bark.

"It was rough and ready but there was immense freedom (in childhood)."

Tutt can't help making comparisons with those youthful days and the furore over the recent firearms debate.

"At the age of 13, even 11, I used to go shooting with a semi-automatic rifle," he said.

"We'd go along the Mary River where the mullet would come to the surface in September. With a .22 we could shoot them and then very quickly drop the rifle and dive in to get them."

Tutt also remembered catching huge eels in Six Mile Creek at Mount Cooroy. His mother would put them through a hand mincer to make eel patties for dinner.

But now he's happy to just look back with fondness on those days when, in his own words: ". . . campfire smoke mingled with the smells of cooking. Times when at dawn and dusk flames danced under blackened billies swinging in open galleys."