Local historian Robyn Braithwaite works as a volunteer for the Richmond River Historical Society and the Lismore Museum. She is also the author of a local bestselling book titled A Stroll Around the Block. She met with Sara Browne to share some of her own history.

I grew up in southeast Queensland, mostly Brisbane. I was born in Nanango which is a little town just south of Kingaroy. My family were from Brisbane.

My dad was in one of the banks and bank people are always being transferred around so we moved a lot. I went to six different primary schools and one high school, Brisbane State High School. I’ve lived in different parts of Australia over the years, and in Canada.

My husband was a zoologist and he was doing a post-doctoral scholarship in Calgary so we went there for two years. Our eldest daughter was born there.

I was working at the bookshop at the University of Queensland, having decided to throw in my degree. It was going to be honours in English and after the first year I thought, ‘I’ve got no idea what I really want to do…I’d love to work in a bookshop.’ So I got a job at the university bookshop and he was a student so I met him that way, back at the beginning of the 70s.

Between Brisbane and Canada, we lived in Melbourne for four years so we were gradually getting cooler in temperature. I enjoyed Canada. We had no money really. I wasn’t allowed to work and he was on a fairly low wage and doing some tutoring as well. We didn’t have a lot of money to spare but we were there with a lot of other graduate students and we went cross-country skiing which was much cheaper than the slopes. In fact, when we first got there, we lived on the edge of a golf course and of course, that gets covered in snow in winter. You could just go straight out the backdoor with your skis. I thought Canada was a lovely place. 

We came back to Melbourne for about six months and then we went up to Darwin. My husband Richard joined the CSIRO and was put in charge of what they called the Kakadu Fauna Survey.

Kakadu had just been made a national park and they wanted to do a really extensive survey of the fauna which went for about five years. We lived there for 17 years. We had another daughter early on there. 

I had got my library qualifications back in Melbourne. Degrees in librarianship were only just starting and I chose to go through the Library Association of Australia. I worked in the library at Monash University. When the kids were old enough, I went back into that and worked at the State Reference Library in Darwin which was great.

Library assistant role at University of Queensland library, 1973

I did end up studying politics and history at what was then the Northern Territory University, now Charles Darwin. I always enjoyed historical research but I didn’t join the historical society up there. 

I worked off and on in the Northern Australia collection of the library which was specialised NT history. Everywhere I’ve lived since leaving home, I’ve really enjoyed reading up on the history of the place so I know where I am. It’s that connection with place. I don’t think I could live anywhere without knowing what happened in the past and how it came to be.

If you discover things you don’t like, that’s just part of history, you just look at why things happened, what were the reasons behind this, how did it affect people? How have we changed? Have we learnt anything from some of these things?

While we were in Darwin, my husband became head of the wildlife research program for the CSIRO and he started fire experiments there to look at the effects of fire. As that went on, he got involved in things that were happening in the park and he was really interested in the eco-tourism side of things, in particular how the tour guides explained the natural systems of the park to visitors.

Through an increasing amount of experience in that area, he got offered a position with the newly formed eco-tourism section of the CSIRO. So we ended up coming back down south to Canberra and he ran that unit for two to three years when the new chief of the CSIRO looked at all the sections and said ‘we don’t need an eco-tourism section’.

That was difficult because he hadn’t done practical research for a few years but then he was asked to apply for a position at the School of Tourism here at SCU as a Professor of Sustainable Tourism. The School of Tourism doesn’t exist anymore. That was back in 2001.

Calgary, Canada, skiing on a snowy golf course, 1978 

I’ve been here 22 and a half years, that’s the longest I’ve lived in any one place. My husband died six years ago. I brought my mother down from Brisbane, she was getting old and needed assistance. I had thought that when she dies, I’d up and move somewhere else but actually, I don’t know that I want to move anywhere else. I thought I might go back to Canberra, I do like Canberra. But I’ve built up a lot of friendships and I’m involved in a lot of groups. I love the area so I think I might be stuck here.

When I arrived here, I thought I needed to get to know people so I joined the historical society because I’m interested in getting to know people and place. I ended up, in a year or so, on the committee. Then I got involved in walks that we would do along the river or around the town. I organised walks around the town, historical guided tours. I was also just doing research enquiries for people, you find out so much about the area.

Eventually, I knew it would be harder for me to do the walking tours, my knees are much more decrepit than they used to be. And nobody else showed a great deal of interest in taking it on. I thought maybe if I did a book and put down everything that I’ve learnt about the different sites in the block, people can use it as a guidebook as well as a book to dip into to find out about the history of places.

I did discover in the writing of it that I knew a minuscule amount compared to all that there is. Even now, I’m learning so much. I feel there should be a second edition but I don’t know if I’ll be the one to do that. Things have changed so much in the last year.

People were always asking, what’s this place or who was here, and I’d always go look things up and research them. I thought it would be so good to have something to refer to. I got two grants to publish it, that’s the most expensive part, to get a publication out there, the printing. I had a deadline. If I hadn’t had a deadline, I’d still be doing it. It was probably about 18 months to do it but the biggest amount was done in about six months, constant working away as the deadline got closer and closer.

Leading a walking tour of the block, 2015 

I guess I hoped it would be popular because I did it for the historical society, all the money goes to the society. One of the other books we published – Men and a River – which was written by Louise Tiffany Daley way back in the 50s –needed a new edition. I thought if I do a biography and we have a new foreword, we’d be able to publish it as a new thing. We did get some money to help publish that but we probably over-printed. We’ll sell them eventually. I was a bit worried that my book would sell some and then be sitting on the shelves for ages. I’ve been very pleased with it. I guess it now marks a moment in time. 2019 it was finished, just before covid, after the 2017 flood but before last year's.

Local historical knowledge might have once informed the future but I think we’re in a totally new area now with climate change. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. We might not get another huge flood for 20 years or we might get another one next month so that really does change the outlook.

I think people have always come to this area because it's got a lovely climate and lovely environment. I think that will still happen. I think that is why people want to continue to live here. Lismore has been here long enough and has diversified enough from its early days. It became a dairy hub and then actually having alternative culture and then the university – it's given a lot of different strings to its bow. It’s a very different place to say, Grafton. I think there’s some resilience.

When you look back a hundred years ago at how prosperous and thriving it was and how wonderful the future looked…but on the other hand, it was also a very sectarian place back in the late 1800s, and early 1900s. It was very conservative in many ways. It hadn’t, all of Australia hadn’t, generally accepted aboriginal people and culture. There are good changes that have been good for Lismore and its future.

I’m prepared to stick around and see how it goes. It’s just put a spanner in the works for a while because I was looking for a little place somewhere in the middle of town. I’m on a large bit of land that requires some heavy work and I can’t keep that going forever. A lot of the nice little places I would have been interested in were probably flooded. I don’t want to go through a flood.

Leading walking tour, 2015

The museum on Molesworth Street, run by the society, we had to move out. We did have stuff on the ground floor in storage that got flooded. We had a range of maps dating back to the late 1800s that were up above the '74 flood height. They’ve been in Brisbane for conservation and they’ve managed to save all but one of them. There are some other things that we are hoping will be ok. There were other things that went, it's sad but they weren’t terribly significant.

The building itself was flooded up to just below the floor where we had our main stuff but then of course with all the rain and the second flood, it just got mould.

The council got the insurer’s, the insurer’s got the engineers and the engineers got Coffs Harbour Demolitions and now that remediation needs remediation. We don’t know when we’ll go back but luckily, we were allowed to have 10 shipping containers which are up next to the library headquarters in Goonellabah.

We spent a lot of time last year cleaning everything and we’re still finishing off the cleaning and now we’re going to be working out of a shipping container answering research enquiries. We’ve still been doing enquiries and providing books for people. We’ve had planning workshops for when we can, if we can, move back into the building – what we’re going to do differently, where we need to improve our collections, how we can display. It's all volunteer based. That’s the difference between the library, the gallery and us, we’re totally a volunteer society. That can make it a bit difficult. There’s nobody paid to do anything, we’re all doing it for the love…and sometimes that wears a bit thin.

I’m in a haiku group. We go on ginkgos which is where we walk around an area of country in silence, up to an hour, then we come up with haiku and share them, offer constructive criticism. I’m in a book group, I’m in a Landcare group at Tregeagle, also a walking a group. I keep myself busy.

I’m writing a chapter for a book on conservationists in this area who aren’t well known, people who worked in the area and haven’t received a lot of recognition. One of our committee members got a grant to do it, a few of us are writing a chapter.

I like to be busy and it's not work when you really enjoy it. I enjoy doing all the research. Writing is not quite so much fun. It’s nice when it’s all done.