Bringing home the bacon

Thanks to Terry Metherell for drawing my attention to an article which appeared in the Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 1 January 1878. Titled “A Queenslander in Sydney”, it is a long piece about the writer’s impressions of Sydney. It includes a description of Manly’s Fairy Bower, then still relatively unspoiled, and there is also this account of the entertainment on offer at Manly on Boxing Day, 1877:
“But, if Christmas Day was calm, Boxing Day was not. Once more the scene shifts to Manly Beach, and we are on the verandah of the Pier Hotel, and the steamers, and the barrel organs, and the German band, and the holiday folks, are coming in: Emu, and Breadalbane, Goolwa, Phantom, and Royal Alfred, ‘one down, 'tither come on,’ come looming round the Middle Head, disgorge cargo and are off again for more in a merry follow-my-leader style. Buckets of ‘prog’ [food], guns, fishing tackle, and babies form the chief impedimenta of the ‘camp followers,’ and a nervous invalid accustomed to the quietude of Cleveland or (say) of Bowen, would be startled out of seven years' growth by the bustling noise and scene... One melancholy death occurred on Boxing Day, at Manly Beach. There is rigged out from the pier, like the boom from the Wolverine, a spar, well-greased; and at the end of it is slung a four-dozen case containing a pig, to be the prize of him who first walks the pole and gets him. After about a couple of dozen spills off the greased spar and into the water, one daring cornstalk [youth] hugged the boom and got the pig out, and it fell into the water, in the clutches of the swimmers, who, in disputing the prize, six at each leg and two at each ear soon drowned it; and, this we believe was the only life lost at Manly Beach during Boxing Day.”

The band on the ferry

In pre-War days on the Manly ferries there used to be a band on board, playing the popular tunes of the day. The following anonymous poem which dates from the 1920s is supposedly by 'an old bandsman who used to come down to Sydney for the Brass Band Contest every year':

I love to go to Manly where the gentle breezes blow
And where the men and maidens in the bounding billows go.
I loved the journey over, it was bonza, it was grand,
As the ferry moved to music from the little German Band.

On the upper deck they gathered, sometimes four, sometimes three
And oh the jazzes that they played, and oh the melodee.
They played the latest numbers heard at the pantomime
And then, the way they played them, Lor’ luv me, it was fine.

Of course you couldn’t hear them from the bottom deck, you know,
Nor underneath the hatches where the courting couples go;
Still, that was but a detail for one would make descent
And offer the collection box no matter where you went!

But now the trip to Manly, with glimpse of rolling sea
With bobbing empty bottles holds never charm with me,
I miss the quaint piano, and the queer asthmatic flute
The double bass and fiddle – why the boat is cold and mute!

I always went to Sydney when contest time came round
For I loved to hear the playing and the waves of rolling sound
And when I wearied sometimes of the masters’ noble notes
I would steal away to Manly and the band upon the boats!

This year I’m doin’ nothin’, the contest won’t see me,
The men that run the show down there and I do not agree -
We sent an ultimatum, and to the Sec. I wrote,
“If you want me at your concert, put the band back on the boat!”