Fun fact: Miss Australia-to-be, Rachael Finch, got her first cover shoot with the Reggie. It was story which made a tenuous link, even by the most generous standards, between a sugar cane by-product and the fake tanning industry. That edition, entitled Brown Sugar and featuring a dazzlingly gorgeous young Miss Finch in a bikini top, sold well.
You know what else sold well? Drovers. Characters. Rodeos. Crocs. Barras. The Cowboys. And anything at all that stuck it to the political shiny bums in Brisbane, irrespective of their leanings.
I remember the lady who gave me completely bewildering directions to her block out behind the Tableland. After driving for hours, well out of mobile range, I pulled into another property to check my whereabouts. I was miles away from where I should have been. When I finally arrived at the intended destination, she cheerfully admitted that she’d substantially pruned the mileage on each leg of the directions “because I didn’t think you’d come if you knew how far it was”.
There were other helpful directions, too: “Go along about 20 chains, then turn left where old Mary’s place used to be there on the right.” Not so helpful.
For me, the Reggie is eating the best bloody ham, home-grown avo and home-made relish sandwiches in a farmhouse kitchen overlooking Dunk Island.
It’s chopper mustering in the Burdekin, watching the wiliest old girls sprint for the nearest impenetrable clump of Chinee apple. It’s a cold Gold at Quamby pub, it’s watching the winter sun rise, all steely greys and silvers, over the Albert River outside Burketown. It’s being reduced to gobsmacked silence the first time you cross the Daintree.
It’s watching a bloke work his knuckles like worry beads, struggling to hold it together after his entire farm, livelihood and family home has been bulldozed by Cyclone Larry; and hearing him say “It’s only bananas, not babies. And there’s people worse off than us.”
It’s beauty and harshness. It’s decency, dignity and the very occasional idiot. It’s big country and big hats, a few big mouths and a lot of big personalities. It’s thinking and dreaming on a fearless scale; it’s people considering “I wonder…”, versus “too hard”.
It’s the Reggie’s DNA and lifeblood, the beating heart of Northern Australia, and it was my very great privilege to have been a small part of it. – Rebecca Winter was the editor of NQR from 2004 to 2006