Those who frequent the current Cairns & District Family History Society building at 20-30 Hartley Street may be interested to see what the address looked like when I grew up on the same site during the mid-1950s and early 1960s.

You may be familiar with 20-30 Hartley Street now, as per the photo below:

For those not familiar with the location, click here to view 28 Hartley Street on Google Maps (you can zoom in/out and use Street View).

Below are some photos of the house and street from earlier times.

I grew up at 28 Hartley Street, Cairns, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

Our house (photo above) was where the CDFHS Resource Centre currently stands.

My parents sold the house in 1963.

The photo above shows our old Prefect bogged in the sewerage trench outside the house.  This was taken at Christmas time 1961 (I think), as that is my dad, George Wood, and my cousin, Jim Hoare, trying to get the car out of the mud.

The photo is looking towards the old Harbour Board building and the inlet.  You can see the vacuum oil storage tanks in the background, where the Cairns Convention Centre now stands.

We left Cairns in January 1963, and the sewerage still wasn’t connected, but by that time dad had built an extension on the house to accommodate the inside toilet.

I remember that the trench kept collapsing and the pipes sinking – the pipes were laid and then dug up a few times, and the mess was outside for a long time.

The photo above shows me and my decorated bike outside our house.  This would have been for the May Day procession of 1962.  Talk about being politicised as a child.  My father was a staunch labor man.  Note the sign on the bike – “Don’t be a clown – vote Labor”.

The photo above shows me ready to start a new school term at Central State School (now gone) in 1961.

Note 30 Hartley Street in the background.  It was owned at the time by Hec (Eric) and Alma Bradford and family.  The previous owners were Mr and Mrs Keegan and their daughter Harriet.  Mrs Keegan was a nurse.

The block on the corner of Sheridan & Hartley Streets was vacant when I was a child, and still is.  When I was growing up, there were only ever the two houses in that part of Hartley Street between Sheridan and Lake Streets.

It will be interesting to see what the site looks like in another 5 to 10 years’ time.

I have a huge archive of Wood and Davies (and associated families) family photographs scanned if anyone is interested in them.