Benton Nemo was a good choice to give the Welcome to County at the Yallambee Open Day last week.
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Mr Nemo is a resident of one of the houses that line the street that leads to the reserve and the Brilla Brilla Community Centre that hosts the childcare centre that held the open day.
Mr Nemo said it was a good place to live, a feeling that others who live or who have lived there agreed with.
Indigenous people have long lived in the area, and from a time well before there was housing on the land.
Like in many Australian towns, Aboriginal people were forced to live in fringe settlements, camps or “yumbas” on the edge of regional towns.
Mount Isa had a big settlement at Orana Park where up to 200 people lived until the early 1970s and there was another at Yallambee next to the river.
There are several settlement named Yallambee dotted across Australia and it appears to be an Aboriginal word that means “to dwell at ease”.
In the 1970s social welfare organisations such as Injilinji, the Jalanga Co-op Housing Society and the Kalkadoon Aboriginal Sobriety House were established to help the local Indigenous community and housing conditions and facilities gradually improved.
In 1972 Mount Isa Mines put in housing as mining dormitories.
At Yallambee these buildings were donated to the reserves and the government built new hostels and houses.
In 1981, the Yallambee and Orana Park areas were officially gazetted as ‘Reserves for Departmental and official purposes under the corporation of the Department of Aboriginal and Islanders Affairs
Bill Wilde is a long term resident of Yallambee from the 1960s.
“We were here when the Pony Club was here,” Bill said.
“We had no houses, but we had tents – and we had toilets.”
Kerry Major also remembers growing up in the camp site in the late 1960s with a lot of fondness.
“We didn’t see hard times because it was communal,” Kerry said.
“It was more fun times because the community WAS a community, and nobody worried about the kids because the kids could more safely in the community, people knew where they were.”
Though her family moved out of Yallambee into the suburbs in 1973, Kerry said they kept up a bond with Yallambee.
“We watched this community grow. We’d come down on the weekend to visit family or come down after school,” she said.
She said there was a lot of history to the place.
“Those (early) houses were operated with a 20c coin box for electricity.”