Keep your hands off that hat
IT HAS been called ugly, an eyesore, a blight on the landscape and past its use-by date – and that was just on yesterday’s opinion page of this distinguished journal.
There was just no way I could let that egregious defamation of character pass without going to bat for the beautiful old hat gracing the cold, bare scalp of a concrete World War II bomb shelter in Munro Martin Parklands.
I grew up as part of the Bayview Scout Group which was not particularly trendy back then, particularly with my penchant for playing the violin – apparently the least-cool instrument ever created.
Despite the healthy lashings of taunts it occasioned, my experience of Scouts (and orchestral fiddlin’) was nothing short of rad.
We lit stuff on fire, abseiled down cliff faces, climbed mountains, learnt about knots and bush tucker and chopped up wood … so we could light it on fire.
Occasionally, we would be woken on camps by a legendary Far North leader named Wombat firing his shotgun into the air and emitting a terrifying roar of “get outta bed”.
Loosing live rounds around kids would possibly not fly these days, but
it was an experience and a half, and no alarm clock has been able to cut the mustard since.
All through that time, there was a whopping great big peaked Scout hat standing proudly in the guts of the city – a monument to a movement that has taught outdoor survival techniques and vital social skills to generations of boys and girls.
To learn that the fibreglass hat could be permanently doffed, rather than brought up to modern building standards, hit me square in the goitres.
Nothing in Cairns Regional Council’s new conservation plan for the structure explicitly says the hat is done-for, but the writing is on wall.
The door has been left open for its removal if it is found to be damaged,
which with time and the rigours of a tropical climate, is inevitable unless money is spent on its upkeep.
The council is right when it says the building was not originally a Scout hut, but arguing that the hat is not a significant piece of the city’s history is a reeking load of tripe.
The shelter itself was built in 1942 and used as a communications centre for the Volunteer Defence Corps as Japan entered the war and rained down blankets of bombs on Pearl Harbor, Thailand, the Philippines and British Malaya.
It was a military structure, true, but only for 15 or so years.
The Scouting Association of Queensland took it over in the mid-1950s and it has been theirs ever since – six decades of unbroken history in the heart of the CBD.
The headwear was not added until 1982, created by local large-scale millinery firm Rogers Fibreglass, but it appears on all heritage-listing photos and has unquestionably become an iconic addition to the city’s landscape.
It has served as a Scout den, a shop where leaders could pick up badges for their industrious young hordes, and back when Munro Martin Park was not yet rebadged to an $18 million parklands, something to provide
protection for drunken itinerants. It’s all part of the story. Only in recent years has it fallen into disuse, largely because of confusion over what the Scouts are allowed to do with it.
They have mooted an idea of turning the octagonal structure into a cafe to generate much-needed funds for the volunteer organisation, but were talked out of it by council officers because it could affect future coffee shops at the Cairns Performing Arts Centre.
Maybe it could become a small museum, still retaining its landmark Baden Powell-style hat as a nod to its full history – not just the 15-or-so years it was a bomb shelter.
I suspect the council already has drawings squirrelled away somewhere of what they want to do with it.
Ratepayers have spent $18 million on upgrades to the park, including putting a big fence around it, and the council wants everything to look spick and span.
The hat is gaudy, dated, strange and decidedly out of place.
That is exactly why we need to keep it.
Save the hat, keep Cairns weird, and save us from becoming just another modern, sterile city.