This is the Seymour Hotel at Bemiside which is 12 kilometres from the town of Ingham.
The Seymour Hotel is basically the last business in the town of Bemiside.
As an amateur historian, I'm very interested in preserving history that looks like it's going to disappear.
When I first came, I didn't know what the age of the hotel was.
So I started asking customers, you've got any photos at home?
What can you show me about the place?
A few of them were good and they bought in shoeboxes full of photographs
and anything that was relevant, as you can see, I've put round the wall as a starter.
Over the next 10 or so years, it became a book mining my business.
But it's a story of the Lower Herbert River area from 1869 up to 1980s.
Sugarcane was the main industry for people being here from the first settlers in 1868
to the first stick of cane being planted in 1870s.
The start of the sugar season started off with the workers arriving here.
Most of these were Italian, Sicilian.
They'd sign on for the sugar season and then they'd go to the local hotel
where there'd be blackboard set up for the head ganger who would have his name on the top
and whatever gang you wanted to work on, you'd put your name on the blackboard.
And as you came through time, you whistled through to the 1960s, mechanisation came in
and you had something like 3,000 hand cane cutters were displaced out of work
The stories that surprised me within mining my business,
I don't think there's any one because it took over 12 years to research.
So it was a bit like putting a jigsaw puzzle together
and being satisfied when you saw a story complete.
I think one of the intriguing things was that in 1870 there was only six white women
living on the Herbert River attached to the sugarcane farms, the plantations
and 100 European men, plus the local knackers.
So I set out to give those women identity which I've done.
I've been here for 30 years. When I first came, the bar was surrounded by 20 to 30 farmers
and their workers. Now it's probably no farmers, a few locals and a few tourists.
So a percentage of them are chasing family tree information from the past.
So they come to the pub because it's the only business here
and they're surprised that we can refer them to photographs on the wall
and it shows their uncle or their auntie in some of the photographs.
I've found that I'll have a day where I sell more of the history books than I do beer,
which is a bit embarrassing because we're here to sell beer.
