General News
28 August, 2024
How a Camooweal business was built on a handshake
There was a lot of trust between the owners and customers.
Tourists driving the Barkly Highway through Camooweal would seldom realise the central role a battered building on the side of the road played in the golden days of droving.
Freckleton’s General Store, previously known as Synnott, Murray and Scholes, was the location where drovers would gather to collect months worth of gear and provisions required ahead of their long journeys.
When North West Weekly visited the store, the wooden steps leading to the side entrance are loose and rickety, which only agitates the bung knee that Kim Freckleton is moving about on.
Like many retired mechanics, a lifetime of climbing over and under vehicles has left his body stiff and sore.
His knee has been giving him trouble for a few days since he scaled up a ladder to hammer a small sheet of corrugated iron over a glass window, which had been smashed by a rock thrown by a bored youngster a week earlier.
Kim’s father, Joseph, took over the store during the Second World War and the family operated it for decades afterwards. The family still own the building.
Kim says the century-old storefront is no stranger to vandalism or even to break ins.
In fact, Kim says the building used to get broken into pretty frequently – or what feels like frequently anyway – during the heydays of the droving town.
Camooweal was always an important thoroughfare between Darwin and Townsville – it was not uncommon for 200 men or more to camp beside the Georgina River while searching for work on the stock routes or stations.
And it attracted two opposing varieties of itinerant men.
With more than 50 brands of tobacco on offer and a licence to sell Jamaican Rum, the store was a place for both honour and thieves – some men would scurry from under the floorboards in the middle of the night or descend from the manhole in the roof to steal grog and tobacco before absconding from town, whereas other men would march through the front door and proudly slap down a pouch of cash to pay off the IOUs they took out months prior to departing for the stock routes.
Freckleton’s General Store would issue official ‘IOUs’ to drovers – who were only able to pay the shop after the cattle had been successfully transported to their end destination.
“Men would have 1000 pounds or whatever of gear and would take it away and agree to pay it back with a handshake – we would write their name down and how much they owed and give them an IOU,” Kim explained.
“Most of the drovers, when they got paid after delivering the cattle, would come back here and give my old Dad whatever they owed him.
“It’s a completely different world to those days – it was all done with handshakes back then – it was an honour thing; it was what the bush was built on.”