Frank Chew

After living as a young boy in Warwick and Roma, from about ten years of age Frank grew up in the Childers area of south-east Queensland. He is said to have received a high school education (very rare for that generation!) at a Grammar School in Melbourne in the 1890s, where he is reputed to have won many sporting trophies for track and field events, in particular for running and pole vaulting.

He and Lucy met and were subsequently married in Childers, but they lived in a number of places around the southeast area of Queensland. As was the case for many men of the Wide Bay and Burnett area, Frank worked in the sugar industry, mainly in the Fairymead and Isis districts around Bundaberg and Childers, and he and Lucy also farmed pineapples near Wamuran, west of Caboolture, until the great depression of the 1930's forced them off the property.

He was probably best known as a skilled railway bridge builder, and worked on main line Queensland Railway projects from Southport to the Burnett District, and gained a reputation for his use of the broad axe and adze. He was a contractor on the construction of the Saint Agnes Creek railway bridge for Queensland Railways on the Goondoon to Morganville branch line c.1930. The Wallaville to Morganville section opened for traffic on 3rd October 1931, and operated as a general QR mixed traffic branch until its sale in 1964 to the Gin Gin Cooperative Mill.

In the late 1930s he tried his hand (with the help of some of the younger sons) at professional fishing on the Burrum River at Buxton, building a house, partly from local pit-sawn timber, above where the present boat ramp is located

He finally retired, with Lucy, to Howard during the Second World War, living until his death in a house built and then rebuilt with his own hands . . . and which is still standing and occupied to this day!