The Story behind the Montville Stories Series

Guest blogger: Doug Patterson, Montville History Group - 2021 John Oxley Library Community History Award recipient. 

In 2019, in response to growing community interest, the Montville History Group decided to write a history of Montville. The group was only small but it had 25 years of research to call on, including photographs, tapes and transcripts of interviews, oral histories and anecdotes from family descendants and three earlier publications, Montville Memories: A Pictorial Journey, Montville State School 1896 – 1996: A Centenary History and Montville Post Office 1897 – 1997: A Centenary History.

The group, coordinated by Cate Patterson, decided that, rather than attempting a traditional chronological history tome, it would work on a series of social histories focusing on the people and thematic highlights of the maturing community. The idea of a Montville Stories Series was born. It was then decided to look at the contribution of people in shaping Montville in 50-year time spans covering its early settlement, the years of intensive farming and years of change.

Since the late 1990s, Montville’s population has remained around a thousand with at least half being senior citizens. As we saw our main audience as older people who have had a close association with Montville; either as descendants of earlier residents, past residents, current residents or those thinking of becoming residents, this led us to keep to an easy-to-read style with a relatively older, familiar, larger font style, clear metadiscourse and clean design and layout. We decided to do an initial print run of 100 based on anticipated sales and relative costs.

Initial work involved sifting through 25 years of research to establish what information we had and needed to verify and what we needed to search. Establishing selection licences and subsequent title deeds became an imperative.

At the same time, although confident that we could handle the history side of this venture, we were out-of-our-depth in how to fund it. We were a small sub-committee of the Montville Village Association (MVA) and had a very small budget and no means to raise money to cover the costs involved. We came up with a somewhat naïve business model that if we could secure seed funding for Book 1, we could then use sales to fund the second book and so on.

We approached a local businessman and he agreed to fund us $1000 to get us started. It was fortuitous that he was interested in discovering the history of the block of land he had recently purchased and that this block was in fact one of the early selections we were already covering in our research.

While we were still struggling with a surplus of research material for Book 1, the group was approached by another historian, Gordon Plowman, who had written a 60-page history of the Flaxton Sawmill, Sawdust and Steam to see if we were interested in publishing it. We read it, saw its potential and it became our first publication as Book 4 in the series. It proved reasonably inexpensive to produce and very popular so we had sufficient funds to publish Book 1, Early Settlers of Hunchy, Razorback, Flaxton and Montville: 1885 to 1914.

In 2020, we published a third book submitted by Ruth Barden, Book 5, Home on the Range; Memories of the Cuthbertson Family: 1953 - 1965 about her family running the post office and pineapple farming in Montville and a second book by Gordon, Book 6, Silky Oaks and Camphor Laurels; the Centenary of the Opening of the Flaxton (State) School: 1922 – 2022.   

Our first four books were well received but we were broke. Having committed to selling at cost, we just weren’t making enough to fund later books which were considerably longer. In 2021, with the help of our local Lions Club, we applied for a John Oxley Library Community History Award. Along with the prestige, winning this award came with a $5000 prize to continue the Montville Stories Series. Thankfully we were successful. With the help of the grant, and a forced Covid isolation, we were finally able to finish Book 2, Fifty Years of Boom and Bust: 1914 to 1964 and Book 3, Fifty Years of Change; the People who have shaped the Montville of Today: 1964 – 2014.

Although Covid gave us extra writing time, the economic post-Covid downturn saw a dramatic drop in sales in 2022. After publishing the 278-page Book 7, Montville Communities: Groups, Clubs, Committees, Organisations and Associations: 1895 to 2022 we were fast running out of money again. Our parent body, the MVA, advanced us funds to help publish Book 8, Montville Post Office: 1897 – 2022 while a number of community members donated money to keep us going.

We began Book 9, Montville Remembers on a wing and a prayer. However, the story of Montville’s engagement in World War 1 and World War 2 was much bigger and more complex than we had anticipated, so we decided to break it into 2 parts with Book 9, Part 1 focussing on World War One: 1914 – 1919 and Book 9, Part 2 focussing on World War Two: 1939 – 1945. Gordon Plowman undertook to write a brief introductory history of each war to contextualise the impact each had on the small community of Montville. He also researched and wrote a summary of the war record of each enlistee. Cate documented how each war impacted on individual families and the community at large. This mammoth task was exacerbated when she discovered inaccuracies, inconsistencies and omissions in local records.

Further donations helped fund the publication of Book 9, Part 1, but Part 2 was a much bigger, 360-page publication and the quote for printing 100 copies was $3,487. We went to our local RSL clubs for financial help without success but were directed to a Commonwealth Grant Program, Saluting their Service Commemorations. We were successful and were able to get it printed.

Book 10, Montville Buildings, however was almost as big and had much bigger research costs through title searches and identifying and interviewing past owners. We decided to ask the current owners of the buildings in Book 10 to help fund it. Almost every owner did, with donations ranging from $200 to $1000.

In the 5 years we worked on the Montville Stories Series, printing costs have more than doubled, while family financial pressures have impacted on sales. We were able to complete the series with grants equalling $8,487 and community donations of approximately $8,000 to supplement sales. We had second runs of 100 books for our most popular books, Books 1, 2, 3 and 4 and our stocks of unsold books are now under 30 copies for earlier books and 50 copies for later ones.

We have had tremendous local support from the Montville Post Office and the Libraries of the Sunshine Coast Council. However, the History Department of the University of The Sunshine Coast was not at all supportive finding our histories not sufficiently academic and not in keeping with its emphasis on digital research. If this is the position of other universities, social histories based on primary sources are now almost solely dependent on the work of community history groups like ours.

Therefore, the support of the John Oxley Library Community History Awards Program becomes essential in keeping social history alive. Indeed, there is a case for expanding the program to encourage more groups to record local history and with rising printing costs, to increase the grant.

Doug Patterson, Secretary, Montville History Group

Post Script - Over these five years we also wrote monthly historical pieces for our Montville History Group Website, regular pieces for our local papers, The Hinterland Times and The Sunshine Valley Gazette, and published 2 additional books, a privately funded book, Glenn Lawrance of High Tor: A Legacy of Sanctuary, of Love, Longing and Loss and a humorous sequel to the Montville Series Books, Tall Tales and True … Maybe.