OUR PEOPLE
Veteran helps his mates find their peace The peace and quiet of the Outback is helping restore the soul of the traumatised. GLENIS GREEN meets Vietnam war veteran Ted Robinson who turned to a hut in the bush as he came to grips with his own demons.
Ted Robinson with one of the old studio cameras used by his father Bill at Robinson Studios.
R
ustic, wide-open spaces and the screech of galah flocks could not be further from the sweaty, tangled jungles of Vietnam - and that’s just how
Ted Robinson likes it. A veteran of Vietnam’s bloody war, Ted has carved out a peaceful niche in Australia’s Outback as respite from the ongoing flashbacks of
combat and now shares it with other traumatised returned veterans and first responders, as part of a novel healing process. Many people will remember Ted, now 71, as chief photographer at the Sunshine Coast Daily newspaper. His father, Bill, operated Robinson Studios, one of the first studios on the Sunshine Coast. In his job, Ted covered the news from murder scenes and car accidents to new babies and fashion shoots. But when the PTSD of serving in Vietnam combined with his hectic job caught up with him some years ago, Ted realised he needed to slow down. “When I sort of fell over and gave up work at the Sunshine Coast Daily, my kids were still in primary school and I used to go out near Adavale where a mate was managing a property to get rid of the stress,” he said. “I used to think how great it would be to have a veterans’ retreat there.” When, while en route to the Birdsville races one day, he spotted an old hut at Adavale and two blocks of land around it for sale for the princely sum of $200, it seemed that fate had stepped in. He and two mates bought it from the
local council, which had reclaimed it due to unpaid rates. Situated 1000 km from his Sunshine Coast home with Quilpie as the closest major town, the hut was an old Cobb & Co staging post-cum-post office in Adavale, a tiny centre with a population of around 16. “For 20 years I’ve been going there … there’s nothing, just peace and quiet,” Ted says.
As president of the Sunshine Coast Vietnam Veterans Association, Ted originally centred the veterans’ retreat on a nearby property called Alaric, but after 14 years, access to the property had ceased, and the focus switched to Adavale.
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10 YOUR TIME MAGAZINE / August 2021
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