On Deck With Declan

April is the cruellest month to depart the Whitsundays.

The stifling air is finally running off - the rain, rain has gone away - and I decide to move to the country’s opposite end? The kookaburras on the fence line are laughing at me for that.

I have been a writer for Mackay and Whitsunday Life newspaper for two years, and in two weeks, I will write my last word for this masthead. This is my final editor’s note. I have made the decision to leave the region and the publication behind. Onwards to greener pastures, as they say.

Let us do away with any pretence: I am a sentimental man. I will miss Pioneer Bay, levelled out on the horizon, blue and tinged with green. I walked the bicentennial boardwalk on Easter Weekend and watched rainbow lorikeets chirruping to each other – I miss the sound already. I imagine I will cry when I drive up Shute Harbour Road through to Proserpine for the last time. The sugarcane will wave me goodbye in the wind.

And that’s simply the place; I will miss the people more. Writing for them, and for all of you, has been an honour. You know how incredible you are. And that alights on something else: I will miss my friends. But “friends come in and out of your life like busboys at a restaurant,” don’t they? We will see each other again.

So, to the Mackay and Whitsunday Life team, to my friends: thank you all for making the Whitsundays my home. This new chapter in Tasmania will be an exciting one, and I will not forget you.

To you, I say thank you, Constant Readers.

Goodbye, for the last time.

Declan

Quote of the Week:

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance. They make the latitudes and longitudes.” – Henry David Thoreau

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