Dorothea McQualter: Wanderer And Puzzler Extraordinaire

At 88, Dorothea (or Thea to her friends), has led an amazing life when she moved to the Burdekin in 2012. Originally from Mareeba, 68 kilometres north of Cairns, Thea is the youngest of nine children, when she first discovered her love of travel.

“My father had a tobacco farm just outside Mareeba, where I grew up. We had one teacher in our bush primary school. When I finished school, I went nursing in Atherton for four years and after training, my sister and I moved down to Innisfail. I worked in the hospital for a few months before I got infected with the wander-bug,” Thea confesses.

“We went down to Wagga Wagga, worked in the hospital there before going fruit picking. We ended up hitchhiking around Tasmania, before I came back to the mainland to work at the Heidelberg Military Hospital, in Melbourne,” she exclaims.

While working in Melbourne, she went to a party at a friend's place, where she met her future husband. They remained married for 60 years before he passed away nine years ago.

“We lived in Melbourne for about six months but my husband always wanted to go north because he'd been born in Bendigo, Victoria, and hated the cold. We rode in big semis all the way up to Brisbane, before we caught the train from there to Cairns, where he got work.”

Looking for better jobs, they moved around a lot before having kids, which still didn’t stop them. Thea had eight, but lost two. Her children are scattered across various locations, including Cairns, Gladstone, the Darling Downs, Bundaberg, and America.

“I quit nursing when I started having children. With kids, I had enough patients,” Thea laughs. “We went down to St George, NSW, then back up to Mackay before going over to Darwin. As a family we moved around frequently, always looking for better opportunities,” she explains.

Once the kids were old enough and left the coop, Thea and Jim didn’t slow down, instead continuing their adventures, this time by boat and bus!

“After he took an early retirement, we bought a 40-foot yacht and went sailing for 10 years up and down the coast. We had a mooring in Cairns, and we’d say, ‘Where's the cyclone going to be this year?’ That’s when we’d decide where to go. After that, I had to have a hip replacement because it's a bit awkward getting around a boat on crutches.”

“We sold the boat, came to shore in Bowen, lived on a mango farm, then got a bus. We did it up and travelled all over Australia. We went to every state, including Tassie. We were doing that right up until Jim was too sick to travel,” Thea reflects.

She’s now been in Home Hill and the Burdekin since 2012, where she’s content.

“It was a strange town when I first came here, because if you weren't three or four generations Burdekinites, they sort of looked at you a bit weird. But it's lovely now. It's been tidied up and still has got great potential,” she enthuses.

With a life lived and well-travelled, Thea remains active by reading, doing puzzles, and attending church with friends.

“I read, and do a lot puzzles now that I don’t travel much. I know the paper’s free but if you take that puzzle out of your newspaper, I won’t buy your newspaper,” Dorothea jokes.

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Thea McQualter (88), endless wanderluster and puzzler. Photo: Mark T. Rasmussen

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