Sitting around the dinner table or in an easy chair, most elderly folk enjoy telling a yarn about people or places from long ago.

My father was no exception. He would regale us with stories about old family members, Gerringong identities and great events in Gerringong history.

One day I went to visit him and he brought out a large wooden serving plate he had picked up from a woodturning shop in Berry.

In the middle of the plate was a grain as all wooden products have. If you look closely at this and use a bit of imagination, on the left it appears to show the image of Seven Mile Beach as if taken from the Kingsford Smith Memorial. To the right it appears to have a face as if looking over the beach. 

Dad said that the face belonged to Joe Dixon as he looked over his home.

I first came across Joe’s name when researching the history of the Gerringong Cricket Club. He was a member of a cricket team ‘King’ Mickey Weston (an important elder in the Dharawal nation) put together mainly from Wodi Wodi people living in Crooked River (Gerroa) in 1894.

Joe then carved out a distinguished career with the Gerringong Cricket Club.

Dad met him much later but he had a great effect on him. He wrote a collection of Gerringong stories, including memories of Joe. My father would love to know that his memory is to be honoured with the publication of his story on the great man in the old Kiama Independent, which has now been replaced by the Kiama Bugle. Many other people in Gerringong held fond memories of Joe, including the original member of the Gerringong Historical Society Clive Emery.

All these great characters, who helped make this region the place it is today, have passed away. 

That is a good enough reason to honour their memory now.

From Clive Emery, longtime Gerringong resident

When I first looked into the eyes of Joe Dixon they were red-rimmed as if from an open fire at his camp site on the bank of the Crooked River. Joe kept wickets for the Crooked River Cricket team on the Saturdays of 1923, and you can be assured nothing passed him by. His eyes could brighten in a flash.

With a charcoal complexion and hair greying at the temples from under bushy brows, he surveyed the world with a kind of tired acceptance, as if accepting there was little he could ever do to change it. Like his parents before him, he was a hunter and gatherer, and the coming of the white man had brought many changes to himself and his kinsman.

Joe was not a tall man, about medium height I would say, rather solidly built with greying hair on his sturdy arms. He wore the clothes of a white man, mostly flannel shirt and woollen trousers and sockless feet fitted into leather boots, with a felt hat showing signs of age pulled tight over his forehead. Often, he would be seen with his pants rolled above his knees as he prawned in the shallows of the river. 

Joe never took from the river more than was needed to fulfil the requirements of himself and his family. Their needs were not great and in those days there was plenty for all.

He knew the tides that beat upon the shore of Seven Mile Beach and the waves that broke upon the rocks of Black Head, for even as he slept, he was conscious of the undertone of the sea. He knew the relevance of the moon on the tides, and the fish of the slumberous river and the restless sea. He harvested the pipis in the littoral zone and the shellfish of the rocky shoreline.

With his family he lived in a tin humpy on the bank of the Crooked River, where the forest growth gave a measure of protection from the whims of the weather. For how long it would be hard to say. A couple of dogs of indifferent breed were always lounging about the campsite. 

Nearby was the camp of the Bloxomes, and as Joe's brother-in-law John Bloxome joined him in the collection of sustenance for their families. Between them the combined brood were mostly girls; Jimmy and Les, Annie and Louie the only ones I knew. That aside their numbers equalled the white school children along the Crooked River Road on school days. They were very happy and full of fun.

Joe, the top man in the camp, was well versed in the comings and goings of King Mickey from Minnamurra under whose “Kingship”' they existed. Joe was able to point out where King Mickey used to camp on his infrequent visits to the area and called the spot "King Mickey's Island".

Joe frequently worked for my parents at gardening and on the farm. Often I would watch him when he was tussocking on the side of the hill facing Seven Mile Beach. When he wanted a spell, he would turn and face the sea and sit upon his hoe handle and dream of days gone by, when the lobsters came to the rocks to breed in their season and fish could be speared in the shallows of the river beside his camp.

He was to fashion a boat from a cedar log brought down by the floods. Sadly it was destroyed by a terrible fire in the Roundbrush in 1925 together with their camps. I only remember the blackened sheets of iron left after the fire after the families moved away.

It is remarkable that Joe should return in ghostlike form to watch forever over his beloved home, Seven Mile Beach, immortalised in a piece of Cedar, along with the Coolangatta Mountain and the long curving shoreline with the wavelets kissing the golden sands of the beach in an everlasting procession of journey's ends.