Rollo’s community legacy

“It rained last night,” said Meyers, 78. He wore a long-sleeved white cotton shirt, blue jeans and a pair of custom-made orthopaedic brown leather shoes. He limped over to a giant fig tree, enormous buttress roots like panelling. “This was only a tiny sapling when I planted it. It was when my wife was still alive.

“And that poinciana over there,” he said. A gust of wind from the broadwater inlet created a swell through the green ferny leaves of the tree. “That was planted 21 years ago, when my father died.”

The ‘Rollo Meyers Park’ was the brainchild of Meyers’s first wife, Christine, a feisty young German woman whom Rollo met while working as a dentist in London. Within twelve weeks of meeting, they were married and, four years later, he brought her to Australia where they purchased a waterfront house with its own sandy beach in Runaway Bay, Gold Coast.

It wasn’t long before Christine noticed the large block of empty land opposite their house. Ugly, sun-burnt earth, bare but for litter and a handful of straggly bushes trailing dry and dusty leaves. Though it was council land, she suggested Rollo clean it up.

It wasn’t until Meyers found himself forced into early retirement due to severe osteoarthritis at the age of 48 that he began to give serious thought to his wife’s idea. He found himself studying the land opposite his house. Everything was dead or dying. The loose sand settling in thin drifts over the loam. As he stood there, watching the sun-scorched earth, he thought about his own poor health and his diagnosis of early-onset osteoarthritis.

The illness was a particularly cruel blow to Meyers. The only thing he could do was to keep moving. But he hated going to the gym and he disliked being indoors. He looked at the vacant lot, bounded by the close. What if he could clean up this dustbowl? Could gardening be the physical therapy that his body so desperately needed?

Back then, the eastern end of Poinsettia Avenue had very little shade, with only a few stark pines and, ironically, not a single poinsettia. It seemed fitting to Meyers that he should start by planting some poinsettias in honour of the avenue’s name. Only one hurdle. The soil.

“There wasn’t any to speak of,” Meyers said. “The land used to be a marsh, and when they deepened the harbour, all the sand was pumped up onto this block.”

It was Christine who encouraged Meyers to undertake a rigorous soil-improvement program. They bought trailer-loads of soil that Meyers painstakingly dug through the sand and then they added fertiliser and mulch, and hand watered the area.

As the soil became healthier, they began to plant edibles. A variety of kitchen herbs, as well as vegetables. Then they graduated to fruit trees. Pawpaws, limes, banana plants, a macadamia nut tree. “And those … ” Meyers extended his arm toward several towering palms, beyond which boats bobbed gently in the Runaway Bay marina. “I planted those from coconuts that had washed up on the beach.”

Meyers waved as a middle-aged man dressed in a pair of light blue denim shorts and a white polo top approached us across the lawn. “This is Frank Gould,” Meyers said, shaking his hand. “He was my neighbour three doors down. He and his wife, Ailsa, now keep the parks watered.

“Frank is one of the many people who have worked on this place,” Meyers said. “The park became a very social thing. People going on their morning walks would stop and talk. Many of them donated plants from their own gardens.”

Other neighbours volunteered, helping look after the garden and two adjacent blocks of land as well. This was welcome news to Meyers who, by that stage, was spending four or five hours a day in the garden. The neighbourhood coalition started to hold regular meetings and organise working bees, and the Gold Coast’s first ever park care group – the Poinsettia Park Care Group – was formed.     

Dr Sheelagh Wennersten, who was assistant co-ordinator of the park care group, approached the council with a request to dedicate the land, and formally turn it into the ‘Rollo Meyers Park’. The council agreed to the request, and the park was officially named in 1994. Meyers’s elation, however, was tempered with the realisation that having a park that bore his name came with a deeper sense of responsibility. 

Several years later the park care group, who were by now looking after 2.4 hectares of public land, discovered that the local yacht club wanted to acquire some of the land in order to build a pokies club and extend a carpark.

The Poinsettia Park Care Group went into immediate action. They printed a – “HANDS OFF OUR PARKS!” pamphlet – and distributed hundreds to houses in neighbouring streets, calling for an urgent public meeting the following Sunday at the park.

The response was overwhelming. “People came from all over, because they knew that if it happened to us, it could happen to them, too,” Dr Wennersten said. 

At the meeting, Dr Wennersten and her husband proposed an idea. What if they were to name these adjacent parks after Meyers as well? Meyers, however, declined, as he felt that the name did not give credit to the dozens of other people who worked on the parks. In the end, a compromise was reached. The smaller garden park would remain the ‘Rollo Meyers Park’, and the adjacent parks became the ‘Poinsettia Park’. 

Undeterred, the yacht club ploughed ahead with its attempt to acquire the land. Debate was passionate and when the club’s application was finally rejected by council, the park care group held a large party in the park to celebrate. 

“I discovered how much the local community had come to value the parklands,” Meyers said.

But if the community loved the parks, there was someone who loved them even more: Christine. “She had this olive tree,” Meyers said as we walked slowly back across the road to the garden. “She nursed it for nine years, fertilising it and watering it. Finally, in the last year of her life, just before she died, it flowered and produced olives.”

For over 30 years Meyers had battled osteoarthritis, prostate cancer, as well as three heart bypass surgeries and yet it was his wife who passed away early. In 2007, Christine was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nine weeks later she was dead at the age of 66.

“We scattered half of her ashes under the native hibiscus tree and half of them around the birdbath,” Meyers said. “We came out to this spot when we knew she was dying and it was an unspoken, mutual understanding between us that this was the place where she would stay.”

We crossed the lawn. A short way from the ‘Rollo Meyers Park’ sign was a bench. Inscribed upon the metal plague riveted onto the backrest were the words: “In loving memory of Christine Meyers for her loving care and nurturing of the park”.

Footnote. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Majellan in 2017.

Rollo passed away on Christmas Eve 2021.

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