The Rossville community rolled up their sleeves to help one of their favourite locals, who has struggled to maintain her 20-year-old passion project. Photo: Supplied.
It wasn’t wrapped up in pretty paper and ribbon, but one beloved Rossville resident received the gift of a lifetime from her neighbours after years of struggle.
More than 20 community members came together on Sunday (12 April) to celebrate Sandy Lloyd’s 80th birthday with a working bee on her “jungle” property, refreshing her very loved, but overgrown forest.
A lover of all things botanical, Ms Lloyd curated the outdoor space herself over two decades, but in recent years, she became unable to maintain the growth due to health issues and the damage left behind by ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper.
“I bought myself a little rainforest block in 2006, because the rainforest is my first and foremost passion,” she said.
“I don’t have a garden; I planted everything that I loved, and it was a rainforest, it was a jungle, but it was my dream.
“My dream was to have a nursery and a tiny little house in the rainforest, and I was living my dream, but it required constant, constant maintenance, of course.”
Except for perhaps the odd person living under a rock, Sandy Lloyd is a name familiar to everyone in Rossville and Cooktown, mostly from her enormous volunteering efforts on every committee and event under the sun, from the Cape York Folk Club to the Cooktown Discovery Festival Re-enactment Society to the Vera Scarth-Johnson Gallery, and so much more.
“I was working very long hours for the Cape York Folk Club and all my other volunteering, and deteriorating health didn’t help,” she said.
“I wasn’t able to spend the time that was needed to maintain it, so all those plants became huge, and all of a sudden, I had no sun. I just was not able to keep up with it.
“All those people came out, and they cut down trees, and they had an excavator here, and cleared out everything, so it’s now manageable for me; what I contributed was nothing compared to this.”
Good at helping others but not so much at asking for it herself, Ms Lloyd’s personal sanctuary was still fairly damaged after the December 2023 flood, which took out her dream nursery.
“All my life, since I’ve been here, until the last few years, I’ve been able to do everything myself,” she said.
“I had a lot of damage here, but because there were so many people that lost everything, I just couldn’t go there with trying to get help then, because so much help was needed everywhere else.
“I didn’t ask for help for my nursery, so it remained collapsed.”
Sandy Lloyd created the rainforest home of her dreams, but the property became unmanageable through health issues and damage from ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper. Photo: Supplied.
Now with her son and grandchildren living on the property, Ms Lloyd was in desperate need of more storage, so her fellow community members raised the funds to turn the old nursery into a storage shed at the working bee.
Pasha Lynch, who organised the crew, said they wanted to find a way to give back to Ms Lloyd after all of the love and dedication she had poured into the community.
“The best thing we felt we could do would be to help her get her land back together,” she said.
“It was amazing; she just kept touching her chest and she was overwhelmed with all of the help she had.
“It’s been hard for her, and we all wanted to do it, because Sandy’s been an amazing member of this community and the Cooktown community.”
Though she struggled to find the words to express her gratitude, Ms Lloyd’s decades of service to the community, and the love (and sweat) that was returned, truly embodied the spirit of the region’s people.
“I’m really, totally overwhelmed at the community spirit that is Rossville,” she said.
“I turned 80 on Easter Sunday, and I had a big party at the Lion’s Den, and that was a surprise also. I wanted a quiet little dinner, but it was wall-to-wall people.
“I just was not aware that I was so loved. It’s just so rewarding.”
Although many special plants had to go, the community working bee brought sunlight back to the house and made the property manageable once again. Photo: Supplied.
