Can you guess our favourite Canadian ad?

Hint #1: Their ad agency needs more shelves to hold its awards. They’ve collected more than 400! Including the top advertising prize in Canada—and the world’s most coveted award, a Gold Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

Hint #2: “Call Shannon. 1-800-563-6353.”

Bingo, you got it, right? Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism’s legendary ads. One of the highlights of our Saturday mornings is their full-page ad on the back of the Pursuits section of The Globe and Mail. Yesterday’s read, “Give yourself the silent treatment” and was accompanied by a photo of an abandoned outport.

It was the province’s superb travel guide where Magellan and I discovered the (nearly) abandoned fishing village of Round Harbour, a ghosted outport longing to be photographed.

And what a round harbour it is. A secluded and calm anchorage tucked into the Cape Shore of Baie Verte Peninsula, a waterfall tumbling from the hillside surrounding the cove.

At the top of the hill just before the gravel road plummets to the cove and stops, we abandoned our motorhome. Built decades after Round Harbour was settled, the 9.5 km road goes to an outport with no roads—you get around on foot or by boat.

The place was first settled in the early 1800s when an English firm established a salmon fishery here. When the first Newfoundland census was conducted in 1836, three families were reported living in Round Harbour. Population:  eighteen people.

Fifty years later there was a Church of England chapel and school. And a resident merchant. (For a good look at how resident merchants screwed the fishing families in Newfoundland, read Claire Mowat’s Outport People. Yes, she was Farley’s wife. And in my view, a better writer than him.)

Population peaked to 114 residents around the time Newfoundland joined confederation. But isolation and financial incentives from Premier Joey Smallwood’s government ($400 per family, about 80% of a fisherman’s annual salary then) drove the relocation to larger centres. Smallwood increased incentives, furthering the exodus and by the time of the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing, fewer than 20 people lived in Round Harbour year-round.

When the last two families voted to resettle in 2013 in return for $100,000 each for leaving their homes, only Lorne Fudge was left, having been denied a vote in the matter because he had a second house in town.

Few signs of habitation were there when Magellan and I visited two years ago. A summer home or two (Lorne’s?) and a newly constructed house.

The overwhelming feeling is one of loss.

Gone are the voices of schoolchildren running home for a hot lunch, laughing, shouting, calling out plans to get together later. Women clothes-pinning laundry in the breeze, tending gardens enriched with sea kelp, gossiping with their neighbours. Fishermen tying up their schooners, bragging to each other about the day’s catch. Church bells ringing on Sunday morning.

An abandoned outport pulls at your heart with a stronger tug than a prairie ghost town. Adam Nicolson in The Sea is Not Made of Water, explains why.

Life is tidal, full of loss and arrival, a thing that makes and ebbs…a set of dissolving realisations that come more easily on a shore than in other places, perhaps because of the constant undermusic of the waves and the coming and going of the tide.

And yet, the indomitable spirit of Round Harbour lives on. A year after the last two families left, this ad appeared on Shoe Cove’s Facebook page:

Round Harbour, Newfoundland—another rural fishing community getting lost in time. Ocean front homes selling for $10,000 to $20,000 fully furnished, with even the bed linens included.

And have a look at this Facebook page “We All Lived In Round Harbour Green Bay Newfoundland” for a glimpse of the history and camaraderie of its people.

Every time Magellan and I see Newfoundland’s tourism videos, we wonder who created them. “Probably an agency from New York,” he said.

We should have realized that only a local agency (it’s Target Brand Architects, located on Water Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland) could create such pure authenticity and show the unpretentious fortitude and cheerful wit of Newfoundlanders. Here’s the opening statement on the agency’s “About” page:

Welcome to Target.

Off-kilter since 1980.

If you haven’t seen one of the province’s tourism ads that Target has created, take a minute and watch “The Weather.”

Makes you feel like calling Shannon, doesn’t it?

Navigation

Briginshaw, J. “Round Harbour: Not so long ago.” Here’s what a professional photographer can do.  

Jones, Lindsay. “1-800 Call Kate: Is there a real person behind that Newfoundland tourism ad?” Maclean’s. October 6, 2021.

Mowat, Claire. Outport People. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983.

Preston, Alex. “The Sea Is Not Made of Water by Adam Nicolson review – of mollusc and men.” The Guardian. July 19, 2021.

“Round Harbour resident staying put.” CBC News. February 9, 2013.

Target Brand Architects From their website: “One of the few independents left in Canada, Target is an award-winning, full-service advertising, communications, and brand architecture firm based in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador – one of the oldest and most creative cities in North America. We’ve been repeatedly named one of Canada’s Top 10 creative agencies, and are one of only 15 agencies in Canada to ever win a Gold Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.” President Catherine Kelly says the agency’s vision is a “commitment to work our buns off to make our clients famous and their cash registers ring, doing it from right here in Newfoundland.”