Frank Nixon certainly bred horses and bullocks on his ranch in the valley of the Upper Nerang, but what really brought him there was what lured practically everyone who settled in south-east Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century – timber. To many it seemed like easy pickings. According to one mildly facetious account of a visit to the Tweed River in 1876: ‘Much money has been made at cedar-getting, and several stick to it in preference to farming. You are your own master; go to work when and where you like, live a life of satisfied solitude amongst the Samsons of the forest, rejoice in the sound of the mohawk [?] or the cockatoo, the red-breasted parrots and the native woods . . .’ (BC, 5 August)
Samuel Gray’s reason for buying a four-year lease of the Upper Walumban Run, just over the border in the Mount Warning caldera, in 1862 was that Red Cedar was still to be found there. Gray had grown up in the Illawarra where nine-tenths of the cedar had been felled and shipped to Sydney by the end of the 1820s. As soon as he had secured the lease Gray signed up two sawyers to provide him with 20,000 super feet of Red Cedar and Cudgerie to be felled by Aboriginal workers. When Gray’s partner, his and Nixon’s brother-in-law Joshua Bray, got to the Tweed he found that they had competition. About twenty cedar-getters were living in huts at Terranora, at the mouth of the river, where the Francis George regularly called to collect the cedar that they rafted down the river. Bray lost no time. He wrote to his fiancée Gertrude Nixon on 27 September 1864, about a trip he was making round the base of Mount Warning to Tyalgum: ‘I had the blacks felling a lot of cedar up there . . . I found a great deal of cedar there, I intend to get it out if I can.’ (Bray Papers)
Bray was already having trouble keeping his Aboriginal workers; when he visited their encampment one night he ‘found two of the cedar choppers (white people) with rum making the blacks drunk, doubtless with the intention of coaxing some of them away, or taking them away after they were drunk’. The cedar-getters had travelled from forty kilometres away (Bray Papers). Bray succeeded in getting rid of the interlopers, but from then on finding the manpower to exploit the timber would become more and more difficult. Of the thirty-eight settlers who collected mail at Bray’s Post Office in 1867, nine were timber-getters or timber-cutters and fourteen were sawyers. Nearly all of the male population of the Tweed was already involved in the timber industry in one way or another when the Bray–Gray partnership arrived. Bray hooked his own chain across the Tweed to catch the logs that came down with each fresh. While he struggled to grow arrowroot and sugar and lost money on both, it was the timber that supported him and Gertrude, and their brood of children. By the time Frank and Kate Nixon came north after the sale of Avenex to join the other members of the Nixon family on the Tweed, the cedar was almost exhausted. According to the Brisbane Courier, ‘much fine cedar has been sent away; but cedar getting has become now a restricted trade, as it is difficult to get.’ (5 January 1872)
Nixon, whose maternal grandfather had made fortunes out of shipping cabinet timbers out of virgin forest in the West Indies and Central America, must have been well aware of the value of the timber he saw still standing in Numinbah; when he told his sister that he didn’t like what he saw there, he was probably referring to the extreme ruggedness of the terrain. There was red gold in them thar hills, but getting it out was going to be difficult and costly.
In 1846 two boys, Edmund Harper and his fourteen-year-old friend William Duncan, who were working with an earlier generation of cedar-getters in the caldera, made their way through the Numinbah Gap and down the valley to the point where Cave Creek enters the Nerang River, where they stumbled upon the biggest Red Cedar they had ever seen. The boys, with no way of exploiting their find, had no option but to return to cutting among the gangs on the Tweed, but Duncan never forgot what he had seen. Forty years later he found the magnificent tree again; it was eventually felled and reduced to a column of timber 127 feet long, with a girth of 17 feet, yielding a total of 13,763 super feet.
It is probably useful to explain at this point that the Australian Red Cedar, Toona ciliata var. australis, is not a cedar, but a mahogany, a member of one of the seven genera in the Meliaceae family. George Bentham’s belief that the Australian tree was identical to the Indian Toona (Flora Australiensis, 1:387), also called Suren or Indian mahogany, has now been vindicated, but not without a good deal of intellectual ferment. In 1843 Leichhardt lamented he didn’t know the scientific name of the ‘noble red cedar’ (Bailey, J., 102). Many had been proposed. In 1840 Austrian botanist Stephan Endlicher included Toona as a section of Cedrela (2:1055); in 1846 Swiss botanist J. J. Roemer realised that there were sound grounds for elevating Toona to the rank of a genus (139). Victorian state botanist Ferdinand Mueller disagreed, and for years he prevailed (Fragmenta, 1:4). Even J. H. Maiden accepted the Muellerian name Cedrela australis in preference to Bentham’s Cedrela toona. It was after a revision by David Smith in 1960 that the Australasian and Asian Cedrela species were finally placed in the genus Toona, it being understood that the genus Cedrela was confined to central and tropical South America. The Australian cedar was then thought by botanists of the same mind as H. A. T. Harms (270) to be a separate species, Toona australis, until Bentham was proved right once again. The genus was revised again in 1995 by Dr Jenny Edmonds of Kew. The Australian Red Cedar is now to be called Toona ciliata var. australis. There are still botanists who believe that Toona and Cedrela together form a single genus, so anyone studying our cedars has to remember all the names. The matter cannot be allowed to end there, because there are botanists who would place both in the order Cedrelae, and those who would place the order Cedrelae in the Cedreloideae and those who would put it in the Swietenioideae.
The ships’ carpenters of the First Fleet no sooner clapped eyes on the Australian cedars than the race was on.
Cedar quality was well known in the naval timber trade, for India had over many years supplied both cedars – the coniferous Indian cedar (Cedrus deodara) and the deciduous toon – to European navies and civilian merchants. It would seem that most British naval personnel and officers of marines at that time could easily identify cedar by sight and smell. At least one would have thought so. Yet it did take a while for Phillip, Hunter, Collins, White, Tench, Dawes and others who were bright enough to be excited at the discovery of a marvellous timber to drop the ‘walnut’ and ‘perhaps mahogany’ and state the obvious – those huge trees, with their beautiful rich canopy of leaves in summer, growing on the banks of the Nepean/Hawkesbury were cedars. (Vader, 21)
To the simple-minded among us, among whom I am proud to count myself, there is nothing obvious about the cedar-ness of Toona australis. If the Cedar of Lebanon and the other members of the genus Cedrus are cedars, then the Australian Red Cedar is not one. No one has ever argued that the White Cedar (Melia azedarach) is a cedar, obviously or otherwise. The White Cedar and the Red, and the Incense Cedar (Anthocarapa nitidula) are in the Meliaceae, as is the Onion Cedar (Owenia cepiodora), whose wood, when the genuine article was exhausted, was soaked in running water to remove the characteristic onion smell, sawn and sold as Red Cedar, to such an extent that mature Onion Cedars are now almost as rare as old-growth Red Cedars. There are no fewer than three species called Pencil Cedar. One of them, Dysoxylum mollissimum, is in the same family, as is its relative D. rufum, sometimes called Bastard Pencil Cedar. The other two Pencil Cedars, Polyscias murrayi and Glochidion ferdinandi, are not even distant relatives, nor is the Black Pencil Cedar, Polyscias elegans. Euroschinus falcata is not a cedar either, though it is called by some Chinaman’s Cedar because its wood is another cheap substitute for Red Cedar. It is a member of the Anacardiaceae, along with Yellow Cedar, Rhodosphaera rhodanthema. Every one of these pseudo-cedars grows in the Cave Creek rainforest. Catch me calling anything an ‘obvious’ cedar.
In 1791 Governor Phillip sent samples of Red Cedar collected from the Hawkesbury district back to England, together with potted sample plants for Sir Joseph Banks (Vader, 21). Within a few months Hawkesbury cedar was being felled wholesale and delivered to Port Jackson for use in the new colonial buildings. What made the process easier was that Red Cedar floats high in the water. For the early timber-getters, who were working along the coastal forests and lower reaches of the rivers, it was a relatively easy matter to fell the trees, and snig the logs to the nearest watercourse, where they were lashed together and floated to coastal ports to be shipped overseas. The work was dangerous: ‘There is much bullock-punching and rafting up to your middle in water. A timber-getter has much of the aquatic animal about him, and does not care much for sharks, fiddlers or stingarees, in the muddy waters. He is a caution to snakes at any time . . .’ (BC, 5 August 1876)
The first attempt at regulating the industry was made in 1795 but, with no way of policing the area or of exercising legislative control, the activity of the timber-getters continued unchecked. Ships making landfall anywhere along the coast were only too ready to load up with cedar as ballast. Within months of the discovery of the Hunter River in 1797, the timber-getters had felled most of the cedar that grew along its banks. By 1798 Red Cedar was the colony’s third-largest export. In 1802 the colonial administration issued a more rigorous order, which simply proved that earlier attempts to stop the rush for ‘red gold’ had been ineffectual. The timber-getters, way ahead of the game, had already pressed northwards into uncharted territory. By 1829 they had opened up the Manning River, by 1832 the Macleay, by 1838 the Clarence, and in every case the result was the same. Once the forests were torn apart, the increased run-off brought more topsoil to the rivers. The once deep and fast-flowing streams became shallow and sluggish.
The cedar-getters forged onwards, into the vast rainforest known as the Big Scrub in the valley of the Richmond River and swiftly on to the Tweed. Others were also moving southward from the new convict settlement of Moreton Bay, now Brisbane. Here they encountered resistance from the local Aboriginal peoples but, even so, ‘valuable rafts of cedar, beech, pine &c’ were a common sight on the southern reaches of Moreton Bay (BC, 5 August 1876). By 1870 the valuable timber was gone from all the accessible parts of south-east Queensland. One of the few places where it could still be found was Numinbah.
Timber-getting was a tough way to make a living anywhere. Bernard O’Reilly gives a wonderfully vivid account of how his brothers and cousins dealt with forest on the other side of the Nerang Valley, on the Lamington Plateau, forest very similar to CCRRS. ‘First hooks were used to slash the thorny, stinging entanglements that defied entry to the great forest . . .’ (O’Reilly, 101–2) The hooks were what Australians call brush hooks, which are the same as the British hedging tools called slashers. To keep its operator out of range of lashing spines and stinging leaves, not to mention the odd affronted snake, the brush hook has a long straight handle and a heavy slightly curved blade. It is used as much to bash down the brush as to slice through it, but the blade is kept razor-sharp, to fell at a stroke any of the many saplings that crowd the forest floor. The understorey for several yards all around the target tree would be slashed with the hook to allow room for the axe swing, leaving serried ranks of pointed stakes.
The thorny entanglements are many, most commonly Cockspur Thorn, Lawyer Vine and Prickly Supplejack. Cockspur Thorn (Maclura cochinchinensis) will grow right through forest trees, to emerge in the canopy as branching sprays of long sharp spines. Lawyer Vine (Calamus muelleri), also known as Hairy Mary and Wait-a-while, is actually a palm, that grows in long canes that loop and snake through the undergrowth. Every part is armed with thousands of spines, all sharp and capable of drawing blood, but worst of all are the almost invisible developing flower spikes whose tiny hooks catch in flesh or cloth and hold on. To struggle is to give the springing fronds another opportunity to take hold. To pick the toothed fronds off is to end up bloody. Prickly Supplejack (Ripogonum spp.) is easier to deal with, but not much.
The stinging guardians of the forest are first and foremost what the old botanists called Urtica gigas, the tree nettle, now called Dendrocnide excelsa, but still in the Urticaceae. O’Reilly, who tells a harrowing tale of how his brother Tom ended up wrapped in the branches of a giant stinger, called it Gympie Gympie. (Gympie is a version of a Yugambeh word meaning ‘stinging tree’.) The true Gympie Stinger is D. moroides, common further north. Our Giant Stinger has bigger leaves that are truly heart-shaped, whereas the Gympie Stinger leaves are ovate and often peltate, which means that the leafstalk instead of attaching to the edge of the leaf blade is attached within it. Both trees sting like fire, delivering formic acid through fine stellate hairs that cover every part of the plant. From the beginning of our work in the forest I have loved this species and worked hard to propagate it. (No professional grower will offer it, for obvious reasons.) Not only are the young trees very beautiful with their foot-long heart-shaped leaves of apple-green silk-velvet, each accurately pinked around the margin, they are exceptionally willing, springing up wherever there is disturbance, holding up their huge leaves like shields to screen the wounded forest from draughts and other noxious influences. They offer a salient reminder that trees are not for hugging. There is no room for touchy-feeliness in the forest.
You’d reckon that such offensiveness in a plant would be principally a protection against being eaten, but in fact Dendrocnide excelsa is the worst victim of herbivory in the whole forest community. Every mature stinger has leaves reduced to lace by a chrysomelid beetle, Hoplostines viridipennis, whose mouth parts are not such that it is troubled by stinging hairs.
It is strange, but becoming less strange to me as I begin to understand the forest, to think that the role of the Giant Stinger is not to protect itself from herbivory but to defend the forest. The leaves of mature trees up in the canopy sting far less than the leaves that their juvenile offspring present at the level of face or neck. D. excelsa is helped by a sneaky relative, D. photinophylla, the Shiny-leaved Stinger, which is far less distinctive, having leaves of regulation Hookers Green that resemble the leaves of lots of other understorey plants. The native herbaceous nettle, Urtica incisa, stings with almost as much vim as its tree relatives. In all three cases, to wet the skin is to reactivate the delivery system in the hairs, renewing the painful burning, sometimes for weeks.
In the Cave Creek rainforest the huge trees clutch at the rocks with wandering flanges rather than sending down a single anchoring root. As O’Reilly says, the trees ‘are supported mainly by high buttresses which in many cases extend more than twelve feet from the tree proper and which make tree-felling from the ground level an impossibility. This calls for the use of a springboard; made of light wood, four feet long and a foot wide, it has at one end a steel tip, which is inserted into a horizontal slot cut into the tree.’ (102) The tip of just such a springboard has been found by the workers at CCRRS. The timber has rotted away; all that is left is the massive forged iron V and four stout nuts and bolts still hanging in their sockets. There is a downturned tooth at the apex of the V so that as the axeman bounced on the board he drove the tip further into the trunk.
Some fellers cut toe-holes in the tree so they could climb up and fix the springboard, others knocked up a makeshift platform-cum-ladder. Before chopping or sawing could begin, the cutters had to study the tree, assess any twist or hollow in the trunk, decide which way it would fall, and cut out a shallow wedge or ‘scarf’ on that side. They would tap the tree with the back of the axe, listening to hear if it was ‘piped’, that is, if there was a hollow running up inside it. The scarf was offset slightly to leave a heel, in the hope of preventing the tree’s suddenly snapping off as the saw teeth or axe blade cut further into it. The bark was then peeled away so that it wouldn’t clog the teeth of the saws. If the scarf was wrongly placed, and the weight of the tree pulled it in the wrong direction, the saw would be trapped, so wedges were driven into the cut to keep it open.
on this narrow rocking perch the settler swings his razor-edged axe, sometimes twenty and even thirty feet from the ground, which bristles with the sharp stumps of slashed undergrowth. Then, when the tree begins to go, he must descend swiftly, bringing not only his axe but his springboard. All good fellers bring their boards to the ground to obviate the possibility of fouling by the falling tree. (O’Reilly, 102–3)
There is no knowing now how our springboard came to be abandoned in the forest. The forged iron tip would not have been jettisoned even if the springboard had broken; it would have been unscrewed from the broken board and fitted to the new one. If it was left behind, it was because retrieving it was impossible. For a springboard to be abandoned, there must have been an accident, one of many in the forest. I keep the iron tip as a sacred relic, sacred to the memory of the human beings – and the trees – that lost their lives.
The O’Reilly boys all at one time or another sustained terrible injuries from their own axes. Ped and Herb both severed leg tendons; Pat buried his axe in his abdomen; Norb stitched a cut on his leg with needle and cotton. By way of variation on the self-injury theme, Mick fell from his springboard and was impaled on a spike. The most dangerous things in the forest were not however the men’s axes but the enormous trees, with their long clear boles and heavy canopy. The largest living Red Cedar recorded was 54.5 metres tall; dropping it must have been like dropping Nelson’s Column.
The swaying of the heavy tops may form wind cracks right up through the heart of the tree. Suppose – and here I quote a case that is not infrequent – a man on a springboard fifteen feet from the ground has just chopped into the heart of a tree: a puff of wind bends the heavy top outwards. Then with the sound of a bursting bomb, the trunk splits up through the heart as far as the branches; the riven half lashes out and upwards, perhaps sixty feet, with a fearful sweep, as the head drops forward; for a split second the tree may balance horizontally by the middle on the shattered, upright trunk sixty feet above, then, pivoting wildly, it drops full length beside the stump. From first to last the calamity may have taken three seconds or less; even had there been time for action, no one could predict the ultimate position of that one hundred and fifty feet of tree as it struck the ground . . . (O’Reilly, 103)
Once the trees began to fall, the cutters had to leap for their lives, hoping to avoid not only the sharp stakes beneath them, but the torn-off branches that came crashing down from above. They called those branches ‘widowmakers’. Each tree was knitted to its neighbours by tough vines that played their own role in strengthening the underpinnings of the canopy.
A big tree in falling, may, through the medium of these vines, tear off large portions of a tree-top fifty yards behind it, in the direction an axeman is most likely to run for cover; again, a big vine, well anchored behind, may by its pull, deflect the falling tree into a high fork from which it will slide back off its own greasy stump and bury its butt in the earth a chain away. (O’Reilly, 104)
In attacking the bases of trees more than a hundred feet tall the fellers were invoking chaos. Each time a forest giant measured its length they were at the mercy of unforeseeable consequences. Nobody knows how many of the men and boys who tried their luck at timber-getting lost their lives or were permanently maimed. For an injured man there was nothing for it but to attempt to control bleeding and infection by any means to hand. If it was decided that he had to seek medical attention, he ran a significant risk of dying before he got to it. The only available painkiller was also the only available disinfectant, rum.
The men who went after red gold in the Australian rainforests had little hope of getting rich. The money would be made by the middlemen, the sawmillers and timber merchants, who could buy cheap from the timber-getters who had nowhere else to go.
These sawyers and their mates are a strange wild set, comprising in general a good proportion of desperate ruffians, and sometimes a few runaways, they themselves being commonly ticket-of-leave men or emancipists. Two or three pair, accompanied by one or two men for falling, squaring small timber, and digging pits, shoulder their axes and saws, and with a sledge and a dray-load of provisions, proceed to some solitary brush where they make a little ‘gunya’, or hut, with a few sheets of bark, and commence operations. (Henderson, 88–9)
Because cedar-getters were prevented by law from actually settling on crown land, they had no way of investing their money and no incentive to save it. When supplies ran out, they would head back to the nearest township to sell the cut.
The cedar dealers furnish them from time to time with salt provisions, flour, tea and sugar; and every three or four months the sawyers travel down to the cedar dealers, who live at the mouths of the rivers, for a settlement of their accounts . . . [The dealers] take care to have a good assortment of clothing, tobacco, &c in their huts, with which they furnish the sawyers at an advance of about three hundred per cent on the Sydney prices: this with a cask or so of rum and wine, to enable the sawyers to have a fortnight’s drinking bout, generally balances their accounts. (Hodgkinson, 28)
The timber-cutters, it seems, were vulnerable to their own version of the ‘lambing down’ that kept shearers poor. Clement Hodgkinson is here describing the cedar-getters he observed on the Macleay in 1847; much the same situation was observed further north on the Clarence.
The old cedar-getters usually worked about three months in the year, taking a load of cedar to Grafton or Bellingen, and with the proceeds buying enough food and grog to do them three or four months. When this was gone, they would then go in to the scrub for another load, and so on until the timber cut out.
In 1869, when New South Wales premier John Robertson visited the Tweed, the reporter who accompanied him waxed hyperbolic about cedar-getters.
They are the roughest of rough fellows – muscular as a working bullock, hairy as a chimpanzee, obstinate as a mule, simple as a child, generous as the slave of Aladdin’s lamp. A fondness for rum, and a capacity for absorbing vast quantities of that liquid, are among their prominent characteristics. They are also in the habit of ‘bruising’ each other upon the smallest provocation; and it is a noticeable fact that one of the surest ways of securing the friendship of a cedar-cutter is to knock him down. (SMH, 26 August)
Edmund Harper, one of the two boys who found the huge cedar in 1846, tells us in an article written nearly fifty years later for The Queenslander:
Times were pretty rough . . . We generally went in little bands of 4 to 8 and made our huts close to the sawpits. We had to carry our water for over a mile on some of the mountains; we used to carry a five-gallon keg each . . . There was no scarcity of kegs on the Tweed in those days or of raw rum either I am sorry to say . . . (Q, 1 September 1894, 410)
Harper, thought to be the son of a man transported for housebreaking, was educated at Sydney College. How he ended up cedar-getting on the Tweed with William Duncan has yet to be explained. For a time Harper and Duncan were based in Brisbane, working as pit-sawyers. In 1863 Duncan sold up, bought a bullock team and travelled south through virgin bush to Nerang, where a cotton manufactury was to be set up, and cut and hauled timber for the construction of the factory. When that job was finished, he went timber-getting again. By 1869 when Duncan applied for a homestead grant of forty acres on the Nerang River at Gilston, he had been felling timber in the area at least since 1866, when he first applied for a licence, and possibly much longer. The Post Office directory gave his occupation as sawyer. Both Harper and Duncan could speak a number of Aboriginal languages, so it seems likely that in the beginning at least their workforce was Aboriginal. Duncan’s six sons all became pit-sawyers and bullockies. Harper set up a wharf on Little Tallebudgera Creek where cedar logs from the upper Nerang River were ‘dogged’ (chained together) for rafting.
At first Nixon exploited the timber he found on his own selections. In August 1878, in return for a payment of £3.15s, he secured three General Timber Licences that would permit him to log in the 40,000 acres of Timber Reserve. In November 1879 he took out two more, in May 1880 two more, and in October 1880 three more, and so on until December 1888. Rather than expose himself to the hardships and privations of cedar-getting, Nixon probably followed Bray’s example and recruited an Aboriginal workforce. As soon as they were felled the cylindrical carcasses of the trees were stripped of their bark, then of their sapwood, and then squared for transport or for ‘slabbing up’; the work was done in the Queensland brushes by eye, without the benefit of any sort of marking or measuring. When ‘G. C. C.’ visited the Tweed in 1876 he was impressed by the contribution of Aboriginal workers. ‘I found them engaged the same as the white men – viz. squaring cedar logs, and I was told that they had a truer eye in squaring the side of a log straight than the best timber-getters.’ (BC, 5 August)
Aborigines were employed also to find the cedar, cut the tracks to the trees, cut them down, snig the logs to a watercourse and ride them down to Nerang, where other Aboriginal workers would tie the logs together to be rafted to Brisbane. This they did often for no other reward than a weekly plug of tobacco. According to Carl Lentz, ‘They mostly got their own food, game, yams, etc., were in abundance’ (Lentz, 25). ‘G. C. C.’ corroborates this: ‘For a little tea and tobacco, [the blackfellows] find out where the cedar is on the mountains or pocket scrub.’ Clearly they would not allow themselves to be so callously exploited indefinitely.
There is no way of removing canopy trees that will not cause utter devastation. The trees are knitted together by lianes; what surrounding trees are not themselves knocked down by the fall of the heavy crown will be dragged down by the vines that knit them to it. Whether the sawn logs are dragged to a shoot to slide down to a collection point, or snigged, that is, dragged through the jungle, even if roads are cut to them, the forest is utterly devastated. Somehow, Nixon acquired a reputation for being unusually destructive. According to Numinbah historian Donna Yaun:
the later trade (forestry) he abused to a great degree, having the idea of getting the logs into the stream with the medium of the aboriginal inhabitants, payment being made in those unbecoming habits of white men and the promise of better things to come, which was in all the death knell for the children of the Australian bushland. (undated newspaper clipping, Gold Coast City Library)
Mrs Yaun did not come to the valley until 1984, nearly a hundred years after Nixon left it, but her husband’s ancestors actually knew Nixon. When Gresty, who was for many years Senior Park Ranger for the National Parks Division of the Department of Forestry, singles out Nixon for condemnation in 1946, he cites a persisting oral tradition.
His methods were ruthless and his indiscriminate despoliation of the red cedar is still an unpleasant memory among the descendants of the pioneer timber getters. (59)
Some notion of the devastation can be gleaned from an account given by Nixon’s niece Florence Bray of her attempt to travel from the Tweed to her uncle’s homestead in 1884:
we set out to spend the winter holidays at Numinbah. It was about twenty miles away . . . there seemed to be a perfect maze of paths and track after track that we tried ended up in a large felled cedar tree, or the patch where one had lain before being cut up and drawn away by the bullock teams . . . (Bray, Florence, 56)
What the children encountered in the devastated forest was the evidence of the mismanagement of a mission that had always been impossible.
The cutters felled the trees and walked out over the rough miles to explain to the bullockies if possible, just where the big logs lay. Many cut logs could not be reached, they were too deep in the forest and too far away from the bullocks’ feeding grounds . . . Nixon tried to slide them into the Nerang River, where, he reasoned, the next flood racing down from the mountain heights would sweep them into the backwater estuary at Southport. (Groom, 90)
There was nothing unusual in Nixon’s attempt to use the freshes to shift his timber; it was what everyone did. For years correspondents of The Queenslander had been complaining of logs left to decay in the forest and of creeks jammed with half-rotten timber. For months on end the rain was not enough and the creeks were too low to move anything. Then, when the skies opened, roaring torrents would leap down the gulleys, rolling massive boulders as they went, bouncing even the biggest logs end over end until they were splintered.
The scheme was a big failure, a huge waste of timber. Many logs were left in the jungle, some found this century half rotten, others washed out to sea or smashed against boulders . . . (Groom, 90)
One condition of timber licences was that the felled logs had to be removed from the forest within twelve months. Any that were left lying longer would be forfeit to the state. In 1880 a duty of two shillings per 100 super feet was imposed on fallen cedar, in the hope of slowing down the rate of deforestation.
It was already far too late. An observer noticed in 1876:
The devastating axe of the timber-getter has made dire havoc among the cedar brushes, and where a few years ago immense quantities of the wood were to be found, there is not now a single tree worth the cutting. The sawyers are a most wasteful set of men. They spoil more timber than they use. They cut and square only the very best parts of a tree, leaving great masses of cedar, which would fetch a great price in the market, to rot unheeded in the brushes. They destroy young trees, too, with most culpable carelessness, and wishing only to seize present advantages, care not a button how many young trees they destroy in cutting down an old one. In about twenty years such a thing as a cedar tree will not be found in the country. (BC, 5 August)
This dismal prediction was only too true. For years too many people had been getting too much cedar too fast. In Queensland a thousand men were said to be ‘engaged in this one industry’. Cedar was being stockpiled; sawmillers and shippers alike were refusing to take new rafts at any price. It was in this situation of crisis that the Queensland government decided that the state should gain more from the wholesale exploitation of its most valuable commodity, and announced the imminent increase of the duty on cedar from two shillings per 100 super feet to twelve shillings.
The tax on felled timber not did apply to sawn timber. Canny operators, some of whom were timber-getters themselves, were already acquiring sawmilling equipment. The felled timber was considered the property of the feller, who had no way of earning income from it until it was sold. The proposed tax of twelve shillings per super foot on unsold timber was more than its value, once the costs of transport had been paid.
All over Queensland, timber-getters organised to defeat the government’s intention. On 9 September 1882 a meeting was convened at Tobin’s Music Hall in Nerang, in the presence of the local member of the state parliament. Nixon seconded the first resolution, to get up a petition against the proposed tax; and proposed the third:
‘That the timber-getters, being the pioneers, and having gone to considerable expense in making roads etc., and as they form a considerable proportion of the population of the district, claim consideration at the hands of the government.’
He stated that the roads had been formed by the timber-getters in places where the Government could never have gone and that the roads being made opened up the country and induced settlement. The timber-getter was already heavily taxed, with license fee, divisional board rates, &c. (BC, 12 September)
Another motion provided for a committee charged with preparing and presenting the petition to the state parliament, on which Nixon was slated to serve. This motion was seconded by a ‘Mr Ginnay’, probably Timothy Guinea, who had selected one half of what is now CCRRS for timber, or perhaps his son John, who selected the other half.
Selectors were of course entitled to fell and/or sell the timber off their own land either as standing timber or logs.
Quite a raid is now set in upon all useful timber, whether pine, beech, or hardwood, and the number of saw mills south of Beenleigh has, during the past year, quite doubled the power of reducing logs into quartering and boards, so that every settler who has trees is courted by two or three parties till he sells all the trees on his selection . . . Further south, settlers without means to obtain bullocks and trucks for drawing logs are casting about for someone to find the money, so that their sons may go to work in stripping the farms of the timber. But settlers and millowners both in the bush and in the town should recollect that while cabbages may give a crop every year, it will be widely otherwise with crops of timber trees. (BC, 25 April 1884)
It was already too late to protect the forests, even if a timber royalty, as the cedar duty came to be called, had been the way to do it. On 20 May a meeting of timber-getters was convened at Nerang.
There were about 60 persons present representing about 60 teams engaged in the timber trade. Frank Nixon Esq. J.P. of Numinba, Upper Nerang, occupied the chair.
Eight resolutions were passed nem con, including:
1. That the proposed new timber regulations would materially cripple the interests of the district
2. That the proposed royalty will be (a) unjust, (b) excessive, (c) vexatious, and (d) almost impossible to collect
3. That the Ranger could not distinguish on a wharf the timber taken from Crown lands from that taken from free-holds
4. That it was an utter impossibility for a ranger’s measurement to be anything like a buyer’s measurement
5. That New Zealand timber could be sold in Brisbane at less price than the Queensland timber getter could produce it for . . .
Nixon made his own contribution, which was reported thus:
From the Coomera River to the border there were six rivers, viz., Coomera, Nerang, Little Nerang, Mudgeraba, Tallebudgera, and the Currumbin. All the timber on those rivers that is get-at-able with horse or bullock teams has been removed years ago. The timber now left was in small patches, and very little in a patch, at the heads of these rivers, in difficult places near the main range. Cedar was not even found there in more than 2 or 3 in a group, and sometimes were from half a mile to a mile apart . . . The only payable method of working these cases was to put the timber into the river and wait for a flood, and sometimes 3 or 4 years are lost before anything can be realised.
Charles Batten, Ranger of Crown Lands, was already busy seeking out and confiscating felled timber that had not been removed from the forest. On 2 June 1885, 99,000 super feet of cedar, marked with a broad arrow, were sold in four lots at the Nerang police office (Q, 23 May). A smaller lot was marked and sold in August to be followed by an astonishing 115,229 super feet in October (Q, 8 August).
Government inspectors kept pointing out that certain clauses associated with the timber contracts had lapsed. In one inspector’s count Nixon had 62 logs of cedar, totalling 54,000 super feet, left in the forest. The timber was seized on paper and put up for sale in the hope that some other person might risk the transport difficulties. Nixon bid unsuccessfully, three pence per 100 feet for his own timber, which was passed in without a sale being made. He gave up the cedar business as a costly failure. (Groom, 90–1)
In 1888 the timber taxes were abolished, but for Nixon as for many another timber-getter, it was already too late. The recession in the rural economy had bitten deep; bullock teams had had to be sold; sawmills had been closed down, and their equipment sold off. Nobody could afford to move the fallen timber.
All over the mountain slopes at the head of the Nerang River huge logs of Rosewood and Red Cedar are lying rotting, so slowly that after rather more than a century some are still solid. Dozens lie jammed in the creeks or thrown up on the banks, festooned with mat rush and climbing ferns, starred with elaborate fungi that shine out like lamps in the arboreal gloom. The CCRRS workforce knows better than to suggest moving them, even when a flood banked behind two of them wiped out the better part of a creekside planting. We could sell them even now, but to me they are monuments, not simply to the lost grandeur of the virgin forest, but to the many nameless men and boys who struggled to make a decent living the only way they could. Above all they commemorate Frank Nixon’s unfortunate Aboriginal workers, who could expect no medical attention for the terrible injuries that were the timberworkers’ lot and could well have paid for their weekly plugs of tobacco with their lives. Carl Lenz recalled a meeting with an Aboriginal forestry worker who he hoped would tell him the truth about the Bunyip:
I met a Richmond River native – his two mates arrived to take him away. They had a job scrub falling. The poor chap got a cut on the leg with an axe, they had no doctor, and he died . . . (Lentz, 26)
When the most inaccessible recesses of the Numinbah Valley were finally surveyed, and opened for selection, they were selected for their timber. The first owner of CCRRS, Timothy James Guinea, arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1836. The two parcels that make up CCRRS were among six selected by Guinea and two of his sons. The whole Guinea family, who made their home at Advancetown, the hub of the timber traffic, was involved in logging and hauling of timber with bullock teams. As they gradually exploited their craggy holdings, hunting out the remaining Red Cedar deep in the gorges, and scanning the steep hillsides for signs of the deciduous trees in winter, or the flushed pink new growth of spring, they would carve out tracks to get to it. Once they had felled the target tree they often had to build roads with picks and shovels to haul out the carcass.
In 1893 Timothy’s youngest son Din Guinea, working in the forest at Cave Creek along with his mate Sandy Duncan (who found the Natural Bridge), came across the biggest cedar they had ever seen. Confronted with this botanical marvel with its unusually bottle-shaped trunk, deep in the trackless forest, the only thing they could think to do was to cut it down. This proved something of a challenge, because they couldn’t find anyone who had a cross-cut saw that was long enough. Eventually, having joined forces with Hector Burns, a famous bullocky and an erstwhile confederate of Nixon, Guinea found a Canadian who did.
The splitting of the big cedar log was done by an American named Henry Fritch, who had at one time in his adventurous career been a trader among the Red Indians. He had his special saw which he brought from America, with what he called the ‘Lumberman’ tooth. With great skill he bored a row of holes along opposite sides of the log, using a six foot long auger. These holes were only two or three inches apart, and he used blasting powder in them to start the splitting process which was finished with huge wedges and a screw-jack. (Burns narrowly escaped death with a mistimed blast.) The edges were then squared with a broad-axe to reduce the width to what would fit on the bullock waggon beds. After all this wastage Messrs Guinea and Burns were paid for more than 4,100 super in the two pieces of one ten foot long log. The tree was believed to contain a total of 11,000 super feet in five logs. (Hall et al., 82)
The butt log of the great tree was full 34 feet round.
The second log was the best and was sent to the first World Fair to be shown in Paris, 1900 A. D. It was then sent to the Crystal Palace in London, put in a glassed-in room for show with bright metal plates of the names of the getters, also where it grew, to be left for perpetuity.
Perpetuity is not what it used to be. The Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936 and the great log went with it.
That amazing tree was not the only candidate for the biggest Red Cedar ever; every district had its own and the Numinbah Valley had several. A cedar removed at about the same time from CCRRS is said to have yielded a record 18,000 super feet of marketable timber. It is odd to think now of the Guineas felling and carting hundreds of trees off Cave Creek properties, yet leaving the valuable timber felled by Nixon to lie where it fell, but there was an honour among timber-getters which required them never to saw or ship another man’s wood. Duncan and Guinea were probably not informed when Nixon died in Thargomindah in 1896. Perhaps they were afraid of Mrs Nixon, who until 1904 was the most powerful landowner in the valley.
The land that is now CCRRS changed hands regularly. At one point part of it became the property of one Albert P. Abraham, who lived there with his family until one rainy night in January 1910 tragedy struck:
Albert F. Abraham was . . . last seen alive at Upper Nerang on Saturday evening, and left about 9.30 to ride to his home. Rain was falling heavily, and the creeks and gullies which he had to cross were flooded. About 5 p.m. yesterday a search party discovered the dead body of the unfortunate man in the creek, about three chains from the crossing. His horse was found alive near by, having been caught in the vines growing on the bank. Abraham was a native of the district, 30 years of age, unmarried, and resided with his parents. (BC, 19 January)
There was no other way for young Abraham to get from ‘Upper Nerang’, since 1939 called Numinbah Valley, to his parents’ property than to follow the track that crisscrossed the river, in those days still known as Nerang Creek. When rain falls along the McPherson Range, the headwaters of the Nerang can become raging torrents shifting millions of tons of turbid water, rolling rocks as big as houses, only to subside within a few hours, leaving the streambeds entirely reconfigured. These were the ‘freshes’ that the timber-getters hoped would shift their timber. Travelling along these mountain streams was always dangerous; drownings of men and beasts were common. Soon after the loss of their son, the Abraham family sold up and left Numinbah.
The devastation of Numinbah did not stop when the Red Cedar and White Beech were exhausted. There was still demand for cabinet timbers like Black Bean (Castanospermum australe), ‘used for veneers, radio cabinets, turnery and furniture’ (Floyd, 2008, 159). The Tulip Oaks or Booyongs (Heritiera trifoliolata and H. actinophylla) were also sought for their fine grain, as was the sweet-smelling fine-figured Rosewood (Dysoxylum fraserianum), one of the biggest but also one of the slowest-growing trees in the forest. Next to be cut out was the Hoop Pine that grew on the upper reaches of the valley floor under the scarps. It was used for ‘plywood veneer, butter boxes, all indoor work, flooring, lining, and all joinery’ (Floyd, 2008, 59). After Hoop Pine disappeared from the wild an attempt was made by the Queensland Department of Forestry to grow it in plantations. The remainder of a plantation still survives within the confines of the neighbouring national park, a mass of close-planted dark trees that cannot now be felled. Instead they are gradually falling, as the rainforest rises slowly, inexorably around them.
The Numinbah Valley was the preserve of timber-getters and bullockies for a hundred years. For most of the 1920s twenty-six bullock teams were occupied full-time in removing its timber. Some was shipped whole; more was sawn into slabs in sawpits where the tree trunk was laid over a trench, so that the two-handed cross-saw could be used to cut it longways into slabs, with one man working from above and another below. The earliest dwellings in the district were built of pit-sawn slabs. For twenty years the only sawmill was at Nerang; in 1881 another was built down the valley at ‘Pine Mountain’ (now called Pages Pinnacle) for a Brisbane firm specifically to mill Hoop Pine.
From the beginning Cudgerie (Flindersia schottiana) had been harvested along with Red Cedar. Crow’s Ash (Flindersia australis), sometimes called teak, which was greasy like teak, with a hard interlocking grain, was the timber of choice for ballroom floors, as well as railway sleepers, decking, and carriage and coach building. Next came Bolly Gum (Litsea reticulata), Red Carabeen (Geissois benthamii) and Yellow Carabeen (Sloanea woollsii), which took over some of the uses of White Beech, as well as serving for plywood and boxes. Brush Box too was sought for heavier duty in wharves and bridges.
The coming of the Second World War simply accelerated the despoliation of the forests. After the war the devastation accelerated because the loggers now had bulldozers to cut the snigging tracks and trucks with caterpillar treads to carry the logs out. ‘Homes for heroes’ was the watchword: Forest, Spotted, Red and Flooded Gums, Grey Ironbark, Carabeen, White Mahogany, Brown Tulip Oak, Blackbutt, Tallowwood, Red, White and Yellow Stringybark, and Brush Box, all were felled to answer the demand for hardwood timber. The timbers were needed too for electricity and telephone poles and for railway sleepers. Sawmills sprang up everywhere, including in the forest above CCRRS (Portion 182). A sawmill operated there from the mid-Fifties until 1972, when it was moved to a more convenient location (Portion 190). (It has since been burnt down.)
To walk in the old-growth forest now is to walk in the deep scars left by this relentless exploitation, along tracks that have been gouged out of the mountainside, in a mess of tangled vegetation and torn roots. The decapitated boles rear up alongside, sometimes surrounded by a ring of young trees sprung from their spreading buttress roots. Often the bole bears a headdress of some precious epiphyte, Vittaria elongata maybe or Asplenium polyodon. The gaps in the forest have been colonised by myrtaceous Brush Box, which outgrew the rainforest saplings that still stand in their dappled shade waiting for their opportunity. With us Brush Box is a handsome tree, with stout rose-pink limbs, thick, glossy leaves and fringed white flowers. A ridge a kilometre or two north of CCRRS supports what appears to be a monoculture of opportunist Brush Box. Occasionally I see the tall column of a Flooded Gum, Eucalyptus grandis, a sign that the beloved forest had to cope with fire, as well as with axes and cross-cut saws, chainsaws and backhoes, bullock teams and bulldozers.
One day, high up in the forest on an old snigging track, I found steel cable nearly as thick as my wrist with a lading hook at one end. I followed its snaking length into the undergrowth till I found the other end, its steel strands splayed and frayed. Sixty years ago or so, as a tractor snigged a tree carcass, the cable hooked around it must have twisted, overheated and suddenly, terribly, burst apart. The cable would have sprung and lashed wildly before it came to rest here on the track. Whenever I pass that way, I stop amid the ferns to pay my respects.