1850s
He went up the river in search of dry open country, described by Edward Ogilvie. One afternoon he rode over the low gap to the lovely Wyangarie Plain. He thought it the most beautiful spot he had ever seen, a smooth open plain with one clump of heavy timber and two or three small lagoons sparkling in the sun and backed by a panorama of mountains at varying distance and the river fringed with a scrub making a sweep round the back of the plain and holding in its curve a low wooded hill that my father instantly decided should be the site of his future home.
He moved his sheep up to these drier plains and living in a sort of tent made from bark and his men in another, went to work energetically to build a wool shed ready for the shearing which had to be done shortly.
The whole country was covered by a thick crop of Kangaroo Grass, then in seed, and looking like a crop of Oats, beautiful to look at but very easy to get alight and not easy to put out so that a few weeks later, soon after the woolshed had been finished, a fire started and the whole thing burnt to the ground . . .
In my childhood we were quite away by ourselves in the bush, never seeing any other children and playing very happily at games of our own invention and as we grew old enough. riding about and fishing in the many creeks and the river.
The constant demand for water from both house and huts was a great tax on bullocks and drivers. So, in fine weather the women generally set up a pot beside the river and washed their clothes in the running water, spreading them to dry on the grassy banks. The Upper Richmond was then a beautiful stream of clear water, running over clean sand and pebbles, an ideal of beauty and purity not to be surpassed anywhere, with steeply shelving banks either of clean grass or shaded by beautiful trees of many kinds, one of the most beautiful being the Moreton Bay Chestnut with its deep glossy leaves in spring, its clusters of red and yellow blossom and later the big green pods, which we children spent many hours sailing as boats on the river . . .
The term “Scrub” for the great forests, which, in the early days, covered the banks of the Richmond, Tweed and Brunswick Rivers and which stretched back unbroken over the ranges to the top of the McPherson range, was a decided misnomer and gives no idea of the beauty of what was really a semi-tropical jungle. It was a mass of splendid trees, running up to 60 feet without a branch before forming a head and growing so closely that the sunshine was completely cut off. In some districts there was a great undergrowth of creepers and vines, especially the notorious “Lawyer Vine”. . .
Upper Richmond was very free from vines. I have walked through it for miles and never seen the sun except where some great tree had fallen and made a gap in the green roof overhead. As you stood and looked around your view was bounded by the great brown tree stems which closed in around me.
Visions of Australia: Impressions of the Landscape 1642–1910,
Eric Rolls (ed.), Lothian, Melbourne, 2002