1850
I went down among the sawyers at the lower part of the river, with a black fellow as guide for twenty miles – the way lay over some ridges, a mere track, and the last part we were three hours going through one of these brushes – merely walking the horse – the trees are immense – there is the tree bearing the purple plum that grows on the Hunter – in fact all those kinds of brush trees, only enormous – the time we took will give you an idea of the size and width of the brush, and then we did not arrive at the river, only a creek where the sawyers are – seven huts – men, women and children, all in the brush under immense trees – women and children are quite pale with a yellowish tint – got here almost dusk one evening and slept in one of the huts, not the best of quarters, and the following day went down to the bend of the river where I had to marry a couple – it was ten miles by water, the beaches lined with dense brush to water’s edge – and in some part pine trees 100 ft high – but not the least value.
The sawyers were indeed a race apart and in appearance a strange ghost-like band. The schooners of the timber fleet which brought their supplies and returned to Sydney loaded with cedar were their only contact with civilization. Hard work and a poor diet had reduced their bodies to bone and muscle on which their clothes hung ungracefully. Only the piercing eyes shining out from bearded faces showed the man within. Like pigmies, they toiled among the giant trees – eighty feet or more in height – teetering on shaky spring boards or snigging the logs to the river bank where they squared them with the pit-saw. Young men grew old and old men grew young and silly in the monotony of the work. To many, the colour of life was a reddish brown, like the earth they walked on, like the boles of the cedar trees when they were sliced through, like the lubras they lay with. The dreadful beauty and unreality of the forest was a subconscious fear they tried to subdue in wild drunken sprees. ‘Existence was always so close to the knife-edge of disaster’ from a falling tree or in the raging creeks at floodtime.
Men and a River: Richmond River District 1828–1895,
Louise Tiffany Daley, Melbourne University Press, 1966