White Beech: The Rainforest Years (29 page)

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 Queenslande
r
:

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 £3.15
s
, 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: