White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  Back at our hotel I complained to Jane. ‘I think I’m just going to have to give up. We’ve been hunting for some land for me for more than two years, and there just isn’t any.’

  ‘How about one last shot?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The James Range is the sort of country you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘That, or something like it.’

  Jane brandished the prospectus, where she had found an account of the original rescission of the lucerne farm from the parent property. ‘The James Range bisects the Orange Creek property. They’ve got a total of 560,000 acres, and they’re only running 3,000 to 3,500 head, so they’re certainly not using it all. Maybe they’ll let you have a bit.’

  Jane made some calls; we drove back past Stuart’s Well for the umpteenth time, to the Orange Creek homestead. The muster helicopter was standing by, so they let the pilot take me up for a good look at the range. As we pulled up and away from the red-earth helipad, the livid green disc of the lucerne farm slid beneath us, and I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t mine.

  ‘What did you think?’ asked the grazier when I got back.

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘It’s a bit rugged.’

  ‘Rugged is good.’

  ‘You’d need to make an access road, and it’d have to be properly engineered. That comes out expensive these days, because you have to observe all the environmental regs about drainage and dust and run-off. A single kilometre of graded road costs thousands and you’d need a lot more than one, because you’d have the easement to do as well. If you want to stick a house in the range somewhere you have to think about availability of water and power, and getting someone to build it for you, way out there.’

  Graziers’ houses are built as close as possible to main routes; only Aboriginal people deliberately choose outstations hidden in the hills. My mountain retreat would be the only thing of its kind in the centre.

  ‘I’ve got a builder who’s game.’

  ‘The real problem,’ said the grazier, ‘is getting land excised from the lease for your use. We could sublet to you, in theory, but you’d be mad to spend a lot of money improving land on my leasehold. I don’t want a house out there in the hills, so when your lease was up or when you wanted to move on, all your hard work and energy would just be left to rot back into the ground. I wouldn’t let you do it, even if I could without infringing the conditions of my lease.’

  ‘So what if you managed a freehold excision from the lease, the way the old owners of Orange Creek did with the lucerne farm?’ asked Jane.

  ‘That was for horticulture. The government is mad keen to develop horticulture in the centre. There’s a plan to make lots of freehold excisions of ten hectares each along the Finke and the Hugh, because there’s underground water really close to the surface, but the prices are going to be somewhere round $10,000 a hectare.’

  ‘That’s a lot of watermelon,’ said Jane.

  I’d been told that the grazier had acquired his lease for less than $3 million.

  ‘What do you as the landholder make out of this?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Nothing. We water the cattle with bore water anyway, so we don’t really need the river frontage, and we can’t expect much in the way of compensation. We’d rather just hang on to the land, for conservation reasons apart from anything else.’

  ‘Would it be really expensive to arrange for an excision of really arid land, like the rangeland? That wouldn’t be anything like $10,000 a hectare, would it?’

  ‘What you have to understand is that for a freehold property to be created on land at present covered by crown leasehold, the lease has to be rescinded, while the boundaries are resurveyed and redrawn. It’s not worth doing, unless there’s a fair bit of money involved, because the legal costs will be high. You won’t find leaseholders prepared to do it at all if the potential winnings aren’t high, because there’s a risk involved.’

  ‘Native title,’ said Jane.

  ‘Exactly. As soon as a crown lease is rescinded, the land becomes vulnerable to a native claim. It wouldn’t necessarily be successful, but it’s practically certain to be made and defended. The lawyers have a field day. It costs everyone money, and you could end up with nothing.’

  In the car on the way back to Alice, Jane said, ‘You wouldn’t contest the validity of any Aboriginal land claim, would you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never? No matter what?’

  ‘Never. No matter what.’

  ‘So that’s that?’

  ‘That’s that.’

  And that was that.

  The Bird

  Logan City lies twenty-five kilometres or thirty minutes south of the Brisbane Central Business District. Described as ‘young, dynamic and booming with growth’, it has sister city and friendship agreements with cities in China, Japan and Taiwan. Many immigrants disembarking for the first time on the shores of the lucky country wind up in Logan. They bring with them all the baggage of the uprooted – disorientation, grief, confusion, anxiety, exhaustion. Their suffering is compounded by the difficulties they encounter, in finding decent work, in gaining decent pay, and in accommodating and adjusting to the Australian way of life. Deracination is felt most keenly by women who are too often housebound and bereft of female kindred, entirely dependent upon the whims of their husbands as their mothers were not. The extent of physical and psychological illness experienced by first-generation migrant women is massive and largely undeclared. In 1992, with no funding from state or federal government, feminist activists in Logan set up a women’s health centre to be run by women for women. In 2000, desperate for cash, the organisers contacted me, asking what I would charge for a lecture that they could run as a fundraiser. I wrote back and said, ‘Nothing. Hire a hall, sell tickets and pocket the profits.’ When the desert project fell over, it was time for me to make my way to Logan, to fulfil my part of the bargain.

  It was a great night, as we say. As we were chatting afterwards, I told the organisers how I had been searching for a house in the centre. Many of them had worked with Aboriginal groups and many more knew careworkers in the centre. They promised to send a message on the bush telegraph asking if anyone out there could help me find a bit of land. Then someone said, ‘What about Ken’s place?’

  ‘You mean Ken’s mother’s place.’

  ‘Yeah. Ken’s really keen to sell that. It might be what you’re looking for.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘About an hour away, mebbe a bit more.’

  Ken is Ken Piaggio, a psychotherapist who worked at the women’s health centre. Next morning he and his wife Jane-Frances O’Regan turned up at my hotel, to take me to see the property. I hadn’t asked where it was. I hoped it was out to the west, beyond the Dividing Range, in the Darling Downs perhaps, but we were driving south, down the Pacific Highway towards the Gold Coast. My heart sank.

  At Nerang we left the highway, crossed the Nerang River and headed south-west through aspirational suburban developments towards the hinterland. The houses became fewer as the road began to climb into the hills, through fire-scarred sclerophyll forests. As we skirted a cutting Ken pointed out the high-rise buildings of Surfers Paradise, clearly visible against the grey-blue ocean. We passed a signpost that said ‘O’Reilly’s Plateau’.

  ‘O’Reilly’s? Is that Green Mountains up there?’

  Green Mountains was a set book at my convent school. I read my copy to pieces, longing to experience the country it described. It was written by Bernard O’Reilly, the man who in February 1937 set out alone from the family farm on the Lamington Plateau in search of a missing aircraft, convinced that it had to be where his sharp eyes had identified a single burnt tree amid the dark green of the rainforest. The story of how he picked his way through rugged jungle to find the crashed plane, with the two out of seven men aboard who were still alive, has gladdened the hearts of generations of Australian schoolchildren.

  ‘Yep. But it’s a l
ong way round. O’Reilly’s is due west of where we’re going, only a few ks away as the crow flies. Door to door the trip’s about 100 ks.’

  So maybe the country we were heading for wasn’t sumptuous like Green Mountains at all. I could see caravans and parkhomes on a site above the road.

  ‘That’s the new Advancetown. It used to be down there,’ Ken gestured with his left hand, ‘where the original track down from Beechmont met the old Numinbah Road. In 1970 or so it was decided that the dam on the Little Nerang River would have to be rebuilt on a far bigger scale to ensure a reliable water supply for the expanding Gold Coast, and so the valley was flooded and Advancetown went under water. A timber-getter called Ernest Belliss built a pub there. For eighty years the old bullockies who hauled the timber out of the hills used to meet and do business in the Bushmen’s Bar. It was an early slab-built structure, a really important part of local history. Belliss invented the name Advancetown and donated land and money to build a school. All gone now.’

  A sign high on the steep verge advertised the Advancetown Hotel.

  ‘Is that the same building?’

  ‘No. They did bring the Bushmen’s Bar up here and set it up behind that new building, but they soon sold it. It’s on private property somewhere, I think.’

  I know now that Belliss was an Englishman, from Shropshire, who came out to Australia in 1866. He is also the man who is believed to have plied one Aboriginal group with liquor and egged them on to attack others who had settled on land on the lower Nerang that had been set aside for an Aboriginal Industrial Mission. According to local man Carl Lentz, Belliss lost no time in getting up ‘a petition with a request to the Lands Department, he got plenty of signatures, to have the Natives reserve thrown open for selections . . . It was divided up in smaller portions and selected in quick time. Belliss selected a big share with plenty good hoop pine and other timber on it, and built a sawmill adjoining the mission station.’ For this estimable service a tributary of the Nerang now rejoices in the name Belliss Creek, if you’re driving one way, and Bellis Creek if you’re driving the other. Nothing remains to indicate that a gallant band of German missionaries had once moved heaven and earth to keep a foothold for Aboriginal people on the Nerang River.

  We passed another sign. ‘The Hinze Dam. Who was Hinze?’

  ‘Russ Hinze was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s local government minister,’ said Ken. ‘Not a local hero, as you might imagine. A lot of people had to move when the valley was flooded, and the people living above the lake had no way of getting to the coast when the road went under water. The dam’s been raised once and it’s due to be raised again. By 2010 the Advancetown Lake will cover 1,640 hectares. The upside is that the catchment can’t be zoned for development. You can fish here if you like; they’ve stocked it with bass, perch, Mary River cod, Saratoga, stuff like that. But you need a permit.’

  ‘I’d rather get me a flathead out of the ocean.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Ken. ‘The old Numinbah Road ran along the river, which had its disadvantages because it went under water fairly regularly, but it meant there were plenty of fishing holes and picnic spots. Not to mention all the old pioneer homesteads that were swallowed by the lake.’

  East of the road a knob-like head reared itself. ‘That’s Page’s Pinnacle. It used to be called Pine Mountain, but once the pine was logged out, they gave it a new name. The old name was already being used for a place near Ipswich.’

  ‘Who was Page?’

  ‘Sir Earle Page, the politician. He took up land round here, took the timber off it and then sold it.’

  A Harley Davidson motorbike swung around the bend ahead and came roaring towards us at high speed. A dozen more followed it, all ridden by men with beards and long grey hair, tricked out in full leathers, gauntlets, helmets, goggles and boots.

  ‘Bikies like this new road because there’s so many curves and so much reverse camber. Nobody else likes it much. They say it was designed and engineered by computer and the computer got it wrong. You might have noticed the crash zone sign? Bikies come to grief here fairly often. Just makes it more popular.’

  I had already noticed several wayside shrines to fallen bikies, bedizened with plastic flowers, beer cans, and T-shirts. I peered through the trees for a glimpse of the dam. The vegetation was a mix of eucalypts, Forest Red Gum, Grey Gum, Grey Ironbark, White Mahogany and Pink Bloodwood. The eucalypts seemed greener than I was used to and the understorey was grassier. Two of the grasses were native, Kangaroo Grass, Themeda australis, and Blady Grass, Imperata cylindrica. Casuarinas, that like to grow in lines along creeksides, had colonised the road cuttings. The country grew more rugged; the road straddled narrow gullies and the curves had got sharper. Some of the gullies were named.

  ‘Does Black Shoot Gully mean what I think it means?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with shooting blacks,’ said Ken. ‘A “shoot” is actually a chute. The timber-getters would send the cut timber straight off the mountain down a chute which they dug out and sometimes lined with felled timber. Back in the day the Black Shoot was the main way of getting from Beechmont to Advancetown. I have heard that when the kids from the valley had to go to school up on Beechmont, this is how they got there. Apparently the school bus used to get up and down this way, but it’s hard to imagine.’

  We had entered the Numinbah Valley, as the valley of the upper Nerang River is known. We crossed it by the new Pine Creek Bridge, with not a Hoop Pine to be seen, and entered the Numinbah State Forest, ‘of a thousand uses’. A sign by the Numinbah Environmental Education Centre featuring sweet-faced forest fauna asked us not to litter the valley. ‘The locals are watching you’. Further on was a ‘Forest Park’ with toilets and picnic tables.

  ‘That’ll be drowned after they raise the dam,’ said Ken. ‘They’ll need a new bridge for the Pocket too.’

  ‘What is the Pocket?’

  ‘It’s the area between the Nerang River and the scarp of the Lamington Plateau. One way in, same way out, hence the Pocket.’

  We passed through what would once have been known as a township, and is now called a village on its signage and a suburb of Gold Coast City everywhere else. The locals knew it as Upper Nerang; the authorities named it Numinbah Valley. The most imposing building in it is the School of Arts. In 1925 subscriptions were taken up and free hardwood was supplied to build a cultural centre for the residents of the Upper Nerang Valley, where concerts, lectures, performances and dances could take place.

  ‘This is Priem’s crossing. Karl Priem was the first man to grow wine in the valley,’ said Ken. ‘And possibly the last.’

  A spectacular volcanic plug had popped out of the river flat on the west side of the road. ‘That’s Egg Rock. During the war airmen trained there for survival in the New Guinea jungle. That scarp beyond it is Ships Stern.’ (Ships Stern, a rhyolite rampart hanging off the side of the Lamington Plateau, used to have an apostrophe. You wonder why the Geographic Names Board didn’t eliminate the ‘s’ as well as the apostrophe. Ship Stern makes more sense than Ships Stern.)

  On the other side of a single-lane bridge was an imposing timber gate. Signs warned visitors to announce themselves to reception. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s the prison farm. Her Majesty’s State Farm Numinbah. Or the Numinbah Correctional Centre.’

  ‘Why does everything round here have two names?’

  ‘More,’ said Ken. ‘It used to be called Whitinbah State Farm for some reason.’

  ‘Villages in Britain still carry the Norse names given them by the Vikings eons ago. Here in Queensland names seem to change every five minutes.’

  Ken laughed. ‘It gets worse. This is Natural Bridge. It used to be called Upper Numinbah, but they changed it to avoid confusion with the Numinbah on the other side of the border.’ As I was to discover, that Numinbah and this Numinbah were two parts of the same place. A small park appeared in a loop of the river on our right. Ken explained. ‘This is where kids used to go for the
big splash off a big old river gum, but that’s gone now. The shire council took the place over in the Seventies and shmicked it up with toilets and barbecues and garbage bins, and called it Bochow Park.’

  The air was growing humid and the vegetation had changed. On the roadside only the Camphor Laurels stood proud and unencumbered, wrapped in their own toxic vapours, while the native trees suffocated under curtains of Balloon Vine and Morning Glory. Around and between them Scheffleras, Jacarandas, Coral Trees, Traveller’s Palms and Cocos Palms vied with every kind of gaudy suburban garden escapee. The Scheffleras are Schefflera actinophylla, native to the Australian wet tropics. In their native plant community they are held in check by competition; in south-east Queensland they are an aggressive intruder. Their umbrella-shaped inflorescence is loved by native birds who drop its seeds everywhere.

  Everybody loves Jacarandas, which flower in violet-blue panicles on their bare branches. As soon as the Jacaranda was introduced it was an absolute must-have for Australian gardeners. The gardening correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald (3 December 1868) waxed lyrical in its praise:

  This most beautiful flowering tree is a native of Brazil, and no garden of any pretentions can be said to be complete without a plant of it. The specimen in the Botanic Garden is well worth a journey of 50 miles to see. Its beautiful rich lavender blossoms, and its light feathery foliage, render it the gem of the season . . . the difficulty of the propagation . . . overcome, Jacaranda mimosifolia, instead of being rare and scarce, will now be within reach of all who love a garden . . .

  In Queensland, Walter Hill, curator of the Brisbane City Botanical Gardens, was the first person to show a specimen of Jacaranda, at the Queensland Horticultural and Agricultural Society Exhibition in October 1865 (BC, 26 October). The Jacaranda he showed was described as a shrub; over the years it would have grown to about thirty metres in height and produced copious quantities of seed. A hundred and fifty years later Queensland has woken up to the fact that Jacaranda mimosifolia is an invasive species, which doesn’t mean that nurserymen have stopped selling it or that gardeners have stopped planting it. The town of Grafton on the Clarence River has all its streets lined with Jacarandas so that for six weeks every year the whole town turns purple. The same massive error of taste has been repeated in the town of Ipswich, south-east of Brisbane. In its home range of north-western Argentina and Bolivia the Jacaranda is now listed as vulnerable.