White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  Nixon’s once ubiquitous presence in the Numinbah Valley is gradually receding. His homestead is gone; Nixon’s Gate has vanished and Nixon’s Gorge is now called Egg Rock Valley. The creek that ran through his original selection is still known as Nixon’s Creek, or would be if the Australian authorities had not decided that apostrophes were too hard and simply dropped them, so Nixon’s Creek is signed Nixons Creek. The Committee for Geographic Names of Australasia has gone one further and it is now officially Nixon Creek. A ford across the Nerang River is still known as Nixon’s Crossing. Of Nixon’s Track there is no sign.

  Local historians believe that Nixon’s Track was a ‘pack track’ that ‘became well-known as settlement increased in the Natural Bridge area’ (Hall et al., 112). When three teenaged children of Nixon’s sister set off on horseback from Kynnumboon to spend the holidays in Numinbah in the winter of 1884 they became hopelessly lost soon after entering the ‘dark scrub track’. As daylight began to fail, knowing that before them lay ‘the Big Hill and after that the dreaded Four Mile Scrub which lay across the top of the Range with a narrow track sometimes skirting a hundred foot precipice and always winding through great rocks and boulders and overhung with huge trees so draped with vines and ferns and orchids as almost to obscure the path’, the children had no choice but to make camp and spend the night in the open (Florence Bray, 56–7). Tracks in rainforest have to be regularly slashed if they are not to disappear within weeks, and a bridle or pack track is narrow to start with. No path through the Numinbah Gap would have skirted ‘a hundred foot precipice’. It would be many years before travel from Queensland into New South Wales became at all regular. When the first bullock track was cut it did not lead, as far as can now be ascertained, through the Numinbah Gap but up from Currumbin via Pine Mountain (now Pages Pinnacle).

  So who was the Pioneer? His family was distinguished, on his mother’s side as planters and traders in the West Indies and Central America, and on his father’s side as members of the British cultural and religious establishment. His parents may have hoped to establish a respected dynasty in the Great South Land and, on the face of it, they appear well qualified to have done so, until history decided otherwise.

  Frank Nixon’s paternal grandfather, Robert Nixon, was an Anglican clergyman and graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, who served as curate of Foot’s Cray in Kent from 1784 to 1804. Both Robert and his brother John were noted amateur artists, who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. It was at Rev. Nixon’s house that his friend and protégé J. M. W. Turner completed his first oil painting in 1793 (Cust). By his wife Anne Russell, Robert Nixon had two sons, Frank’s father, George Russell Nixon, born on 20 March 1802, and Francis Russell Nixon, born sixteen months later. In 1810 both boys were sent to Merchant Taylors’ School in London. George was taken out of the school within a year, while Francis stayed eleven years, and went on to graduate from St John’s College Oxford in 1827. In 1842 he was made a Doctor of Divinity and consecrated bishop of Tasmania. His distinguished career is the subject of one of the longer entries in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography. Frank was obviously named for his uncle, but it is notable that he never answered to Francis but always, no matter how formal the occasion, identified himself as plain Frank. If he had a middle name, as all his siblings did, he never used it.

  Frank’s father George was twenty-eight years old when he entered Trinity College Cambridge as a pensioner in 1830. After he graduated in 1834 he led a peripatetic existence as tutor to the children of the rich in finishing schools in Italy and Switzerland. What this odd sequence of events suggests is that George Russell’s health was always fragile, or thought to be so.

  Frank Nixon’s mother was Rosalie Adelaide Dougan. At least three generations of Dougans had been traders and planters in the West Indies, first in St Kitts, then Tortola and finally Guiana. Of the three sons of Thomas Dougan one, Robert, took up land near Stabroek (today’s Georgetown) in what is now Guiana. His ‘rich sugar plantation bordered with coffee and fruits’ was uncompromisingly named ‘Profit’. George Pinckard, who visited it when he came to Guiana with General Abercromby in 1796, rhapsodised that ‘having every advantage of culture, it exhibits, in high perfection, all the luxuriancy of a rich tropical estate . . . A private canal leads through the middle of the grounds, and serves, at once, for ornament and pleasure, as well as for bringing home the copious harvests of coffee and sugar.’ What was more, ‘to the slaves it affords a happy home!’ (Pinckard, ii, 203–4)

  Robert Dougan’s brother John Dougan, Rosalie Adelaide’s father, is described variously as a merchant and a navy agent. In 1798 he married Clarissa Squire, daughter of a Plymouth merchant. Their first three children were christened in England. In 1803 the family travelled back to Tortola, where a fourth child was born in 1804. In August 1805 the family returned to England, and in May 1806 Dougan returned to the West Indies once more, this time without his family. He was then acting as agent for prizes, that is to say, ships thought to be bound for French colonies in the Caribbean, the cargoes of which were forfeit according to the British interpretation of the rules governing the maritime war with France. As such his activities came under bitter criticism from the American sea-captain Richard J. Cleveland, whose two ships, the Cerberus and the Telemaco, called in at Tortola on 22 April 1807.

  The agent for prizes, a Mr. Dougan, came on board, and to him were delivered the ship’s papers. He then very civilly accompanied me on shore to aid me in procuring lodgings. This being accomplished, I returned on board, at the expiration of about two hours, to take my baggage on shore; and to my surprise found, that during that short interval, Dougan had been on board, had broken open my writing-desk, and had abstracted from it all my private letters and papers. This wanton outrage was entirely unnecessary, as he might have had the key by asking for it . . . (Cleveland, ii, 21)

  The seizing of the vessel, which was not bound directly or indirectly for a French port, was illegal; according to Cleveland the trial that followed ‘was neither more nor less than a shield to cover an act of villainy’. Cleveland may have been under a wrong impression about the legal case, but he can hardly have been wrong about what followed.

  The Telemaco and cargo being condemned, it was no easy matter for the prize agent [i. e. Dougan] to dispose of them, excepting at a very great sacrifice. The ship possessed an intrinsic value at Tortola, which the cargo did not . . . The prize agent was extremely embarrassed with the peculiarity of this case, aware that, without the intervention of a neutral, nothing could be made of it. In this extremity, he made a proposal to me to take it at about half its original cost, and, as an inducement, would engage to provide protection against detention by British cruisers on its way to Havana. What effrontery! What impudence! What villainy! To rob me of my property on pretext of inadmissibility of voyage, and then propose a passport for the more safe prosecution of the same voyage, for pursuing which the property was confiscated! (Cleveland, ii, 24)

  Cleveland, who had no way of raising the money to purchase his own vessel and cargo, took ship for New York, leaving Dougan in possession. By such shifts Dougan became a very wealthy man. In May 1808 he returned to England, where he stayed until 1812. In 1808 Dougan’s brother Robert died in London. In his will, written on 6 January 1806, he makes no mention of children and appoints his ‘beloved brother John late of the island of Tortola and now residing in Great Britain’ his sole legatee and executor. A codicil dated 26 March 1807 left to his nephew Thomas Dougan of Demerara (son of another brother) ‘a certain plantation in Demerara aforesaid called the Profit plantation with the Negroes Cattle and Stock thereof or of any Sum or Sums of Money to arise from the sale thereof’ (NA, PRO, 11/1492).

  The Dougans’ sixth child was christened at East Teignmouth, Devon, in 1810, and a seventh at St George’s Hanover Square in 1811. In 1812 Dougan left England again, but this time with his wife, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where a ninth child was born. The family returned to England, landing at E
ast Teignmouth on 15 November 1815. In January 1816 he was obliged to be in London, to give witness against a former employee who had forged a bill of exchange for £800 in his name. In a begging letter in which he demanded £1,000 from Dougan, the prisoner excused the amount as small in comparison with Dougan’s great wealth. Rosalie Adelaide was the second-last of the Dougans’ twelve children, born according to Dougan family historians in Bedford Square on 4 June 1817; a younger brother was baptised at East Teignmouth on 13 September 1818. Not long after that Dougan’s fortunes changed drastically.

  On 14 July 1821, we find him writing a desperate letter to Lord Bathurst:

  I feel it incumbent on me now to mention, what your lordship is already apprized of, that lately Failures of Mercantile Persons and other Disastrous events, the Pressure of Calamity has borne heavily upon me, and left me with a family of 14 persons to provide for, and commence life anew after having conveyed to the Treasurer of Greenwich Hospital all my Effects and Debts, amounting to £18,000 to meet a Demand of £26,000 of Late Naval Prize Creditors. (NA, CO 323/195)

  He was appointed one of two commissioners charged to investigate the situation of ‘certain Africans’ who had been found aboard French vessels captured during the Napoleonic wars and ‘condemned to the Crown’ by the Vice Admiralty Court in Tortola under the provisions of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The freed slaves were then apprenticed, that is, indentured, to various planters in the West Indies for fourteen years apiece (NA, PP 1825, vol. xxv, 5). The substitution of indentured labour for outright slavery was a typical British compromise, designed to keep everyone happy, everyone except the labouring people themselves, who had as little chance of defending themselves against exploitation and abuse as ever they had.

  Dougan’s fellow commissioner, Major Thomas Moody, was married to a daughter of one of Dougan’s two sisters. The two men took very different views of the treatment of the indentured servants; Dougan objected that Moody favoured the colonists, taking their part even in cases where there was clear evidence of ill-treatment. The two were required to submit independent reports, but Dougan’s health was failing and he was not able to see the matter to a conclusion. In September 1826 he died intestate, leaving his brother’s estate unadministered. His eight daughters were all unmarried; of his four sons, two had joined the British army in India.

  Thirteen years later, on 21 September 1839, in London, twenty-two-year-old Rosalie Adelaide Dougan married thirty-seven-year-old George Russell Nixon. Their first child, George Dougan Nixon, was born in Switzerland in 1840 and died there the same year. Frank was born in Rome in 1842. A sister Angela was born in Bagni di Lucca in 1843, a brother Edward (1845) and sister Gertrude (1846) in Tenby in Wales, where their father was running a small private school, another brother, Frederick Dougan, in Verlungo (1848), another, George Louis, in Bristol (1851). Three more siblings were born in Switzerland, Arthur in Vevey (1852), and Anna (1853) and Clara (1855) in Veytaux. Clara died in infancy.

  Frank was eighteen when his parents decided to send him and his brother Edward to Australia, where Rosalie Adelaide’s elder sister Mary, who had virtually brought her up, had emigrated with her husband Richard Walkden and her children and stepchildren. The Nixon boys arrived on the Owen Glendower in January 1860. Rather than staying and working on the Walkden farm at Pakenham in Victoria, they travelled to another Walkden property at Brungle in New South Wales where three of Mary’s sons, Frederick, Frank and George Walkden, were breeding horses for the East India Company and the British army in India.

  Brungle, nestling in the lee of the Snowy Mountains, twenty kilometres north-east of Tumut, is a special place, with rolling hills, deep valleys and rushing mountain streams. The winters are bright and cold, the summers bright and hot. There Frank bought a property in the name of his family and hired a carpenter to build a split-slab house with bark roof, apparently without assistance from their father, who had come out to Australia in October 1860 to visit his brother in Hobart. By the time Mrs Nixon and the other six children arrived aboard the Albion in January 1862 and travelled to Brungle by bullock dray, the house was all but ready. They called it ‘Avenex’ after one of the places where they had lived in Switzerland, a hamlet on the Balcon de la petite Côte, overlooking Lake Geneva.

  On the voyage out nineteen-year-old Angela Nixon, who was usually called Nina, had caught the eye of Percy Spasshat, the ship’s doctor. After a wedding at Brungle the couple went to live in Armidale, taking Frank’s ten-year-old sister Anna with them. Seventeen-year-old Gertrude Nixon soon attracted the attentions of twenty-five-year-old Joshua Bray, who with his brother James was working for his father on the neighbouring Brungle Run. Bray’s sister Mary was married to Samuel William Gray, who at a government auction in 1862 bought the lease of 16,000 acres in the Mount Warning caldera, and offered his brother-in-law a partnership. In 1865 Bray proposed to Gertrude and was accepted. He then travelled up to the Tweed, where he set about building a house on the north arm (now the Rous River), and gave it the Aboriginal name for the place, ‘Kynnumboon’.

  Raising horses in Brungle may have suited Frank and his brother Fred, but their parents and siblings could not settle. In December 1864, George Nixon travelled to Sydney to visit an old friend who was rector of Christ Church St Laurence, to find that he was on the point of returning to England on sabbatical leave. Bishop Nixon was already in England on sabbatical so George decided to accompany his friend and visit his brother. When the bishop realised that his failing health did not permit a return to Tasmania and retired to Stresa on the Lago Maggiore, George went with him. He would not return to Australia until 1868.

  On 19 July 1865 Gertrude wrote to Joshua from Avenex:

  Frank came home on Monday and we have been having long consultations as to the future Ect. If Fred went up [to the Tweed] he might see to a little house being put up for Mama and Anna. Mama supposes you will let her build it on a small portion of your land . . . We are very glad to have dear old Frank back again – he likes your song ‘To the West’ so much we tried it over together last night. (Bray Papers)

  When sixteen-year-old Fred turned up at Kynnumboon, Bray found him a good worker but ‘low-spirited’, and permitted himself to observe that ‘his Mama scolded him too much’. In fact Fred was in love with a Brungle girl called Charlie Rankin. She had promised to wait for him and the boy considered himself engaged. Meanwhile Frank, who was enjoying life in the Tumut, and the cross-country trips driving cattle and horses to market, showed no sign of joining in the rush to the north. On 14 October Gertrude wrote to her betrothed:

  Nothing has been decided [about Avenex] as yet. I want them to let it or sell it – which wd be for the best, for it would be absurd for Frank to stay on. (Bray Papers)

  After Gertrude’s wedding, which took place in Armidale in June the next year, her mother did not return to Avenex, but stayed in Armidale with the Spasshats. In August Bray wrote from the Tweed to assure her that a house was being built for her there. By the end of 1867 though the house was still unfinished Mrs Nixon and Anna were living in it; it was called the House on the Hill, or simply the Hill. Frank, Edward, Arthur and Louis were still at Avenex, while Frederick was working on a property outside Armidale. By 17 April Frank, Louis and Arthur had joined their mother at the Hill, because it was then that they climbed sacred Mount Warning, something that only the most senior Aboriginal elders were allowed to do.

  Selections had been taken up in the names of various members of the Nixon family: George Russell Nixon had 160 acres and Arthur twenty-two, on the east bank of the North Arm. Only forty acres upstream from Kynnumboon had been taken up in Frank’s name, probably because he was hoping against hope to be able to keep Avenex.

  In his diary for 29 April 1868, James Bray noted that ‘Frank Nixon came over to say goodbye’ on his way back to Brungle (Bray Papers). He stopped in Armidale and there, on 13 May, he married Catherine Elizabeth Cameron (New South Wales marriage certificate no. 1868/001527). Kate, as sh
e was known, eldest of the seven children of Hugh and Anne Cameron, was born in the tiny fishing village of Garmony on the isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland. The family arrived at Botany Bay on the Walmer Castle on 30 December 1848 and settled in Armidale. By the time Kate was wed to Frank Nixon, she had seen all five of her surviving siblings married to members of the Armidale Scottish community. She herself had been married in 1859 to a Donald Cameron, who died in 1862, leaving her childless. When she married Frank she was thirty-eight years old, twelve years older than he. They were to have no children that we know of and Kate remains a shadowy figure in Nixon’s story, to the point of being confused with his mother. They were married according to the rites of the Presbyterian Church, with Catherine’s father and her brother John as witnesses. No member of the staunchly Anglican Nixon family appears to have been present. Frank gave his occupation as grazier and his residence as Tumut. He took his wife back to Avenex where he and Fred continued to make their living as farmers and graziers. Frank was still in the Snowy in February 1870 when he stood witness for Fred, who had attained his majority and was at last free to marry Charlie Rankin (New South Wales State Records, 3504/1870).

  When Avenex was finally sold, Fred stayed in the district. Frank had no choice but to take Kate north where his younger brothers had formed a company to produce sugar. More land had been taken up, and machinery for the purpose had been imported from Britain. The Tweed correspondent of The Queenslander reported on 11 October 1873:

  Mr Gray will have over thirty acres of cane planted this season and that with last year’s planting will make a total of some sixty acres or more, almost enough to start a mill. Mr A Nixon (for Nixon Brothers) is also forming a plantation this season as fast as he is able, with the intention I have heard of erecting machinery as soon as he has cane sufficient to keep a mill going for the season. Theirs is the only plantation on the North Arm and from what I have seen it is likely to be the most successful on the river.