The cedar-getters forged onwards, into the vast rainforest known as the Big Scrub in the valley of the Richmond River and swiftly on to the Tweed. Others were also moving southward from the new convict settlement of Moreton Bay, now Brisbane. Here they encountered resistance from the local Aboriginal peoples but, even so, ‘valuable rafts of cedar, beech, pine &c’ were a common sight on the southern reaches of Moreton Bay (BC, 5 August 1876). By 1870 the valuable timber was gone from all the accessible parts of south-east Queensland. One of the few places where it could still be found was Numinbah.
Timber-getting was a tough way to make a living anywhere. Bernard O’Reilly gives a wonderfully vivid account of how his brothers and cousins dealt with forest on the other side of the Nerang Valley, on the Lamington Plateau, forest very similar to CCRRS. ‘First hooks were used to slash the thorny, stinging entanglements that defied entry to the great forest . . .’ (O’Reilly, 101–2) The hooks were what Australians call brush hooks, which are the same as the British hedging tools called slashers. To keep its operator out of range of lashing spines and stinging leaves, not to mention the odd affronted snake, the brush hook has a long straight handle and a heavy slightly curved blade. It is used as much to bash down the brush as to slice through it, but the blade is kept razor-sharp, to fell at a stroke any of the many saplings that crowd the forest floor. The understorey for several yards all around the target tree would be slashed with the hook to allow room for the axe swing, leaving serried ranks of pointed stakes.
The thorny entanglements are many, most commonly Cockspur Thorn, Lawyer Vine and Prickly Supplejack. Cockspur Thorn (Maclura cochinchinensis) will grow right through forest trees, to emerge in the canopy as branching sprays of long sharp spines. Lawyer Vine (Calamus muelleri), also known as Hairy Mary and Wait-a-while, is actually a palm, that grows in long canes that loop and snake through the undergrowth. Every part is armed with thousands of spines, all sharp and capable of drawing blood, but worst of all are the almost invisible developing flower spikes whose tiny hooks catch in flesh or cloth and hold on. To struggle is to give the springing fronds another opportunity to take hold. To pick the toothed fronds off is to end up bloody. Prickly Supplejack (Ripogonum spp.) is easier to deal with, but not much.
The stinging guardians of the forest are first and foremost what the old botanists called Urtica gigas, the tree nettle, now called Dendrocnide excelsa, but still in the Urticaceae. O’Reilly, who tells a harrowing tale of how his brother Tom ended up wrapped in the branches of a giant stinger, called it Gympie Gympie. (Gympie is a version of a Yugambeh word meaning ‘stinging tree’.) The true Gympie Stinger is D. moroides, common further north. Our Giant Stinger has bigger leaves that are truly heart-shaped, whereas the Gympie Stinger leaves are ovate and often peltate, which means that the leafstalk instead of attaching to the edge of the leaf blade is attached within it. Both trees sting like fire, delivering formic acid through fine stellate hairs that cover every part of the plant. From the beginning of our work in the forest I have loved this species and worked hard to propagate it. (No professional grower will offer it, for obvious reasons.) Not only are the young trees very beautiful with their foot-long heart-shaped leaves of apple-green silk-velvet, each accurately pinked around the margin, they are exceptionally willing, springing up wherever there is disturbance, holding up their huge leaves like shields to screen the wounded forest from draughts and other noxious influences. They offer a salient reminder that trees are not for hugging. There is no room for touchy-feeliness in the forest.
You’d reckon that such offensiveness in a plant would be principally a protection against being eaten, but in fact Dendrocnide excelsa is the worst victim of herbivory in the whole forest community. Every mature stinger has leaves reduced to lace by a chrysomelid beetle, Hoplostines viridipennis, whose mouth parts are not such that it is troubled by stinging hairs.
It is strange, but becoming less strange to me as I begin to understand the forest, to think that the role of the Giant Stinger is not to protect itself from herbivory but to defend the forest. The leaves of mature trees up in the canopy sting far less than the leaves that their juvenile offspring present at the level of face or neck. D. excelsa is helped by a sneaky relative, D. photinophylla, the Shiny-leaved Stinger, which is far less distinctive, having leaves of regulation Hookers Green that resemble the leaves of lots of other understorey plants. The native herbaceous nettle, Urtica incisa, stings with almost as much vim as its tree relatives. In all three cases, to wet the skin is to reactivate the delivery system in the hairs, renewing the painful burning, sometimes for weeks.
In the Cave Creek rainforest the huge trees clutch at the rocks with wandering flanges rather than sending down a single anchoring root. As O’Reilly says, the trees ‘are supported mainly by high buttresses which in many cases extend more than twelve feet from the tree proper and which make tree-felling from the ground level an impossibility. This calls for the use of a springboard; made of light wood, four feet long and a foot wide, it has at one end a steel tip, which is inserted into a horizontal slot cut into the tree.’ (102) The tip of just such a springboard has been found by the workers at CCRRS. The timber has rotted away; all that is left is the massive forged iron V and four stout nuts and bolts still hanging in their sockets. There is a downturned tooth at the apex of the V so that as the axeman bounced on the board he drove the tip further into the trunk.
Some fellers cut toe-holes in the tree so they could climb up and fix the springboard, others knocked up a makeshift platform-cum-ladder. Before chopping or sawing could begin, the cutters had to study the tree, assess any twist or hollow in the trunk, decide which way it would fall, and cut out a shallow wedge or ‘scarf’ on that side. They would tap the tree with the back of the axe, listening to hear if it was ‘piped’, that is, if there was a hollow running up inside it. The scarf was offset slightly to leave a heel, in the hope of preventing the tree’s suddenly snapping off as the saw teeth or axe blade cut further into it. The bark was then peeled away so that it wouldn’t clog the teeth of the saws. If the scarf was wrongly placed, and the weight of the tree pulled it in the wrong direction, the saw would be trapped, so wedges were driven into the cut to keep it open.
on this narrow rocking perch the settler swings his razor-edged axe, sometimes twenty and even thirty feet from the ground, which bristles with the sharp stumps of slashed undergrowth. Then, when the tree begins to go, he must descend swiftly, bringing not only his axe but his springboard. All good fellers bring their boards to the ground to obviate the possibility of fouling by the falling tree. (O’Reilly, 102–3)
There is no knowing now how our springboard came to be abandoned in the forest. The forged iron tip would not have been jettisoned even if the springboard had broken; it would have been unscrewed from the broken board and fitted to the new one. If it was left behind, it was because retrieving it was impossible. For a springboard to be abandoned, there must have been an accident, one of many in the forest. I keep the iron tip as a sacred relic, sacred to the memory of the human beings – and the trees – that lost their lives.
The O’Reilly boys all at one time or another sustained terrible injuries from their own axes. Ped and Herb both severed leg tendons; Pat buried his axe in his abdomen; Norb stitched a cut on his leg with needle and cotton. By way of variation on the self-injury theme, Mick fell from his springboard and was impaled on a spike. The most dangerous things in the forest were not however the men’s axes but the enormous trees, with their long clear boles and heavy canopy. The largest living Red Cedar recorded was 54.5 metres tall; dropping it must have been like dropping Nelson’s Column.
The swaying of the heavy tops may form wind cracks right up through the heart of the tree. Suppose – and here I quote a case that is not infrequent – a man on a springboard fifteen feet from the ground has just chopped into the heart of a tree: a puff of wind bends the heavy top outwards. Then with the sound of a bursting bomb, the trunk splits up through the heart a
s far as the branches; the riven half lashes out and upwards, perhaps sixty feet, with a fearful sweep, as the head drops forward; for a split second the tree may balance horizontally by the middle on the shattered, upright trunk sixty feet above, then, pivoting wildly, it drops full length beside the stump. From first to last the calamity may have taken three seconds or less; even had there been time for action, no one could predict the ultimate position of that one hundred and fifty feet of tree as it struck the ground . . . (O’Reilly, 103)
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 Queenslander:
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 £3.15s, 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 cu
t 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)
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 21