White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  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:

  ‘That the timber-getters, being the pioneers, and having gone to considerable expense in making roads etc., and as they form a considerable proportion of the population of the district, claim consideration at the hands of the government.’

  He stated that the roads had been formed by the timber-getters in places where the Government could never have gone and that the roads being made opened up the country and induced settlement. The timber-getter was already heavily taxed, with license fee, divisional board rates, &c. (BC, 12 September)

  Another motion provided for a committee charged with preparing and presenting the petition to the state parliament, on which Nixon was slated to serve. This motion was seconded by a ‘Mr Ginnay’, probably Timothy Guinea, who had selected one half of what is now CCRRS for timber, or perhaps his son John, who selected the other half.

  Selectors were of course entitled to fell and/or sell the timber off their own land either as standing timber or logs.

  Quite a raid is now set in upon all useful timber, whether pine, beech, or hardwood, and the number of saw mills south of Beenleigh has, during the past year, quite doubled the power of reducing logs into quartering and boards, so that every settler who has trees is courted by two or three parties till he sells all the trees on his selection . . . Further south, settlers without means to obtain bullocks and trucks for drawing logs are casting about for someone to find the money, so that their sons may go to work in stripping the farms of the timber. But settlers and millowners both in the bush and in the town should recollect that while cabbages may give a crop every year, it will be widely otherwise with crops of timber trees. (BC, 25 April 1884)

  It was already too late to protect the forests, even if a timber royalty, as the cedar duty came to be called, had been the way to do it. On 20 May a meeting of timber-getters was convened at Nerang.

  There were about 60 persons present representing about 60 teams engaged in the timber trade. Frank Nixon Esq. J.P. of Numinba, Upper Nerang, occupied the chair.

  Eight resolutions were passed nem con, including:

  1. That the proposed new timber regulations would materially cripple the interests of the district

  2. That the proposed royalty will be (a) unjust, (b) excessive, (c) vexatious, and (d) almost impossible to collect

  3. That the Ranger could not distinguish on a wharf the timber taken from Crown lands from that taken from free-holds

  4. That it was an utter impossibility for a ranger’s measurement to be anything like a buyer’s measurement

  5. That New Zealand timber could be sold in Brisbane at less price than the Queensland timber getter could produce it for . . .

  Nixon made his own contribution, which was reported thus:

  From the Coomera River to the border there were six rivers, viz., Coomera, Nerang, Little Nerang, Mudgeraba, Tallebudgera, and the Currumbin. All the timber on those rivers that is get-at-able with horse or bullock teams has been removed years ago. The timber now left was in small patches, and very little in a patch, at the heads of these rivers, in difficult places near the main range. Cedar was not even found there in more than 2 or 3 in a group, and sometimes were from half a mile to a mile apart . . . The only payable method of working these cases was to put the timber into the river and wait for a flood, and sometimes 3 or 4 years are lost before anything can be realised.

  Charles Batten, Ranger of Crown Lands, was already busy seeking out and confiscating felled timber that had not been removed from the forest. On 2 June 1885, 99,000 super feet of cedar, marked with a broad arrow, were sold in four lots at the Nerang police office (Q, 23 May). A smaller lot was marked and sold in August to be followed by an astonishing 115,229 super feet in October (Q, 8 August).

  Government inspectors kept pointing out that certain clauses associated with the timber contracts had lapsed. In one inspector’s count Nixon had 62 logs of cedar, totalling 54,000 super feet, left in the forest. The timber was seized on paper and put up for sale in the hope that some other person might risk the transport difficulties. Nixon bid unsuccessfully, three pence per 100 feet for his own timber, which was passed in without a sale being made. He gave up the cedar business as a costly failure. (Groom, 90–1)

  In 1888 the timber taxes were abolished, but for Nixon as for many another timber-getter, it was already too late. The recession in the rural economy had bitten deep; bullock teams had had to be sold; sawmills had been closed down, and their equipment sold off. Nobody could af
ford to move the fallen timber.

  All over the mountain slopes at the head of the Nerang River huge logs of Rosewood and Red Cedar are lying rotting, so slowly that after rather more than a century some are still solid. Dozens lie jammed in the creeks or thrown up on the banks, festooned with mat rush and climbing ferns, starred with elaborate fungi that shine out like lamps in the arboreal gloom. The CCRRS workforce knows better than to suggest moving them, even when a flood banked behind two of them wiped out the better part of a creekside planting. We could sell them even now, but to me they are monuments, not simply to the lost grandeur of the virgin forest, but to the many nameless men and boys who struggled to make a decent living the only way they could. Above all they commemorate Frank Nixon’s unfortunate Aboriginal workers, who could expect no medical attention for the terrible injuries that were the timberworkers’ lot and could well have paid for their weekly plugs of tobacco with their lives. Carl Lenz recalled a meeting with an Aboriginal forestry worker who he hoped would tell him the truth about the Bunyip:

  I met a Richmond River native – his two mates arrived to take him away. They had a job scrub falling. The poor chap got a cut on the leg with an axe, they had no doctor, and he died . . . (Lentz, 26)

  When the most inaccessible recesses of the Numinbah Valley were finally surveyed, and opened for selection, they were selected for their timber. The first owner of CCRRS, Timothy James Guinea, arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1836. The two parcels that make up CCRRS were among six selected by Guinea and two of his sons. The whole Guinea family, who made their home at Advancetown, the hub of the timber traffic, was involved in logging and hauling of timber with bullock teams. As they gradually exploited their craggy holdings, hunting out the remaining Red Cedar deep in the gorges, and scanning the steep hillsides for signs of the deciduous trees in winter, or the flushed pink new growth of spring, they would carve out tracks to get to it. Once they had felled the target tree they often had to build roads with picks and shovels to haul out the carcass.

  In 1893 Timothy’s youngest son Din Guinea, working in the forest at Cave Creek along with his mate Sandy Duncan (who found the Natural Bridge), came across the biggest cedar they had ever seen. Confronted with this botanical marvel with its unusually bottle-shaped trunk, deep in the trackless forest, the only thing they could think to do was to cut it down. This proved something of a challenge, because they couldn’t find anyone who had a cross-cut saw that was long enough. Eventually, having joined forces with Hector Burns, a famous bullocky and an erstwhile confederate of Nixon, Guinea found a Canadian who did.

  The splitting of the big cedar log was done by an American named Henry Fritch, who had at one time in his adventurous career been a trader among the Red Indians. He had his special saw which he brought from America, with what he called the ‘Lumberman’ tooth. With great skill he bored a row of holes along opposite sides of the log, using a six foot long auger. These holes were only two or three inches apart, and he used blasting powder in them to start the splitting process which was finished with huge wedges and a screw-jack. (Burns narrowly escaped death with a mistimed blast.) The edges were then squared with a broad-axe to reduce the width to what would fit on the bullock waggon beds. After all this wastage Messrs Guinea and Burns were paid for more than 4,100 super in the two pieces of one ten foot long log. The tree was believed to contain a total of 11,000 super feet in five logs. (Hall et al., 82)

  The butt log of the great tree was full 34 feet round.

  The second log was the best and was sent to the first World Fair to be shown in Paris, 1900 A. D. It was then sent to the Crystal Palace in London, put in a glassed-in room for show with bright metal plates of the names of the getters, also where it grew, to be left for perpetuity.

  Perpetuity is not what it used to be. The Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936 and the great log went with it.

  That amazing tree was not the only candidate for the biggest Red Cedar ever; every district had its own and the Numinbah Valley had several. A cedar removed at about the same time from CCRRS is said to have yielded a record 18,000 super feet of marketable timber. It is odd to think now of the Guineas felling and carting hundreds of trees off Cave Creek properties, yet leaving the valuable timber felled by Nixon to lie where it fell, but there was an honour among timber-getters which required them never to saw or ship another man’s wood. Duncan and Guinea were probably not informed when Nixon died in Thargomindah in 1896. Perhaps they were afraid of Mrs Nixon, who until 1904 was the most powerful landowner in the valley.

  The land that is now CCRRS changed hands regularly. At one point part of it became the property of one Albert P. Abraham, who lived there with his family until one rainy night in January 1910 tragedy struck:

  Albert F. Abraham was . . . last seen alive at Upper Nerang on Saturday evening, and left about 9.30 to ride to his home. Rain was falling heavily, and the creeks and gullies which he had to cross were flooded. About 5 p.m. yesterday a search party discovered the dead body of the unfortunate man in the creek, about three chains from the crossing. His horse was found alive near by, having been caught in the vines growing on the bank. Abraham was a native of the district, 30 years of age, unmarried, and resided with his parents. (BC, 19 January)

  There was no other way for young Abraham to get from ‘Upper Nerang’, since 1939 called Numinbah Valley, to his parents’ property than to follow the track that crisscrossed the river, in those days still known as Nerang Creek. When rain falls along the McPherson Range, the headwaters of the Nerang can become raging torrents shifting millions of tons of turbid water, rolling rocks as big as houses, only to subside within a few hours, leaving the streambeds entirely reconfigured. These were the ‘freshes’ that the timber-getters hoped would shift their timber. Travelling along these mountain streams was always dangerous; drownings of men and beasts were common. Soon after the loss of their son, the Abraham family sold up and left Numinbah.

  The devastation of Numinbah did not stop when the Red Cedar and White Beech were exhausted. There was still demand for cabinet timbers like Black Bean (Castanospermum australe), ‘used for veneers, radio cabinets, turnery and furniture’ (Floyd, 2008, 159). The Tulip Oaks or Booyongs (Heritiera trifoliolata and H. actinophylla) were also sought for their fine grain, as was the sweet-smelling fine-figured Rosewood (Dysoxylum fraserianum), one of the biggest but also one of the slowest-growing trees in the forest. Next to be cut out was the Hoop Pine that grew on the upper reaches of the valley floor under the scarps. It was used for ‘plywood veneer, butter boxes, all indoor work, flooring, lining, and all joinery’ (Floyd, 2008, 59). After Hoop Pine disappeared from the wild an attempt was made by the Queensland Department of Forestry to grow it in plantations. The remainder of a plantation still survives within the confines of the neighbouring national park, a mass of close-planted dark trees that cannot now be felled. Instead they are gradually falling, as the rainforest rises slowly, inexorably around them.

  The Numinbah Valley was the preserve of timber-getters and bullockies for a hundred years. For most of the 1920s twenty-six bullock teams were occupied full-time in removing its timber. Some was shipped whole; more was sawn into slabs in sawpits where the tree trunk was laid over a trench, so that the two-handed cross-saw could be used to cut it longways into slabs, with one man working from above and another below. The earliest dwellings in the district were built of pit-sawn slabs. For twenty years the only sawmill was at Nerang; in 1881 another was built down the valley at ‘Pine Mountain’ (now called Pages Pinnacle) for a Brisbane firm specifically to mill Hoop Pine.

  From the beginning Cudgerie (Flindersia schottiana) had been harvested along with Red Cedar. Crow’s Ash (Flindersia australis), sometimes called teak, which was greasy like teak, with a hard interlocking grain, was the timber of choice for ballroom floors, as well as railway sleepers, decking, and carriage and coach building. Next came Bolly Gum (Litsea reticulata), Red Carabeen (Geissois benthamii) and Yellow Carabeen (Sloanea woollsii), which t
ook over some of the uses of White Beech, as well as serving for plywood and boxes. Brush Box too was sought for heavier duty in wharves and bridges.

  The coming of the Second World War simply accelerated the despoliation of the forests. After the war the devastation accelerated because the loggers now had bulldozers to cut the snigging tracks and trucks with caterpillar treads to carry the logs out. ‘Homes for heroes’ was the watchword: Forest, Spotted, Red and Flooded Gums, Grey Ironbark, Carabeen, White Mahogany, Brown Tulip Oak, Blackbutt, Tallowwood, Red, White and Yellow Stringybark, and Brush Box, all were felled to answer the demand for hardwood timber. The timbers were needed too for electricity and telephone poles and for railway sleepers. Sawmills sprang up everywhere, including in the forest above CCRRS (Portion 182). A sawmill operated there from the mid-Fifties until 1972, when it was moved to a more convenient location (Portion 190). (It has since been burnt down.)

  To walk in the old-growth forest now is to walk in the deep scars left by this relentless exploitation, along tracks that have been gouged out of the mountainside, in a mess of tangled vegetation and torn roots. The decapitated boles rear up alongside, sometimes surrounded by a ring of young trees sprung from their spreading buttress roots. Often the bole bears a headdress of some precious epiphyte, Vittaria elongata maybe or Asplenium polyodon. The gaps in the forest have been colonised by myrtaceous Brush Box, which outgrew the rainforest saplings that still stand in their dappled shade waiting for their opportunity. With us Brush Box is a handsome tree, with stout rose-pink limbs, thick, glossy leaves and fringed white flowers. A ridge a kilometre or two north of CCRRS supports what appears to be a monoculture of opportunist Brush Box. Occasionally I see the tall column of a Flooded Gum, Eucalyptus grandis, a sign that the beloved forest had to cope with fire, as well as with axes and cross-cut saws, chainsaws and backhoes, bullock teams and bulldozers.