One day, high up in the forest on an old snigging track, I found steel cable nearly as thick as my wrist with a lading hook at one end. I followed its snaking length into the undergrowth till I found the other end, its steel strands splayed and frayed. Sixty years ago or so, as a tractor snigged a tree carcass, the cable hooked around it must have twisted, overheated and suddenly, terribly, burst apart. The cable would have sprung and lashed wildly before it came to rest here on the track. Whenever I pass that way, I stop amid the ferns to pay my respects.
Cream
When Nixon left Numinbah in 1889, the valley was much as he had found it. He had almost certainly found it as it had been cleared by its Aboriginal inhabitants. If he noticed the earthen ring on the eastern bank of the river, there is no record of his having done so. He almost certainly assumed that the grassland he found was natural, not suspecting that it had been kept clear by regular burning to provide a wallaby and pademelon trap. He ran the 1,264 acres to which he had secured title as ranchland, simply grazing his six or seven hundred head of cattle and horses up and down the valley on the native grasses. Every now and then the steers would be rounded up, branded and castrated; these formed the early bullock teams that dragged the timber out of the rainforests. When Nixon’s property was sublet to a Southport dairy farmer called Tom Lather in 1889, most of the land was still forest and scrub. Only the horse paddock, which ran along the river bank from the homestead, had been fenced. Hoop Pines still grew at the foot of the scarps.
To run the property at Numinbah, Lather, who was already dairying near Southport, installed his brother-in-law, Tom Cowderoy. Now that government subsidies have been withdrawn, dairying in south-east Queensland is over. We can only wonder now why so many of the early settlers could think of no better way to use the land. Perhaps the green of the subtropical vegetation reminded them of home; the grass was certainly lush but the climate was largely unsuitable. Because of dingoes roaming the scrub, all calves and even young heifers had to be penned up at night. As well as the animals he brought with him, Cowderoy caught as many as he could of Nixon’s wild cows, lassoing them and dragging them into the bails to be milked. The milk was poured into large flat bowls and left in a cool house to separate, then the cream was skimmed off by hand, churned by hand, salted and put up in boxes. Once a week the boxed butter was taken to market in Southport by packhorse. The journey up and down the pinches of the rough track along the Nerang took many hours; if it had been raining, as it often had, the horses slipped and slid. If it kept raining, the river would rise and the farmer and his horses would have to swim for their lives. Cowderoy’s son Tom remembered:
One pack day my father had to take the pack down to Southport. He rode Torrelilla and led the packhorse Morra. He arrived safely and delivered the butter and farm produce but coming up the Valley the following afternoon, a sudden storm at the head of the Valley caused the river to rise suddenly. At one crossing he had to swim the horses across, but Torrelilla would not swim properly – he would do nothing but rear up in the water, so my father had to let Morra the packhorse go. He managed to reach the bank but poor Morra was swept downstream by the swift current, and finally stopped by hanging his head over a log. Fortunately Mr Din Guinea whom my father knew well happened to be there with his bullock team. He crept along the log and managed to rescue Morra, who was none the worse for his ordeal. (Cowderoy, 13)
It rained for most of 1890.
With the constant rain the stockyards got from bad to worse. The poor calves used to get bogged, and had to be dragged out of the mud and brought shivering to the great open fireplace to get warm again.
In 1890 in the depth of the recession Nixon’s agent W. Castles sold Tom Lather bullocks to the value of £125. Lather immediately sold them on to a W. Ferguson and accepted his promissory note as payment, simply endorsing it to Nixon. The note was dishonoured and Castles took a mortgage over Ferguson’s property. Meanwhile, like many other farmers in the district, Tom Lather was going broke. In June 1891 he attempted to sell a hundred head of bullocks and fifty head of ‘quiet female cattle’ at the Beaudesert auctions. ‘Terms – Cash. No Reserve’. (Q, 13 June)
On 8 February 1894 a civil action for recovery of Lather’s debt was heard in the District Court (BC, 9 February). Nixon had instructed his solicitor to accept the security in lieu of payment, realise on it, and claim the rest from the defendant, but the defendant demanded an immediate release. The judge found for Nixon with costs. On 19 July, at a meeting of Lather’s creditors, ‘the causes of his insolvency were put down as inability to carry out a contract with Mr F. Nixon for the sale and purchase of cattle Etc.’ (BC, 20 July) In September Lather was declared bankrupt, owing Nixon, his chief creditor, £415.14s.9d. (BC, 4 September) Among Nixon’s assets at his death were bills of mortgage Nos 219529 and 219530, of securities to the estimated value of £184 (QSA 9007/742107).
The Cowderoys did not struggle in the Numinbah Valley for long. Even so, when they left more land had been cleared, to grow potatoes and pumpkins as well as maize. The lease was taken over by Nixon’s old racing buddy, Tom Gaven, licensee of the Royal Mail and Commercial Hotels in Nerang, who owned a string of butcher’s shops. We may conclude that, after this first attempt, dairying on the Upper Nerang was given up as a bad job, and the milch cows used for beef production. Gaven also took up Nixon’s old portion 3, Catherine’s Flat (BC, 5 February 1897 and 11 September 1915).
Another of the early settlers who tried his hand at dairying was a William McLaren who took it up on his own account after the Cowderoys had left. As he told Charlie Lentz:
‘We ran in heifers with calves, from the bush. We tied the calves up but most of the heifers cleared out and left the calves to starve, so the dairying was not much of a success. The heifers were rather wild. They did not return. Now those people summonsed me for wages, and I will have to pay them. I don’t know much about dairying, and I don’t think they knew much about it either. I dare say if you come up you would still see a few horns lying about in the yard yet.’ I said, ‘You must have had some fun to get them bailed up.’ ‘Aye that we did while it lasted, but it did not pay though,’ he replied. (Lentz, 36)
In 1895 a new set of settlers began to move into the valley, taking up smaller selections of about 160 acres. Many of them took up dairying in a small way, producing skim milk to feed their pigs and a can of cream to send each week to the butter factory at Southport.
Land for selection was purchased at the rate of 2/6 per acre on poorer soil, to higher rates on better country in proportion to its timber species. Land with standing Hoop Pine was widely sought as this was by now the next in demand to Red Cedar which was nigh exhausted. Generous terms allowed selectors upwards of 20 years to pay for land. (Hall et al., 56)
Such favourable terms had to be earned; land that was not ‘improved’ would be forfeit to the crown. A dwelling had to be built, and the land had to be fenced and cleared. The settlers’ way of improving the native grass pasture was to do as the Aboriginal people had done, burn it off regularly. The cattle would willingly eat the soft new grass, keeping it down until gradually the tussocks aged and it was time to burn them again. As late as 1903 the valley could be described as ‘still in its natural state, the only thing missing was the red cedar . . . there was no land cleared, only the open grassed forest was used.’ (Holden, 14) The ‘open grassed forest’ was itself an artefact, made and managed for eons by Aboriginal hunters. (Gammage, passim)
As more and more land was surveyed and offered for selection, the available grassy sclerophyll forest was all occupied, and only the rainforest was left. The same conditions applied; the selectors had to clear the land. Clear-felling trees a hundred feet tall, chained to each other by massive vines and interlaced with canes, was the most gruelling and terrible work, as well as horribly destructive. Yet it never occurred to any of the settlers that there was any alternative to dairy farming in Queensland the way they had in Ireland or Germany. European dairy cattle that wer
e offloaded in Queensland had no defences against an array of pests and plagues the like of which had never been seen in Europe. The dairy farmers worked all the hours God sent, and all the while they had to watch their animals suffer.
The koalas, bandicoots and Mountain Brushtail Possums of Numinbah had grown up with the paralysis tick, Ixodes holocyclus, but imported animals had no resistance to it. A two- or three-week-old calf with ten ticks on it would become paralysed and almost certainly die. In 1843 James Backhouse gave an account of the ‘Wattle Tick’ as destroying ‘not only sheep, but sometimes foals and calves’. (Backhouse, 430) Even today the only treatment is injection with an anti-tick serum developed for dogs, which is far too expensive to use for regularly dosing cattle. The paralysis tick also carries the bacteria Rickettsia australis, which causes Spotted Fever, and Borrelia, which causes Lyme Disease in humans. In the warm dampness of the Upper Nerang the so-called New Zealand tick Haemaphysalis longicornis also flourished.
Worse was on the way, in the shape of the introduced cattle tick Rhipicephalus microplus. In August 1872 twelve Brahman cattle from Indonesia were landed in Darwin. They were destined for slaughter but somehow ended up at Adelaide River, where they mixed with station cattle. Within a generation the cattle tick had crossed into Queensland and was rapidly spreading south and east. An outbreak in Brisbane in April 1898 resulted in the declaration that no cattle or horses would be permitted to cross into New South Wales ‘from any portion of the Queensland coast country east of the 148th meridian’. The experience of northern farmers had proved that dairy cattle were least able to withstand the consequences of tick infestation, in particular red water fever, which killed infected animals in a matter of hours. Carl Lentz recalled:
I had just got started [dairying] when cattle ticks got there from the north, and red water fever broke out everywhere. I lost most of my cows. Some people lost almost all of theirs. (Lentz, 35)
Dairy farmers also had to battle lice, tuberculosis, brucellosis, bloat and anthrax, which turned up in the 1880s under various labels, as ‘Cumberland Disease’, or splenic apoplexy or pleuro-pneumonia or blackleg. In 1901 the Warples brothers got Henry Stephens to build them stock-dipping yards on Nixon’s old Portion 2. Passing teamsters were welcome to use the dip at a cost of ‘tuppence’ or ‘thrippence’ a head. The legacy of such dips, which poisoned the land around them, is still a problem today.
The dairy industry lurched from crisis to crisis, and yet year on year more and more settlers destroyed more and more native vegetation so that they could embark on a life of hopeless struggle. In 1911, when the Queensland government opened land on Lamington Plateau for selection, eight members of the O’Reilly family, brothers Tom, Norb, Herb, Mick and Paul, and their cousins, Pat, Luke and Joe, acquired a hundred acres each at a price of 35/- an acre, to be paid off over thirty years at 5 per cent. Three months later the government closed the area to selection, leaving the O’Reilly boys the sole white settlers on the plateau. Their possession of the land was contingent on their clearing it, fencing it, planting pasture grass, and running dairy cattle on it. It was part of the terms of their selection that a certain acreage of rainforest had to be cleared within a year of their taking it up.
In the felling of rainforest, much chopping may be saved, especially in hilly country, by the use of the ‘drive’ system. This, roughly, is the cutting of say half an acre of trees only two thirds of the way through and then ‘sending them off’, with a big drive tree dropped from the uphill side; the pressure goes on slowly at first and then gains momentum, as each tree is pushed from behind and in turn pushes the one in front; the big water-vines too play an important part. The trees do not break off level at the cut; they rip and burst under the pressure, and it is a terrifying sight to see a large strip of lofty forest tearing itself to pieces to the accompaniment of sounds which cannot be described. (O’Reilly, 104–5)
If a single tree refused to give way and held up the drive, the most foolhardy member of the gang might venture in to help it on its way by sawing or chopping a little further into it. Otherwise it was a matter of waiting, for the pressure to increase, for a wind, or, some said, for the next ebb tide.
If everything went as planned each falling tree struck others until all the trees in the drive came crashing down. This was quite a spectacle, and if a really big drive was ready to go, favoured friends might be invited to watch . . . if those invited were girls, they could be counted on to bring a cake or batch of scones and boil the billy, so all present could have a picnic during the lunch hour. (Lentz, 68)
Destruction of the forest was the best entertainment going; sometimes it was done simply for the hell of it. In about 1897 Carl Lentz and his sister were invited by friends who lived at Pine Mountain (now Pages Pinnacle) to explore Connell’s Creek (now called Waterfall Creek) and view the spectacular falls (now called Horseshoe Falls). They scrambled up a high spur to the top of the falls.
The spur we were on was very narrow along the top, and open forest, very steep down both sides with dense scrub. One place along the top was full of boulders, some bigger than thousand gallon tanks. One, a very big one, was just on balance. We had an axe, cut a strong sapling, stuck one end to a glut, levered, canted it over. It rolled down against a big bloodwood tree, pushed it over, rolled along it. Near the tree head was a low sharp rock ledge. As the enormous weighty boulder rolled over that, it cut the tree clean off, catapulted the great stem, roots and all, clean over itself and speared it ahead, away down into the scrub below. The boulder gained more momentum, took everything before it and started more rocks going. It was an avalanche, the rumbling noise was terrific, and lasted a good while too. (Lentz, 70)
The entertainment value was not exhausted with the smashing of the trees. The next step in clearing land is the burning off:
The burning of felled jungle is a splendid spectacle. You have perhaps a hundred or more acres covered to a depth of twenty feet with smashed timber and dry leaves . . . The torch is applied along the foot of the clearing, and flames, advancing in a wall, rush up the slopes with a roar which may be heard for many miles. Black smoke, boiling fiercely, shoots up to one thousand feet, and there the terrible heat, contacting the icy upper air, generates a giant thunder cloud which rides majestically above the inferno . . . the steady boom of exploding rock . . . goes on for many hours after the fiercest of the blaze has subsided. (O’Reilly, 112)
In the course of such a burn millions of creatures lose their lives, from the possums and gliders in their houses in the tree hollows, the snakes and lizards that are roasted in their hidey-holes between the rocks, the tree frogs, and the giant snails, to the whole host of invertebrates. By the time the O’Reillys were clearing rainforest in Queensland in the nineteen-teens, most of the accessible rainforest areas on the east coast of Australia had already been felled, burned and turned to cropland or pasture. The process had been breathtakingly rapid; within a decade thousands upon thousands of hectares of forest that had stood for millennia had gone up in smoke.
The distinguished English scientist Sydney Skertchly, who retired from his post as assistant government geologist in 1897 and settled at Molendinar, was in no doubt about the folly of clearing and burning the rainforest.
Any sap-thirsty ignoramus with an axe can destroy it in an hour; and the biggest fool burn it in a day. What does he get? – a light, feathery, white powder charged with all the potash and other salts laboriously stored in the tree, and he knows this is the plant-food par excellence, and thinks he is going to get it. But he won’t. Half of it is scattered by the wind, most of the residue washed out by the rain and sent into Moreton Bay, and his remaining soil is due at the same depot, for there is nothing left to hold up the water, and a few hours after a heavy downpour the vaunted scrub soil comes floating past my house. (Q, 13 May 1922)
On 18 December 1923, Skertchly delivered a lecture on ‘The Nerang River, its past, present and future’ to the Institute of Surveyors in Brisbane.
&nb
sp; The scrubs, Professor Skertchly pointed out, were the greatest holders of water we could possibly have. Before they were cut down rain that fell at the source of the Nerang River took five days to reach the spot at which he lived, but when it fell now the water reached him in five hours. Not only were the waters not held up in what he described as a sponge – masses of moss and other vegetation – but they were wasted.
To-day’s forests had taken thousands of years to grow. They had been there before the arrival of the mammals, but a tree that had been growing for 2800 years could be destroyed by any dairy farmer in 20 minutes. (BC, 20 December)
In Skertchly’s grim vision the ultimate result of the clearing of the forests would be desertification. He reckoned without the energy with which the farmers set about replacing the destroyed forest with exotic vegetation. Superbly orchestrated forest systems are now cacophonies of weeds.
Kangaroo Grass may be good for growing kangaroos but not for European cattle bred to produce excess milk. The next great ‘advance’ in Australian husbandry came with the introduction of pasture grasses from other parts of the world. The obvious choice was Paspalum, from the humid subtropical areas of South America. The first species to be introduced in the 1870s, probably at the instance of our old friend Ferdinand Mueller, was P. dilatatum, which was well adapted to our high rainfall and fertile soil. Paspalum made its way to Numinbah in 1901, when Henry Stephens seeded it on his property in the Pocket. (Henry Stephens’s son Ted became the owner of what is now CCRRS in 1968.) By 1907 Paspalum, Rhodes Grass (Chloris gayana) and Prairie Grass (Bromus cathartica) were all established in the Numinbah Valley (BC, 18 June).
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 23