A Single Tree

by Don Watson

  University Press, Sydney, and Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, 1984

  Roger Underwood

  2004

  1

  Boarding houses largely filled the niche now occupied by the motel, or the B&B. Almost every large country town had a boarding house when I was a young man. They provided an alternative to living at the pub, and a “homeaway-from-home” for itinerant businessmen, travelling salesmen, schoolteachers, bank johnnies and various single men and women. The speciality of the boarding house was a cheap room and cheap meals, but they also had a certain ambience about them, depending on the personality of the landlady. I heard about a boarding house at Manjimup in which conversation at the dinner table was forbidden, but the ones I knew were clean, happy, bustling places with friendly staff and opportunities for fun and games.

  Back in 1964 Pemberton had two large boarding houses, and they did a thriving business. They were great rambling old weatherboard and iron-roofed buildings, with a huge kitchen and dining room, a rabbit warren of single rooms and a unique backyard ecosystem of old stables, giant woodheaps, rusty implements and puddled yards around which dwelt a variety of cats, dogs, chooks, rats and snakes which lived off food scraps and each other.

  After only one night’s test run at the boarding house, I re-arranged my life completely. Henceforth I continued to live in the SOQ but I had my evening meal and breakfast each day at the boarding house, and they made me a crib, which I picked up after breakfast. All of this cost me less than five shillings (50 cents) a day . . .

  2

  At McCall’s Boarding House, you entered by stepping straight off the front verandah into the dining room. This was a large low-ceilinged room, poorly lit, and made darker by polished jarrah flooring and oiled dado walls. Beyond was the kitchen with its great cooking table and massive wood-fired range. After I had insinuated myself with the cook (who was also the landlady), I was always allowed to eat my breakfast in the kitchen, which I loved to do on winter mornings. I would eat my bacon and eggs in a glorious atmosphere of warmth from the wood stove amid the heavy aromas of hot fat, bacon and coffee, and look through the window at the rain sheeting down across the distant hills. The cook, a jolly, buxom Englishwoman with mighty arms and curly hair, would chatter away cheerfully to me, as she bustled about preparing the breakfasts for the other guests, who mostly came in later than me.

  On my first night I was immediately introduced to the rules of the place. The first was that meals were served “on the dot”. On the dot, you were expected to be seated, and to have your knife and fork poised; the kitchen door would swing open and out would come the young ladies employed as waitresses, neatly uniformed, bearing steaming plates of food to the tables.

  The second rule involved seating arrangements. There were four large tables in the dining room, and you couldn’t just sit where you liked. You were allocated to a table by the management, and there was a rigid hierarchy. The table nearest the door (known as “Table One”) was for casuals – tourists, for example, or people not known to the staff who just popped in off the street for a meal. I started there. Table Two was for the travelling salesmen, who came in on their circuits of the bush, and would turn up like clockwork on the third Monday of the month or whatever, as they moved around the country towns soliciting buyers for their wares from the local shopkeepers.

  After a night or two as a casual, I graduated to Table Three. This was closest to the kitchen, and was reserved for local regulars, mostly old retired mill workers and one or two bachelor shopkeepers. Table Three also boasted the presence of Old Paddy, the boarding house’s odd job man. Old Paddy had spent most of his lifetime chopping wood for the kitchen and the hot water system. He was a tireless worker. Over many decades of chopping from dawn to dusk, he had got well ahead of the demand for wood, and his pile of chopped mill ends had developed into a pyramid that the Phaero Rameses II would not have been sorry to call his own. Another Table Three regular was Alec Evans, who for many years had been in charge of building the bush railway lines that ran out from the mill. Alec had a fund of wonderful bush yarns, and would entertain me for hours, often sitting on well after dinner was over.

  But it was to Table Four that I aspired. Here were the young people, mostly schoolteachers, but also a bank johnny and a fisheries officer. They were all about my age, and every night I would watch from afar as they skylarked, roared with laughter, flirted, chatted, and generally had a grand time. One young lady caught my eye immediately, with her flashing brown eyes and charming manner, and my interest in moving tables intensified. I put in to the management for the first available transfer to Table Four. This I eventually achieved, but not until the start of the new school year a few months later.

  Many of the residents complained that boarding house food was monotonous and unenterprising. It was, but I still enjoyed it, and I never complained. Almost every night we had a roast dinner, with beef, pork or a joint of hogget smothered in rich gravy, roast potatoes and pumpkin, parsnip or carrot and peas or beans, plus a choice of sweets. The sweets were usually trifle or steamed pudding, both served topped by viscous yellow custard, but occasionally there would be a treat and a massive tin of fruit salad would be opened for us, which would be served with fresh cream.

  Breakfast was invariably bacon and eggs. Perhaps there were other options, but I never felt the need to inquire. They were cooked in a huge black frying pan, containing about 10 centimetres of bubbling fat, into which the eggs and the bacon slices would be plunged. When breakfast was over, the frying pan would be simply set aside and the fat would congeal, ready for re-heating to boiling point the next day. I don’t know about the healthiness of all this, but I do know that nothing has ever tasted as good as those deep fried eggs and bacon, eaten in a warm kitchen on a winter morning, as a watery sun pierced the morning mist.

  ‘An early chapter from a life in forestry’, paper presented at WA 2029:

  A Shared Journey, WA History Council, 2004

  John Vader

  1987

  Axes

  The axes that earlier British colonists had used to cut efficiently into large American softwoods, proved to be unsuitable for felling our hardwoods. Convict axemen and their free successors in the Australian bush learned their skills and implement needs the hard way – by work experience. Then they would pride themselves on the smoothness of their axe cuts, the under-cut, the side on which a tree would fall, being in large cedars as deep and wide enough to hold a man’s body. The final back cut, nowhere as deep in the side away from the fall, was made in such a way as to provide a hinge of wood that contributed to the control of the direction of fall.

  It is doubtful if any members of the First Fleet, convict, military or naval, had much to do with felling trees whose trunks were more than a metre through at chest height, and they were sorely tested felling the hardwoods around Port Jackson. These blunted the poor quality axes supplied by the Admiralty. Carpenters worked with axes, wedges and mauls, and adzes for trimming logs to manageable sizes; on every ship were several men skilled in the use of timber trade tools. When settlers and their sons went out to the Nepean/Hawkesbury they remembered a few basic timber-getting methods, then developed their own skills as axemen and sawyers. It was mainly a matter of hard work, and balance . . .

  The heavier, 4-kilogram double-bladed axe did not appeal to Australians whose needs were eventually satisfied by types such as the locally designed Kelly brand single-blade which, in typical lack of local business enterprise in those days, was later manufactured in the United States of America and imported back. It became so popular that ‘Kelly’ became the slang word for an axe. While Americans made axes for the Australian market before World War II, it was during that war when we began to make our own, and made them so well we now sell double-bladed axes to the Americans.

  Earlier, at the turn of the century, cedar-felling axes of all shapes and sizes were imported from Britain, Sweden and North America, but it was not until wood chopping contest
s became a little more serious, if not wildly competitive, that what had become our standard axe was refined – in the United States.

  Anyone who lived in the bush or country towns in the 1950s period, would have heard of Plumb and Kelly axes. For a generation before, they and a couple of other brands had been known as the best although, after the turn of the century, numerous brands had appeared on the market. The Plumb Axe Company of Philadelphia, the American Axe and Tool Co. of New York, the Douglas and the Kelly companies, all competed for business in the world axe market . . .

  The sharper the axe the cleaner the cut, whether into a tree, or taking a toe off, or into a leg muscle: and the healing process was relatively quicker than a cut made by a blunt axe. Some bushmen simply tied calico around a deep wound, while others also applied tobacco juice, or some patent antiseptic on the cut before bandaging it. When Bill Landers sliced an adze into his shin, while shaping a bullock yoke, and his boot began to fill with blood, one of the men went up to the homestead to ask for the ‘Friar’s balsalm’, the standard antiseptic at Towal Creek Station . . .

  Red Gold: The Tree that Built a Nation, New Holland Press, Sydney, 2002

  Raymond A. Walls

  2008

  In December 1941 public unease turned to near panic. Those who did not have a wireless set or take a metropolitan paper had the news broken to them in the local press. ‘The Yellow Peril Strikes’. ‘We Are At War With Japan?’ An urgent public meeting was called and recriminations were heaped on council and on Hudson in particular. It was said that Wonthaggi had one hundred and fifty ‘trained men’ and Korumburra none. Hudson interjected ‘You seem panicky’, and protested that council raised money for road and street construction, not for civil defence. A Mr. Green told him ‘Keep quiet, I am speaking’. Unusually, Hudson, pressured from all around the hall, subsided. The meeting demanded that the Air Raid Precautions program should be reactivated, and Hungerford pointed out that council had cut itself off from the State Emergency Council from whom all assistance would need to come. This caused further recriminations to be hurled at the council. Hudson re-entered the fray to say that it was a government matter, and Sister Kerville, matron of the bush nursing hospital retorted, ‘If the government is lacking in care of women and children will you be the same?’ Hudson tried to reply but was shouted down by cries of ‘Rubbish!’ from all around the hall. This may have been the first time that a woman had made a major contribution to public debate in Korumburra since Vida Goldstein’s political meetings in the early days of federation . . .

  Korumburra had been officially designated as a ‘vulnerable area’. This required the warden to prepare an evacuation plan. People and transport were listed and the information circulated. In the event of an invasion a council truck was designated to collect official records from all the banks and transport them ‘inland’. The driver was no doubt told of his destination, but it is not recorded. Councillors Scott and Ritchie were co-opted to work with an officer of the Agriculture Department to arrange for the transfer of stock out of the district. Beef cattle were to be taken away and dairy cattle to be milked then shot to deny the invader a ‘larder’. All these arrangements were confused by the lack of certainty for petrol supplies. Because of rationing there was considerable unused capacity of underground storage at local garages, but officials refused permission for fuel to be stored in a ‘vulnerable area’. This paradox would suggest that the Korumburra council was not the only body that had not instituted adequate planning in advance of the emergency.

  Even in fields where council was not the responsible body it was assumed that it would provide support for community activities. Working bees dug air raid trenches in the grounds of the state school and St. Joseph’s. (Mothers provided the afternoon teas.) A council truck transported men to cart spars for timbering, and council undertook to supply galvanised iron to shelter the trenches from the rain. Like appeals for iron required for the water tanks the building directorate was unable to help, but each request and appeal used administrative time and resources.

  Four air raid sirens were installed in the town, and as an exercise the ‘brown-out’ of the dimmed streets and premises was intensified for a trial ‘black-out’. Plane watching towers were erected and manned by trained volunteers at Mt. Misery (Outtrim) and on the fire brigade tower, which was then at the top of the Commercial Street hill. Council supplied an electric radiator for the watchers at the fire brigade tower, but it would have been a cold shift in winter on the isolated and appropriately named Mt. Misery. To modern readers it may seem that the public and authorities were indeed, as Hudson had suggested, ‘panicky’, but there were valid reasons for official and public perceptions of danger. Ships were sunk by enemy action off Cape Liptrap and a submarine-launched Japanese reconnaissance plane carried out at least one flight over Inverloch and Andersons Inlet. In the dark times of 1942 the possibility of an enemy landing if not an invasion on the coast south of Korumburra was not to be ignored . . .

  While officers were overworked and stressed with civil defence duties council found time to debate unsubstantiated rumours about the activities of aliens in the community. Councillors were partici­pating in community hysteria when one may have looked to them for a more balanced view. At a meeting of the Australian Natives Association in Korumburra a Mr Milne said, ‘In regard to the Jewish element, Hitler was the only man game to tackle them. (Applause and ‘Hear! Hear!’)’. The Great Southern Advocate uncharacteristically fired hatred at Italian members of the community, whether they were naturalised, unnaturalised or prisoners of war allocated as farm labourers in the district. The secretary was directed to prepare lists of properties, and in all cases the occupations were found to be in accordance with the law and coastline regulations. One wonders if councillors were embarrassed by the presence of Cr. John Canobio at the table, a person of Italian descent. Italian people, old citizens and new, were to make a significant contribution to the development of Korumburra shire in the second half of the twentieth century. The first victim of war is said to be truth, but national and racial intolerance rank high. Council records and newspaper articles of the forties tell an unpleasant story.

  Five Fighting Shires: Korumburra Council 1891–1994, Korumburra, Victoria, 2008

  Shirley Walker

  2001

  1

  I am seven. I live in a valley in the rainforest. Around us is the remnant of the Big Scrub which once covered the land from north of Murwillumbah to the Richmond River. Beneath the tangle of giant softwoods, cedar, rosewood and teak, the envy of the cabinet makers of the world, is a warm maze of fern and lawyer vine. The smell of cut timber permeates the air as the massive trees are felled and the logs hauled to the mill. The houses which line the single street of the village are for the most part built of raw timber, with tin roofs and tin fireplaces. Verandahs and tankstands are festooned with staghorns, elkhorns, hares-foot ferns and orchids from the scrub.

  The valley with its two creeks, Terania and Tuntable, is encircled by the cleared flanks of the mountains, green with paspalum, studded with the stumps of the rainforest trees. Behind are high bluffs, and beyond them the serrated peaks of the Nightcap Range, and then Mount Warning. The great mountain, an extinct volcano, is seen only from the heights yet its presence is always felt, kingfisher blue, looming in the distance.

  Returning to this place sixty years later I am stunned by my familiarity with a skyline imprinted on my consciousness since birth; it cannot be supplanted by any other sweep of horizon, no matter how much loved or newly familiar. There is an almost physical shock of recognition as the primal horizon superimposes itself on the mind and settles into its own place. This is home, the place of birth, of the birth of consciousness.

  Here days seem eternal. One of the few time-markers is the noon plane, a Stinson I learn later, which passes over the valley each day on its way from Brisbane to Sydney. To us it is as distant as the moon, but still a reminder of the great world outside the valley. This is t
he plane which later crashes on the Lamington Plateau in a cyclone, a famous episode in Australian aviation history The survivors are lost in the jungle for almost a week. One seeks help, crawling on lacerated knees through stinging nettles and lawyer vines. Bernard O’Reilly, the bushman who finds them, is a national hero, and the event becomes folklore, then myth.

  Another time-marker is the lighting of kerosene lamps in the kitchens of distant hill-farms. We kneel, my sister and I, on a kitchen stool by the casement window, watching one light after another come on, and naming the familiar homesteads as the milking is finished and families come home to tea. We wind up the gramophone, a portable His Master’s Voice left with us by a sophisticated aunt who is a typist in faraway Canberra, and play the hits of the thirties. ‘When It’s Lamp-lighting Time in the Valley’ seems written just for us, but we love the Gladys Moncrieff, the Bing Crosby and Jessie Matthews records which our mother brings home from Lismore, twelve miles away.

  This then is the primal scene: the dusk is as perfumed as Aphrodite with the stocks, wisteria and may bush in our mother’s garden; the rainforest edges closer with the strange cries of its nocturnal birds and animals; the full moon rises behind the great shoulder of the mountains; the gramophone plays and the lights of the valley come on one by one. All is well and seems as permanent as time itself.

  2

  BURDEKIN MEN

  Burdekin men wear blue singlets bleached to grey, tight khaki shorts, felt hats and mostly no boots.

  They carry cane-knives sharp enough to slice straight through a leg above the knee.

  They are accompanied by dogs known as Meathead or Hereboy.

  They call one another fond nicknames such as The Meatant or the Barra.

  They distrust the South. Sometimes one ventures as far South as Brisbane. One or two of the most adventurous go to the Melbourne Cup and marvel at the cold (in November).