The Bush
Page 21
Some of the cedar-getters were runaways who faced lashes and irons if the law caught up with them, and some had served their time but were still running from the taint of it. Some had run from ships. All were to some degree ‘consorting’, or in danger of being charged with it, and therefore all had to live by a code of honour from which a strain of ‘mateship’ might be descended. They were called by such names as Moreton Bay Harry and Moreton Bay Ned, Jack the Slasher, Tommy Tinderbox, Old Brine, Jimmy the Sailor, and Red Jack the Hopper who lacked a leg. Among them we can presume there were men of ambition determined to throw off the convict stain, men who found in the manly independence of a sawyer’s life something more agreeable than the humiliations of servitude, and men who had been corrupted or broken by their experience and drowned in drink, or as Harris put it, ‘extracted what they wanted from others’ industry as thugs and standover men’. There were, as well, native-born ‘currency lads’ and adventurous immigrants who, if Harris’s account is a fair one to go by, commonly found themselves obliged to adapt their philosophies and habits to those of their disreputable colleagues.
‘They live in pairs in the dense dark brushes; their habitation being merely a few sheets of bark temporarily piled together,’ the cleric John Henderson wrote of them. They also worked in pairs – or threesomes, if a reliable man could be found. Whatever the character of the first two, the third man, according to Harris, was likely to be an escaped convict hiding out in the forest and either scrounging a living, or demanding one by force of arms. Life in these musk-scented ‘brushes’ demanded mutual reliance and, one imagines, certain minimum levels of forbearance. Eating little else but corned meat and tea and sugar on one of nature’s more Gothic sets can hardly have nurtured gentle understanding. Tobacco and pigeons, possums and pademelons probably helped their disposition, but living and working together in the damp, steamy, murderous semi-darkness where ‘carpet snakes as big as anacondas and patterned with lustrous diamonds feast[ed] on the fruit-bats’, men surely had to learn how to get on with each other, much as they had to with the ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, poison trees and flesh-tearing vines: ‘the bloodthirsty cycles of the rainforest’, as Shirley Walker puts it. Modern ‘pleasure seekers who walk into its fetid depths suffer a regression and can’t wait to get out’, she says. The cedar-getters walked in and stayed, communicating with coo-ees when out of view or conversational reach, keeping their families in huts by the creeks. We don’t know how far they regressed, if at all, but if they are indeed among the progenitors of the national character and values, it might be a calculation worth making.
While the authorities reckoned the forests were home to the irredeemably wicked, Harris found the folk there more ‘generous-hearted’ than most, and with a ‘more general manly spirit and fairness of feeling’. The two views combine naturally enough: the legendary ethos of egalitarian mateship was never immune to outbreaks of degeneracy and roistering. But we might also look at these forests as bohemain layovers on the way to usefulness and respectability. The sinners in them were playing out an essential colonial drama, pioneering the native soul. Living down whatever resentments and neuroses their experience had visited on them, forgetting or inventing their pasts, being free men and women, new men and women in a prehistoric environment, they were not only recasting themselves, but also fashioning a critical piece of the national character. In the sunless, primeval depths they fought with monsters, turned ‘pallid as corpses’ and ‘died to their old selves’, so that the new being might emerge – the Australian bushman, the mate, the myth.
Respectable or not, the cedar-getters were hard men, and had to be. Short of dying of thirst or being mangled slowly in a chaffcutter, it is hard to think of less congenial bush work than this. Just getting through the lower storey of the jungle and cutting away the tangle of lianas that invariably bound the trees together was particularly taxing. Every subsequent step, from felling the trees to trimming and squaring the logs, cutting them in sawpits and transporting them by whatever means, was strenuous and often dangerous, and demanded coordinated effort. To be the man below in the sawpit, sweltering and swallowing the dust, must have been as much a test of friendship as endurance. In such conditions it was likely that certain canons of behaviour should evolve – pull your weight, no whingeing, no dobbing, no pissing off and leaving your mate if he breaks his neck, or gets bitten by a snake. It is possible that for every couple of bushmen who chose to be mates, half a dozen others had mateship thrust upon them.
Big cedars, especially those exposed to gales and cyclones, grew buttresses so massive the men preferred to waste the timber rather than the time it took to cut it. They raised themselves to the level of the much more manageable trunk on springboards inserted into notches they cut with their axes. Springboards (or jigger-boards) were about 120 centimetres long, 15 millimetres wide and 25 millimetres thick. Once clear of the buttress, it was on these slender perches that the men stood, facing each other with their axes. They were Philadelphia- and New York-made axes, with hickory handles and 2-kilogram heads, but single blades, not the double-bladed kind the Americans used. They first scarfed the tree to encourage it to fall in their preferred direction, and then, in alternating axe blows, or pulling and pushing on a crosscut saw, they brought it down.
No one ever felled such a tree by mere hacking. The task demanded rhythm and grace as much as a sharp axe and saw. Old film of tree-fellers in a Gippsland forest shows how certain kinds of bush work required such flawless technique they took on the characteristics of an art: in this case, a sort of heroic ballet by men with effortless poise and marvellous aerobic capacity and strength. All without chiropractors, weight training, stretching regimes, protein supplements or massage. The skills were determined by the nature of the undertaking. One of them was timing: before the tree fell, it began to creak and groan – as the axemen said, to ‘talk’. It didn’t do to be still standing on the springboard when the tree went down with an electrifying crack, or to jump but land in the wrong place and break your leg, or land on your axe or saw, or to jump too soon and leave the monster poised on the uncut fraction of its trunk.
They cut the trees nearest to the riverbanks first, rolling the logs into the water and floating them down to the mouth for shipping. When those were gone, they moved up the creeks and deeper into the forest. The labour of felling the trees was easily matched by the effort to find them, and surpassed by the difficult and sometimes perilous task of getting them out. The trick to finding cedar was to spy the new red leaves waving in the breeze at the top of them in spring. Because they were believed to have keener eyes, ‘We nearly always had a blackfellow with us’, one cutter recalled. When the creeks were too shallow to float the logs, the men rolled and slid them to the banks of larger streams, or fired them, thick end first, down ‘shoots’ and waited for flood rains to carry them to the river.
As the industry developed, the logs were carried on droghers in the bigger streams, but for years it was common for the men to strap them together into rafts and, with axes to hack through the overhanging brushwood and spikes to prise them clear, ride the logs by day and night down to the sea.
When out of reach of the creeks, they cut tracks and used bullocks to drag them there. Bullocks were much less prone to staking than horses, had tougher hides to tolerate the lawyer vines, and were less likely to go ‘mad, and die within two hours’, as one north Queensland surveyor reported of his horse after contact with a stinging tree. Sometimes cedar-getters snigged the logs; sometimes, with blocks and tackles and much ingenuity, they managed to lift them onto wagons. Deep in the rainforest men performed astounding feats to which only the birds were witness. In time all the gullies were cut out, and they worked ‘the very brow of the Big Scrub facing the sunrise’. The method here was to haul the logs to the top and send them hurtling and crashing down the other side to the beach, then ‘“surfing” with bullocks or human swimmers to the seamen in their whaleboats, out through the rollers to the schooners’ de
rricks’.
The boss of the Big Scrub in the early years was Steve King, a 5-foot 2-inch English ex-convict with scars on his face and a crooked left arm, who had a timber licence and a house with a wife and children in it on the Clarence. There, he was about as respectable as a man with his past could be, but he employed absconders in his sawpits and for that he risked losing his licence. It seems Steve King could see the end of the ‘old, free life’ beyond the limits of settlement and the law, and he decided to look for a place where he might enjoy it again. The Clarence Aborigines are said to have told him that there was ‘plenty wudgie wudgie’ to the north. So, with a motley crew, a bullock team and a whaleboat, he walked through the forest from the Clarence to the Richmond – through the sclerophylls to the Gondwanans. They put the boat in the river and as they rowed down they saw ‘hill after hill covered with trees – cedar, teak, bean and sandalwood – but above all the cedar showing its pink tips in the spring’ and ‘[n]ever was the heart of a gold-digger more gladdened’. They say red is the colour of commerce. King went home, gathered up his fellow sawyers and their families, and set sail for the Richmond. He’d die there eighteen years later, having earned a place among the reputable settlers in the Ballina Pioneers Wall.
From the ranks of these notorious tribes came the bones of the local economy and society. They became merchants, agents and dealers in timber, bullocks, grain. They set up sawmills and stores. They went in for boat building and operated merchant vessels along the coast and on the rivers. They became respectable and indispensable.
The cedar-getters did not destroy the Big Scrub. They took only what they wanted and left the rest, including enough young samples of the species they were harvesting to assure regeneration. They were conservationists, relatively speaking. The walls of the Lismore museum are lined with scores of ‘specimen boards’, each taken from a different rainforest species, and all with descriptions of the tree’s character and use. A local sawmiller collected them for educational purposes.
As they were in the forests of Gippsland, the destroyers were the selectors. They took up impossibly rugged and remote farms under the Land Acts and set about clearing and planting. A couple of them must have felt something that their fellow farmers didn’t, because they put a few hectares of the Scrub aside. These remnants still stand and are protected against logging and other forms of exploitation, and also against lantana and other weeds; invasive animal species, including rats, mice and cane toads; and against damage by fire which, should it occur regularly, would promote the growth of eucalypts over the Gondwanans and break down the genetic integrity of the forest. The Bangalow museum says the reserves represent 0.4 per cent of the original forest; Lismore’s says 0.2 per cent. Regardless of the percentage, it is very unlikely that any of it is truly pristine Big Scrub.
The selectors wanted the trees less than they wanted those red soils in which they grew. They planted maize to start with, and pumpkins, which became a semi-staple. Then a lot of them went in for sugar cane and bananas, and some tried tobacco, hemp and sisal. They raised pigs. Dairying developed steadily after hand separators arrived (to separate the cream from the milk); then separating stations and, soon after, cooperative butter factories were established along the creeks. In 1892 the South American grass Paspalum dilatatum was introduced and became a typical part of the scenery – ‘the cleared flanks of the mountains, green with paspalum, studded with the stumps of the rainforest trees’. The dairy cows that ate it also flourished: 10 000 litres of milk per hectare with a Friesian herd, the experts say. Without a backward glance at the mighty forest, a writer in the Sydney Morning Herald declared paspalum had made the Northern Rivers dairy industry ‘pre-eminent’, and it should have been the most prominent display in the region’s exhibition at the 1913 Sydney Royal Show. By then, cream was the thing. Cans of cream were ferried over waterways on flying foxes; cream carts travelled on what passed for roads, and cream boats (which also brought the mail) shunted up and down the little waterways between the farms and factories until the 1970s.
Many of the selectors had been timber-getters and when they took up their selections, for a while at least they did not so much change their occupation as add farming to it. Cedar and hoop pine were the popular varieties – hoop pine made good butter crates. Those trees from which they did not cut bark, shingles, palings, or materials for housing and shipbuilding, they ringbarked or felled and burned or allowed to rot. Rosewood, tulipwood, white beech – furniture timbers of great quality – were done away with.
In the early 1890s a series of catastrophic floods coinciding with economic depression created misery in the towns and on the farms. The waterways running through towns were polluted by dead animals which had been washed or thrown into them upstream, and by human excrement swept out of lavatories, and from time to time there were fatal outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid. Public health and public drunkenness were two of the more prominent concerns for the new municipalities. While the court reports indicate that nearly all the drunks were European, and all the overflowing lavatories belonged to Europeans or to the school, which excluded Aborigines, in the Richmond River port of Coraki only the Aborigines were banished from the town limits. It was ‘unpleasant’ to have them there. So, despite the ‘unease’ of some of the older white residents, they were taken away to a 4-hectare reserve.
Amid all their hardships and deliberations, the people of what had been the Big Scrub found time to go to race meetings, to form sporting clubs, arts societies, church and charitable groups, and a regiment of the Light Horse. They also formed the opinion that dissolute and larrikin youths in the towns were blighting country life, and that no one in politics, least of all those new Labor members, gave a fig for the man on the land. In 1895 the North Coast Fresh Food & Cold Storage Co-operative Company Ltd formed in Byron Bay. It made bacon. Soon after, uniting about twenty small cooperative factories, it became Norco and made butter and cheese. The dairy farmers’ existence was assured. The company became a giant and is still going strong, employing 600 people in the district.
In 1840 no European had been in the Big Scrub with an axe, and in 1860 none had been there with a plough. By 1900 it was a bleak ruin, gone forever. The rainforest flanking the Clarence River at Grafton, Shirley Walker says, is now frequented by ‘gangs of predatory boys who build tree houses, rob birds’ nests, beat snakes to death and stage savage inter-gang wars with sticks and stones, shanghais and bows and arrows’. Close contact with nature can do that to boys. That great enthusiast for rural mateship and the cleansing effects of life in the bush, E. J. Brady, declared the contact made real a man’s physical and intellectual potential: ‘Hacking down the primal bush, firing, planting, cutting first crops – these things give physical life and overflowing interest; while mental life is stimulated by anticipation and interested by chance.’ Another school might say that predatory boys and men who hack at the bush are governed by the same impulse.
The selectors in the Big Scrub were, as they had been in Gippsland, the founders of the new: the first of our people, our Genesis. The forest was destroyed so calves could be born and suckled, corn raised, the light allowed to shine on growing children – native children, ‘born of the land’, the new indigenes. The virtue was self-evident. They were ‘clearing’; the word comes from the Latin clarus, meaning light or brightness, which is the condition of seeing the truth and the way forward. They were letting in the light, even God’s light, letting it shine brightly. The word also suggests improvement – the removal of impurities and obstacles – which was the (government-enforced) condition of their existence as selectors.
In fact there had been clearings before they arrived: frost hollows which had been hunting grounds and ceremonial places for the Aboriginal people. It was the cedar-getters who called them grasses – Chilcott’s grass, Dan’s grass, Dorroughby’s grass – because they were essential fuelling stations for their bullock teams, and made good staging points for their forays into the Scrub. The selector
s were making more clearings, more grasses, letting in more light. They were making the whole of the Big Scrub a clearing. But this ‘virtuous’ activity had ruinous consequences, for with the light they let in the settlers attracted ferocious creepers like Madeira vine, morning glory, kudzu, cat’s claw creeper and lantana, a declared Weed of National Significance and one of the world’s ten worst. Their privet hedges escaped. Their camphor laurel trees, planted for shade, went feral. They let in asparagus fern, crofton weed, fireweed, groundsel, Koster’s curse, Mysore thorn, blackberry. A lot of the selectors’ clearings were soon uncleared by these weeds, some in the first generation, some in the second, some, as with camphor laurel, most destructively just forty years ago, when the dairying and banana farms wound up.
There is, as well, a sense in which these clearings concealed as much as they revealed. Any new culture will soon take up myth and denial. It becomes a matter of manners to pretend not to know that something uncivilised has happened; it’s likely one of the first skills of any civilisation. In the bush it was and remains a defining one. Still, the selectors were not responsible for the massacres of the Bundjalung at Evans Head and Ballina, or for the mass poisoning said to have occurred at a place south of Ballina, which, by one account, so appalled the local whites they resolved to show more kindness in future. The selectors came after these events and brought their own dramas, among them floods, bad enough in the first big one of 1863, but steadily worse as the forest was torn down and the rivers and creeks shoaled and their banks eroded. The light the settlers let in shone on the virtue of their own necessitous lives, but blinded them to the ruin on which they were built.