White Beech: The Rainforest Years (26 page)

Nixon had already profited from Pratten’s survey by adding two more selections of his own. On 25 September 1874 he secured a fourth parcel which extended his run by ninety acres to the east bank of Nixon’s Creek, and a fifth on 2 October gave him eighty acres on the east bank of the Nerang, 874 acres in all. To this were added selections made in the name of two of Nixon’s brothers. In 1875 Portion 10 of eighty acres, five kilometres upstream from the homestead, was selected for Louis, whose occupation was given as timber-getter (QSA, LAN/AG19). He was in fact a trader based in the Solomons (Corris, 99). According to Bray family historian Mary Kinsman:

Soon after [the massacre] he settled on an island which he bought from a chieftain in the Solomon Group of Islands . . . He bought another island for Joshua [Bray] for £50.0.0 . . . He wrote of the customs of the Solomon natives in a journal which makes quite fascinating reading, which perhaps one day might appear in print. (Kinsman, 80)

When Dr Henry Brougham Guppy visited the Solomons in 1881 with the survey vessel
Lark
he found Nixon to be a helpful and reliable informant, ‘one of those traders whose name should not be forgotten amongst the pioneers, who, in working for themselves, have worked directly for the good of their successors in the Solomon Group’ (Guppy, 1887a, 35). According to Guppy, Nixon resided on the island of Savo ‘at various times between 1874 and 1882’. Nixon told Guppy of his exploration of the island:

From Mr Nixon’s description there would appear to be in the central elevated portion of the island a large crater-ring, in the middle of which there is a small cone, composed of
lapilli
and ashes, and traversed by deep fissures, from which at the time of his visit to this locality sulphureous vapours were escaping. A white cloud displaying lightning (
ferilli
) in its midst used to form over the mountaintop in the evening . . . The inhabitants do not visit the high parts of the mountain, alleging that men who have been there have always fallen sick shortly afterwards and some have died. (Guppy, 1887b, 56)

Anyone who knows Wollumbin, with its cone within a crater and its head in the clouds, will be struck by the resemblance between it and the core of Savo. Louis Nixon had dared to defy augury by climbing that too, with the inevitable result: ‘a few days after Mr Nixon’s visit to the summit, he was attacked by a low fever that confined him to his couch for three months.’ (Guppy, 1887b, 57)

In 1876, at the Crown Land Sales in Beenleigh, we find Fred Nixon, giving his occupation as mailman, buying Portion 11, upstream from Nixon’s holdings. He was not long from Tumut, where the birth of his fourth child was registered in 1875. The fifth birth was registered in Queensland in 1879, but in 1880 he transferred his Numinbah lease to an Anne Stephens and moved over the border to the Tweed, where he apparently took over as the proprietor of the Tumbulgum Hotel a few kilometres downstream from Kynnumboon. In 1883, giving his address as Gudgen (Cudgen), Tweed River, he went out of business and claimed bankruptcy, which was granted the next year. He would go on to operate rather more successfully as a publican elsewhere in New South Wales, much to the disgust of his family.

These were happy times for the Squire of Numinbah, who had leisure for gentlemanly pursuits. On Boxing Day 1877 the new Nerang Racecourse was inaugurated with a racing carnival at which Nixon and Nixon bloodstock were represented. Nixon was thereafter regularly involved in organising and adjudicating at the regular meetings of the racing confraternity and was a foundation committee member of the Nerang Turf Club (
LW
, 11 October 1880;
BC
, 30 October 1880). He was also a prominent member of the Nerang cricket team. In the Tweed–Nerang match of 23 March 1878 he was caught for five, run out for a duck, bowled out the last man in the batting order and made a catch. After a dinner that evening the players ‘adjourned to Mr Nixon’s residence (who had kindly given a room for the occasion) and dancing was kept up till the small hours’ (
LW
, 30 March).

The Numinbah homestead was twenty-five kilometres away and accessible only by a rough bush track; no room in it can have been big enough to accommodate two cricket teams and their womenfolk. Local historians describe the house as having ‘4 rooms and a wide front verandah. The 2 front rooms consisted of a living room and bedroom with the kitchen joined to the main building by a short landing.’ Frank must have been living in a house closer to Nerang, leaving Toon in residence in Numinbah, but if he was to fulfil the conditions for acquiring the freehold he had to convince the inspectors that he was a full-time resident of his homestead selection.

The system by which unsurveyed land was made available to settlers in 1874 assessed its value at £1 per acre, of which five shillings had to be paid as a deposit, the rest to be paid within three years. After 1876 Nixon paid nothing on Portion 3, and the selection was eventually declared forfeit. As it was not reopened for selection until after Nixon died, it looks as if his friends at the Beenleigh Lands Court assumed that he would one day pay the arrears and the forfeiture would be reversed. The parcel lay across the river from Nixon’s main run and Nixon may have wished to concentrate on consolidating his holdings west of the river. Contrariwise, the Nerang flooded eight times between January and August 1877, and Nixon may have decided that Portion 3 was a bad proposition.

After the death of Nixon’s father in 1878 Numinbah historians have it that he built another house, connected to his own by a verandah, for his widowed mother (Hall
et al
., 51). If he did Rosalie Adelaide seems never to have lived in it. Instead she moved to Carlon Street in St Leonards, as the north shore of Sydney was then known. In 1880, her youngest child, Anna, now married to Joshua Bray’s half-brother James Rowland, went to stay with her mother in preparation for the birth of her first baby, which was registered in St Leonards.

In June 1879, Frank was asked to serve in the Nerang Police Court as one of the two magistrates to hear the case of the wounding of an Islander known as Billy Tully by the Chief Magistrate and leading sugar grower Robert Muir. Billy Tully’s deranged behaviour, dancing naked, yelling and banging a tin with a stick, had terrified Muir’s small children and their nurse. Muir had let off a shotgun blast to frighten the Islander off and wounded him in the thigh. The magistrates decided that the wounding was not intentional and that the shotgun was used in the legitimate defence of Muir’s wife and family (
LW
, 21 June). Muir was absolved of blame and Billy was taken under guard to the Brisbane madhouse. Apparently Nixon did not warm to the job of magistrate, for he did not appear on the bench again until 14 February 1883 (
LW
, 23 February).

Nixon usually described himself as a grazier; local historians are doubtless correct in saying that ‘he was grazing cattle and horses over the entire valley, wherever the open country provided natural pasture’, but not in saying that his ‘registered cattle brand was F. N. G.’ (Hall
et al.
, 51) – it was actually FN6. His string of freehold portions gave Nixon toeholds in what he was actually running as a ranch, said to have had a carrying capacity of between 600 and 750 head. His most important colleagues and allies were the bullockies who bought his animals for their teams, in particular Ernest Belliss and Hector Burns. Nixon didn’t bother to fence his individual portions but contented himself with building ‘a two-rail split mortised post fence on the North end’ of his land along the boundary of Jesse Bird’s Portion 6, about where the Numinbah Valley School of Arts stands today. Everyone travelling south had to pass through Nixon’s Gate; ‘this gave him the grazing rights of all the crown land in between and practically all Numinbah Valley’ (Cowderoy).

It was not until 1880 that Nixon’s homestead selection was inspected to ensure that he was complying with the conditions of his lease. The inspectors reported that ‘he had resided on the selection since July 1874 and had constructed a slab house with shingle roof of five rooms, a slab kitchen of three rooms, a stable, stockyards and pig styes, had some nineteen acres cultivated, mostly under maize, and had a garden planted with oranges, lemon trees, vines etc.’ (QSA LAN/AG 17) Local historians tell us that ‘the main part of the dwelling was built of pit-sawn Red Cedar and had a high-pitched roof for coolness’. According to their account (for which no authority is cited), ‘The house had 4 rooms and a wide front verandah. The 2 front rooms consisted of a living room and bedroom with the kitchen joined to the main building by a short landing. It was built of split slabs and, like the main structure, had a shingle roof.’ The inconsistencies might be a consequence of the descriptions having been made at different times. A photograph of the house – if indeed it is the right house – shows that it is raised on massive stumps that appear to be of White Beech (Hall
et al.
, 50). Numinbah Homestead, as the house was known, has disappeared; even its site cannot now be securely identified.

In March 1881 Louis Nixon made landfall in Sydney; on 14 March at his mother’s house in St Leonards, he made his will, which was witnessed by his brother Arthur (QSA 3564/741905). On 17 November 1882, on the tiny islet of Santa Ana (now Owaraha) in the Solomons, he died, aged thirty-one. As his executor, Frank, who had occupied Portion 10 as his bailiff, assumed his lease. He was still struggling to secure the missing pieces in his jigsaw of freeholds. As he wrote to Henderson in 1883:

No. 578 is Jessie Birds forfeited selection 120 acres, one of the portions that I am now applying for. The other selection 577 was Stephen Hall 120 acres. Jessie Bird could never have even seen No. 578 . . . Neither Jessie Bird nor Stephen Hall have ever been near these selections. Stephen Hall saw the land once, & that was all. In fact, as you know, they only took up the land in the hope of making capital out of me. They have certainly done me injury enough for if they had not dummied the land it would have been part of my freehold before now. The 200 acres I have now applied for adjoining our homestead includes the 120 acres formerly selected by Stephen Hall.

Nixon was eventually successful; the missing portions became part of his estate in 1883. In the same year he was elected a member of the Nerang Divisional Board. In mid-1885 Louis Nixon’s will was proved and Nixon set about adding Portion 10 to his freehold (
BC
, 14 May 1885). On 11 May J. G. Appel swore an affidavit saying that he ‘knew and was acquainted with George Louis Nixon late of Numinbah Nerang Creek . . . the permanent domicile of the said George Louis Nixon was at Numinbah Nerang Creek aforesaid where the said deceased resided on his selection . . . the absence of the deceased was caused by his ill health.’

Appel, who was to hold several important positions in the Queensland government, was then working as a solicitor in Brisbane. He would eventually buy Nixon’s Portion 3; he and his brother would eventually become the largest landowners in the Numinbah Valley. The report of the inspection of Louis Nixon’s selection prior to the Deed of Grant seems to describe a fairly typical dummy run:

There are about 16 acres of scrub and forest land, full and partly cleared and planted with artificial grass value £1

House 16 x 10, one room, hardwood slab walls, shingle roof, not floored, in good condition, unoccupied, value £14.00

No fencing – Grazing land, unstocked

The application for the Deed of Grant was successful, and in 1886 Nixon added Portion 10 to his freehold property.

On 25 September 1885 the Nerang Divisional Board heard a proposal from the surveyor Roessler for an improved road from Nerang to Upper Nerang. ‘It was recommended that a small sum be expended in cutting a bridle track Mr Nixon agreeing to act as pilot.’ Nixon moved the motion and ‘the sum of £5 was voted for the work.’ (QSA, aNER/D1) At the next meeting ‘Mr Nixon reported that he with the overseer had gone over the route proposed by Mr Roessler . . . but could not procure labour to cut the bridle track.’ At the next meeting of the Board on 19 September, Mr Nixon’s letter of resignation was acknowledged and accepted with regret (
BC
, 6 October). Nixon must have offered some explanation of his sudden resignation but history has not recorded it. Its suddenness suggests some unexpected calamity. This may have been the juncture at which Nixon lost the services of Toon. As a consequence of years of revelations about the realities of the ‘recruitment’ system, the Queensland government was repatriating Islanders who ran away from their employers. Certainly when new settlers arrived in 1903 the homestead had been standing empty for some time (Hall
et al
., 63).

By mid-1885 Nixon was experiencing serious cash-flow problems. Payments on Portions 6, 8 and 14 had fallen into arrears and the selections were declared forfeit; in 1887 Nixon managed to pay the arrears and the forfeitures were reversed. By this time the boom of the early 1880s, when Premier Thomas McIlwraith borrowed money to finance infrastructure development and solicited migrants to come north, was well and truly over. McIlwraith’s Queensland Land Mortgage and Investment Company had lent far too much money on flimsy security and on dummied properties. As the sugar and arrowroot mills and the sawmills that had opened in south-east Queensland ran out of operating capital, one by one they were forced to close.
The Bulletin
reported in 1888: ‘Large numbers of travellers pass through here daily seeking employment. Even many of the old residents on the creek here cannot find work’ (Hall
et al
., 85).