White Beech: The Rainforest Years (27 page)

In January 1889, after leasing most of his land to a family of dairy farmers, Nixon left Numinbah. He probably expected to come back, for he left behind his dogs, a black dog called Rough, a black and tan bitch called Vic, and their offspring, Tiger (Hall
et al.
, 55). He took up positions as registrar of the Central District Court in Isisford and district receiver in insolvency and high bailiff of the Barcaldine district (
BC
, 10 January). He and Kate went to live in Isisford. In February he was appointed to the Barcaldine Hospital Committee (
BC
, 4 February 1890). A year later the
Brisbane Courier
reported his first ‘tour down the line’ and a sitting of the Barcaldine Police Court in which he had to deal with a case of attempted murder, another of horse-stealing and another of giving wine to a ‘prohibited person’ (
BC
, 9 September 1891). A year after that he chaired a public meeting in support of setting up a cottage hospital at Isisford.

In 1891 Kate returned to the south-east, to Beenleigh for the Crown Land Sales of 13 February, when she bid for Portion 5V which consisted of eighty acres on the east bank of the river, connecting Nixon’s Portion 1 with his Portion 6. Her purchase was ratified on 25 October 1893. Nixon had been after the land for years, even though, as he said in his letter to Henderson in 1883:

With the exception of some 4 or 5 acres the whole of the 80 acres piece is useless, bad, worthless land. It is bastard scrub, rocky, stoney, and cut up by small blind rocky creeks & water courses. In fact it is not worth 1/- per acre. My reason for taking it up is, that I shall save the price of the land in the fencing . . .

On 1 October 1894, eleven years later, he secured title to it. His country estate was complete.

Later in 1891 Nixon was obliged to return to the coast, to Southport, where his mother was living. His father’s will was still unproved, mainly because the other executors, Rev. George Watson Smyth of Cheltenham College, and Frank’s brother-in-law Francis Robert Bedwell, both appointed in 1860 on the eve of the elder Nixon’s departure for Australia, lived outside the jurisdiction. Nixon had therefore to obtain Ancillary Letters of Probate before the matter could be finalised. The business was long, slow and complicated. In his depositions and affidavits Nixon described himself as late ‘of the Tweed’, and presently of Isisford, as if he had no connection past or present with Numinbah (QSA 7000/742029). In an affidavit dated 19 April 1892, Nixon stated that his mother was living at a property called Dunmore, on the Esplanade at Southport. Nevertheless Numinbah historians believe that ‘Nixon’s mother, when over eighty years old, frequently rode through the bush with her maid, to meet the coach going to Brisbane.’ (Hall
et al.
, 51)

According to the inscription of her tombstone in Murwillumbah Rosalie Adelaide was only seventy-five when she was buried there on 28 January 1894. She had been living in Southport for some years before her death. The Mrs Nixon who rode through the bush, supposing there ever was one, could only have been Kate. In his affidavit Nixon listed his surviving siblings but he could not name all his nieces and nephews.

On 15 June 1893 Nixon’s younger brother Edward died suddenly and without making a will, on a station west of Townsville where he had been working as a bookkeeper. The records suggest some disarray in proceedings thereafter. Nixon was eventually granted Letters of Administration after producing evidence that Edward’s mother and other surviving siblings agreed. By then, Fred was running a hotel at Brunswick Heads; Nina and Anna were both widowed and Arthur, who had resigned from a government job as assistant inspector of Polynesian labourers at Mackay, was working as a journalist in the gold-rush town of Croydon in far northern Queensland. Their agreement to Frank Nixon’s administration of their brother’s will was signed before Joshua Bray. Nixon gave his address as Southport and his occupation as ‘gentleman’; his sureties were a storekeeper and a publican, both of whom had to swear that they were good for half of Edward’s estate of £418 (QSA 1894/19 935785).

In August 1894 Nixon resigned his post in Barcaldine and was appointed clerk of petty sessions and police magistrate to the new boom town of Thargomindah, where his niece, Fred’s daughter, twenty-four-year-old Rosalie Jessie Nixon, kept house for him at 351 Dowling Street, probably because Kate was still in Isisford. The summer of 1895–6 was ‘the severest that has been experienced for years’; so many people fell victim to typhoid fever that the Wesleyan Chapel was fitted out as a hospital ward. On 26 January 1896, Nixon fell ill of the ‘heat fever’; the doctor was called but there was little he could do. Eight hours later Rosalie came to inform the doctor that her uncle was dead. By Frank’s will (QSA 9007/742107) dated 4 August 1883 Kate Nixon inherited everything Frank owned in Queensland, Portions 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 and 14 in Numinbah, subdivisions 2 and 5 of suburban allotment 1 of section 14 of the town of Nerang, allotment 8 of Section 1 in the town of Longreach and Subdivision 14 of an allotment of section 3 in Southport (
BC
, 4 May 1896, 22 June 1896, 14 November 1898). Frank’s widowed sisters and his nieces and nephews got nothing. The selections made in Frank’s name on the Tweed were left to Joshua Bray and Samuel William Gray. The only executor was Kate’s sixty-year-old brother, John Cameron, because the other, Edward Nixon, was dead. Besides his land, Nixon died possessed of £48.18.3 in the Commercial Bank at Thargomindah, and £412.19.11 on fixed deposit in the Bank of New South Wales.

Kate never went back to Numinbah. Two years after her husband’s death, she can be found living in the mining town of Kilkivan, west of Gympie. The electoral rolls of 1903 and 1905 show her living with her sister Flora and her son William Grant Fraser, butcher, in Fraser Street, Kilkivan. At some point Kate and Flora decamped to Southport. When Flora died in 1909, she was described as ‘late of Southport’.

Within months of securing probate of Nixon’s will in 1902, Kate began to sell off his properties in Numinbah. In 1903 she sold Portions 7 and 14 to James Holden, and in 1904 Portions 2, 4, 5V, 6 and 10 to the timber-getters and bullock drivers George and Arthur Warples. No one connected with Frank Nixon would play any further role in the development of the Numinbah Valley. Kate eventually moved back to Armidale where she died in 1914. Her first husband and others of her kin were buried in Armidale, but Kate’s body was taken on the long and difficult road north to be laid beside Frank’s in Thargomindah General Cemetery. It is this that gives one to suspect that what may have seemed like a marriage of convenience was no such thing. Perhaps Nixon was not the callous adventurer he is usually made to seem.

There are some who would say that the story of Frank Nixon’s failed experiment in the Numinbah Valley set a precedent. Every year brings new settlers into the valley, with all kinds of plans and schemes for making money, but the land refuses to cooperate. Pedigree beasts fall sick and die; plans to build tourist villages are thwarted or run out of time and money; bush tucker withers on the twig; campsites remain empty; vineyards moulder; rough scrub invades the pastures; eroded slopes slide and fall; termites eat away the old houses and the new. The forest waits to resume its own.

Timber

Frank Nixon certainly bred horses and bullocks on his ranch in the valley of the Upper Nerang, but what really brought him there was what lured practically everyone who settled in south-east Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century – timber. To many it seemed like easy pickings. According to one mildly facetious account of a visit to the Tweed River in 1876: ‘Much money has been made at cedar-getting, and several stick to it in preference to farming. You are your own master; go to work when and where you like, live a life of satisfied solitude amongst the Samsons of the forest, rejoice in the sound of the mohawk [?] or the cockatoo, the red-breasted parrots and the native woods . . .’ (
BC
, 5 August)

Samuel Gray’s reason for buying a four-year lease of the Upper Walumban Run, just over the border in the Mount Warning caldera, in 1862 was that Red Cedar was still to be found there. Gray had grown up in the Illawarra where nine-tenths of the cedar had been felled and shipped to Sydney by the end of the 1820s. As soon as he had secured the lease Gray signed up two sawyers to provide him with 20,000 super feet of Red Cedar and Cudgerie to be felled by Aboriginal workers. When Gray’s partner, his and Nixon’s brother-in-law Joshua Bray, got to the Tweed he found that they had competition. About twenty cedar-getters were living in huts at Terranora, at the mouth of the river, where the
Francis George
regularly called to collect the cedar that they rafted down the river. Bray lost no time. He wrote to his fiancée Gertrude Nixon on 27 September 1864, about a trip he was making round the base of Mount Warning to Tyalgum: ‘I had the blacks felling a lot of cedar up there . . . I found a great deal of cedar there, I intend to get it out if I can.’ (Bray Papers)

Bray was already having trouble keeping his Aboriginal workers; when he visited their encampment one night he ‘found two of the cedar choppers (white people) with rum making the blacks drunk, doubtless with the intention of coaxing some of them away, or taking them away after they were drunk’. The cedar-getters had travelled from forty kilometres away (Bray Papers). Bray succeeded in getting rid of the interlopers, but from then on finding the manpower to exploit the timber would become more and more difficult. Of the thirty-eight settlers who collected mail at Bray’s Post Office in 1867, nine were timber-getters or timber-cutters and fourteen were sawyers. Nearly all of the male population of the Tweed was already involved in the timber industry in one way or another when the Bray–Gray partnership arrived. Bray hooked his own chain across the Tweed to catch the logs that came down with each fresh. While he struggled to grow arrowroot and sugar and lost money on both, it was the timber that supported him and Gertrude, and their brood of children. By the time Frank and Kate Nixon came north after the sale of Avenex to join the other members of the Nixon family on the Tweed, the cedar was almost exhausted. According to the
Brisbane Courier
, ‘much fine cedar has been sent away; but cedar getting has become now a restricted trade, as it is difficult to get.’ (5 January 1872)

Nixon, whose maternal grandfather had made fortunes out of shipping cabinet timbers out of virgin forest in the West Indies and Central America, must have been well aware of the value of the timber he saw still standing in Numinbah; when he told his sister that he didn’t like what he saw there, he was probably referring to the extreme ruggedness of the terrain. There was red gold in them thar hills, but getting it out was going to be difficult and costly.

In 1846 two boys, Edmund Harper and his fourteen-year-old friend William Duncan, who were working with an earlier generation of cedar-getters in the caldera, made their way through the Numinbah Gap and down the valley to the point where Cave Creek enters the Nerang River, where they stumbled upon the biggest Red Cedar they had ever seen. The boys, with no way of exploiting their find, had no option but to return to cutting among the gangs on the Tweed, but Duncan never forgot what he had seen. Forty years later he found the magnificent tree again; it was eventually felled and reduced to a column of timber 127 feet long, with a girth of 17 feet, yielding a total of 13,763 super feet.

It is probably useful to explain at this point that the Australian Red Cedar,
Toona ciliata
var.
australis
, is not a cedar, but a mahogany, a member of one of the seven genera in the Meliaceae family. George Bentham’s belief that the Australian tree was identical to the Indian Toona (
Flora Australiensis
, 1:387), also called Suren or Indian mahogany, has now been vindicated, but not without a good deal of intellectual ferment. In 1843 Leichhardt lamented he didn’t know the scientific name of the ‘noble red cedar’ (Bailey, J., 102). Many had been proposed. In 1840 Austrian botanist Stephan Endlicher included Toona as a section of
Cedrela
(2:1055); in 1846 Swiss botanist J. J. Roemer realised that there were sound grounds for elevating Toona to the rank of a genus (139). Victorian state botanist Ferdinand Mueller disagreed, and for years he prevailed (
Fragmenta
, 1:4). Even J. H. Maiden accepted the Muellerian name
Cedrela australis
in preference to Bentham’s
Cedrela toona
. It was after a revision by David Smith in 1960 that the Australasian and Asian
Cedrela
species were finally placed in the genus
Toona
, it being understood that the genus
Cedrela
was confined to central and tropical South America. The Australian cedar was then thought by botanists of the same mind as H. A. T. Harms (270) to be a separate species,
Toona australis
, until Bentham was proved right once again. The genus was revised again in 1995 by Dr Jenny Edmonds of Kew. The Australian Red Cedar is now to be called
Toona ciliata
var.
australis
. There are still botanists who believe that
Toona
and
Cedrela
together form a single genus, so anyone studying our cedars has to remember all the names. The matter cannot be allowed to end there, because there are botanists who would place both in the order Cedrelae, and those who would place the order Cedrelae in the Cedreloideae and those who would put it in the Swietenioideae.