White Beech: The Rainforest Years (31 page)

The coming of the Second World War simply accelerated the despoliation of the forests. After the war the devastation accelerated because the loggers now had bulldozers to cut the snigging tracks and trucks with caterpillar treads to carry the logs out. ‘Homes for heroes’ was the watchword: Forest, Spotted, Red and Flooded Gums, Grey Ironbark, Carabeen, White Mahogany, Brown Tulip Oak, Blackbutt, Tallowwood, Red, White and Yellow Stringybark, and Brush Box, all were felled to answer the demand for hardwood timber. The timbers were needed too for electricity and telephone poles and for railway sleepers. Sawmills sprang up everywhere, including in the forest above CCRRS (Portion 182). A sawmill operated there from the mid-Fifties until 1972, when it was moved to a more convenient location (Portion 190). (It has since been burnt down.)

To walk in the old-growth forest now is to walk in the deep scars left by this relentless exploitation, along tracks that have been gouged out of the mountainside, in a mess of tangled vegetation and torn roots. The decapitated boles rear up alongside, sometimes surrounded by a ring of young trees sprung from their spreading buttress roots. Often the bole bears a headdress of some precious epiphyte,
Vittaria elongata
maybe or
Asplenium polyodon
. The gaps in the forest have been colonised by myrtaceous Brush Box, which outgrew the rainforest saplings that still stand in their dappled shade waiting for their opportunity. With us Brush Box is a handsome tree, with stout rose-pink limbs, thick, glossy leaves and fringed white flowers. A ridge a kilometre or two north of CCRRS supports what appears to be a monoculture of opportunist Brush Box. Occasionally I see the tall column of a Flooded Gum,
Eucalyptus grandis
, a sign that the beloved forest had to cope with fire, as well as with axes and cross-cut saws, chainsaws and backhoes, bullock teams and bulldozers.

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, £415.14
s
.9
d
. (
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 were 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.