White Beech: The Rainforest Years (24 page)

In 1876 Arthur Nixon gave up trying to grow sugar in New South Wales, and accepted an appointment as government agent in ships carrying Polynesian labourers between the South Seas and Queensland (
BC
, 2 October). He then wrote ‘A True Account of a Recruiting Voyage’ which gave a first-hand account of the widespread abuse of the system, and submitted it to
The Patriot
as by ‘a Government Agent’. The article was roundly denounced as ‘hysterical’ and the hunt was on for its author, who was eventually identified. Arthur then resigned his government post (
BC
, 3 July 1878) and for some time after he worked with Louis, now Captain Nixon of the schooner
Pacific
, based at Ugi in the Solomons (
ISN
, 19 February 1881).

The only difference between indentured labourers and slaves is that indentured labourers may not be bought or sold, and they will eventually be free to return home or to find other employment. History tells us that many Islanders died before they were out of their indentures. From 1906 to 1908 most of the 60,000 Islanders still working in Queensland were repatriated under the provisions of the Pacific Island Labourers Act. It seems that while some South Sea Islanders might have been eager to work in Queensland, many, possibly the majority, were tricked into leaving their homelands, while others were kidnapped with maximum violence. Just where Frank, Arthur and Louis Nixon fit into this spectrum is not clear. When Arthur took up the government post of assistant inspector of Polynesian labourers at Mackay, he was described by the opposition as having ‘been in the blackbird trade before’ (
WA
, 2 November 1888); when he resigned the post in 1893, he was rewarded with ‘a testimonial and a purse of sovereigns by the employers of kanakas’ (
CP
, 11 February 1893), so it seems that he was not opposed to the system in principle.

In the Pioneer’s own account of how he came to Numinbah, in a letter he wrote to the land agent William Henderson in 1883, he doesn’t mention Toon, who was still working for him:

Eleven years ago the Upper Nerang where I am now living & for several miles below me was unknown country, no white man had ever been here – I found the country through the blacks, explored the whole of it and decided to take up land & make a home here . . . I applied for [the selection] on the 22nd July 1874. I immediately set to work & cut a bridle track up to this place so as to enable me to get my horses and cattle up. (The country was so rough that the blacks & I had to explore it on foot.)

Local tradition holds that soon after being shown the way into the valley Nixon ‘cut a track through the Numinbah Gap’ (Hall
et al
., 51). Nixon’s own words tell us that the track he cut led ‘up’ the Nerang rather than down, and he brought his horses and cattle ‘up’ rather than down, so he probably did take the usual route from the Tweed over the foothills of the McPherson Range at Tomewin northwards across the Currumbin and Tallebudgera Creeks on to the junction of the Little Nerang and upstream to the river flats, where he marked blazes on the trees that were to serve as the corner posts of his first selection.

Nixon’s once ubiquitous presence in the Numinbah Valley is gradually receding. His homestead is gone; Nixon’s Gate has vanished and Nixon’s Gorge is now called Egg Rock Valley. The creek that ran through his original selection is still known as Nixon’s Creek, or would be if the Australian authorities had not decided that apostrophes were too hard and simply dropped them, so Nixon’s Creek is signed Nixons Creek. The Committee for Geographic Names of Australasia has gone one further and it is now officially Nixon Creek. A ford across the Nerang River is still known as Nixon’s Crossing. Of Nixon’s Track there is no sign.

Local historians believe that Nixon’s Track was a ‘pack track’ that ‘became well-known as settlement increased in the Natural Bridge area’ (Hall
et al
., 112). When three teenaged children of Nixon’s sister set off on horseback from Kynnumboon to spend the holidays in Numinbah in the winter of 1884 they became hopelessly lost soon after entering the ‘dark scrub track’. As daylight began to fail, knowing that before them lay ‘the Big Hill and after that the dreaded Four Mile Scrub which lay across the top of the Range with a narrow track sometimes skirting a hundred foot precipice and always winding through great rocks and boulders and overhung with huge trees so draped with vines and ferns and orchids as almost to obscure the path’, the children had no choice but to make camp and spend the night in the open (Florence Bray, 56–7). Tracks in rainforest have to be regularly slashed if they are not to disappear within weeks, and a bridle or pack track is narrow to start with. No path through the Numinbah Gap would have skirted ‘a hundred foot precipice’. It would be many years before travel from Queensland into New South Wales became at all regular. When the first bullock track was cut it did not lead, as far as can now be ascertained, through the Numinbah Gap but up from Currumbin via Pine Mountain (now Pages Pinnacle).

So who was the Pioneer? His family was distinguished, on his mother’s side as planters and traders in the West Indies and Central America, and on his father’s side as members of the British cultural and religious establishment. His parents may have hoped to establish a respected dynasty in the Great South Land and, on the face of it, they appear well qualified to have done so, until history decided otherwise.

Frank Nixon’s paternal grandfather, Robert Nixon, was an Anglican clergyman and graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, who served as curate of Foot’s Cray in Kent from 1784 to 1804. Both Robert and his brother John were noted amateur artists, who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. It was at Rev. Nixon’s house that his friend and protégé J. M. W. Turner completed his first oil painting in 1793 (Cust). By his wife Anne Russell, Robert Nixon had two sons, Frank’s father, George Russell Nixon, born on 20 March 1802, and Francis Russell Nixon, born sixteen months later. In 1810 both boys were sent to Merchant Taylors’ School in London. George was taken out of the school within a year, while Francis stayed eleven years, and went on to graduate from St John’s College Oxford in 1827. In 1842 he was made a Doctor of Divinity and consecrated bishop of Tasmania. His distinguished career is the subject of one of the longer entries in the
Australian Dictionary of National Biography
. Frank was obviously named for his uncle, but it is notable that he never answered to Francis but always, no matter how formal the occasion, identified himself as plain Frank. If he had a middle name, as all his siblings did, he never used it.

Frank’s father George was twenty-eight years old when he entered Trinity College Cambridge as a pensioner in 1830. After he graduated in 1834 he led a peripatetic existence as tutor to the children of the rich in finishing schools in Italy and Switzerland. What this odd sequence of events suggests is that George Russell’s health was always fragile, or thought to be so.

Frank Nixon’s mother was Rosalie Adelaide Dougan. At least three generations of Dougans had been traders and planters in the West Indies, first in St Kitts, then Tortola and finally Guiana. Of the three sons of Thomas Dougan one, Robert, took up land near Stabroek (today’s Georgetown) in what is now Guiana. His ‘rich sugar plantation bordered with coffee and fruits’ was uncompromisingly named ‘Profit’. George Pinckard, who visited it when he came to Guiana with General Abercromby in 1796, rhapsodised that ‘having every advantage of culture, it exhibits, in high perfection, all the luxuriancy of a rich tropical estate . . . A private canal leads through the middle of the grounds, and serves, at once, for ornament and pleasure, as well as for bringing home the copious harvests of coffee and sugar.’ What was more, ‘to the slaves it affords a happy home!’ (Pinckard, ii, 203–4)

Robert Dougan’s brother John Dougan, Rosalie Adelaide’s father, is described variously as a merchant and a navy agent. In 1798 he married Clarissa Squire, daughter of a Plymouth merchant. Their first three children were christened in England. In 1803 the family travelled back to Tortola, where a fourth child was born in 1804. In August 1805 the family returned to England, and in May 1806 Dougan returned to the West Indies once more, this time without his family. He was then acting as agent for prizes, that is to say, ships thought to be bound for French colonies in the Caribbean, the cargoes of which were forfeit according to the British interpretation of the rules governing the maritime war with France. As such his activities came under bitter criticism from the American sea-captain Richard J. Cleveland, whose two ships, the
Cerberus
and the
Telemaco
, called in at Tortola on 22 April 1807.

The agent for prizes, a Mr. Dougan, came on board, and to him were delivered the ship’s papers. He then very civilly accompanied me on shore to aid me in procuring lodgings. This being accomplished, I returned on board, at the expiration of about two hours, to take my baggage on shore; and to my surprise found, that during that short interval, Dougan had been on board, had broken open my writing-desk, and had abstracted from it all my private letters and papers. This wanton outrage was entirely unnecessary, as he might have had the key by asking for it . . . (Cleveland, ii, 21)

The seizing of the vessel, which was not bound directly or indirectly for a French port, was illegal; according to Cleveland the trial that followed ‘was neither more nor less than a shield to cover an act of villainy’. Cleveland may have been under a wrong impression about the legal case, but he can hardly have been wrong about what followed.

The
Telemaco
and cargo being condemned, it was no easy matter for the prize agent [i. e. Dougan] to dispose of them, excepting at a very great sacrifice. The ship possessed an intrinsic value at Tortola, which the cargo did not . . . The prize agent was extremely embarrassed with the peculiarity of this case, aware that, without the intervention of a neutral, nothing could be made of it. In this extremity, he made a proposal to me to take it at about half its original cost, and, as an inducement, would engage to provide protection against detention by British cruisers on its way to Havana. What effrontery! What impudence! What villainy! To rob me of my property on pretext of inadmissibility of voyage, and then propose a passport for the more safe prosecution of the same voyage, for pursuing which the property was confiscated! (Cleveland, ii, 24)

Cleveland, who had no way of raising the money to purchase his own vessel and cargo, took ship for New York, leaving Dougan in possession. By such shifts Dougan became a very wealthy man. In May 1808 he returned to England, where he stayed until 1812. In 1808 Dougan’s brother Robert died in London. In his will, written on 6 January 1806, he makes no mention of children and appoints his ‘beloved brother John late of the island of Tortola and now residing in Great Britain’ his sole legatee and executor. A codicil dated 26 March 1807 left to his nephew Thomas Dougan of Demerara (son of another brother) ‘a certain plantation in Demerara aforesaid called the Profit plantation with the Negroes Cattle and Stock thereof or of any Sum or Sums of Money to arise from the sale thereof’ (NA, PRO, 11/1492).

The Dougans’ sixth child was christened at East Teignmouth, Devon, in 1810, and a seventh at St George’s Hanover Square in 1811. In 1812 Dougan left England again, but this time with his wife, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where a ninth child was born. The family returned to England, landing at East Teignmouth on 15 November 1815. In January 1816 he was obliged to be in London, to give witness against a former employee who had forged a bill of exchange for £800 in his name. In a begging letter in which he demanded £1,000 from Dougan, the prisoner excused the amount as small in comparison with Dougan’s great wealth. Rosalie Adelaide was the second-last of the Dougans’ twelve children, born according to Dougan family historians in Bedford Square on 4 June 1817; a younger brother was baptised at East Teignmouth on 13 September 1818. Not long after that Dougan’s fortunes changed drastically.

On 14 July 1821, we find him writing a desperate letter to Lord Bathurst:

I feel it incumbent on me now to mention, what your lordship is already apprized of, that lately Failures of Mercantile Persons and other Disastrous events, the Pressure of Calamity has borne heavily upon me, and left me with a family of 14 persons to provide for, and commence life anew after having conveyed to the Treasurer of Greenwich Hospital all my Effects and Debts, amounting to £18,000 to meet a Demand of £26,000 of Late Naval Prize Creditors. (NA, CO 323/195)

He was appointed one of two commissioners charged to investigate the situation of ‘certain Africans’ who had been found aboard French vessels captured during the Napoleonic wars and ‘condemned to the Crown’ by the Vice Admiralty Court in Tortola under the provisions of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The freed slaves were then apprenticed, that is, indentured, to various planters in the West Indies for fourteen years apiece (NA, PP 1825, vol. xxv, 5). The substitution of indentured labour for outright slavery was a typical British compromise, designed to keep everyone happy, everyone except the labouring people themselves, who had as little chance of defending themselves against exploitation and abuse as ever they had.

Dougan’s fellow commissioner, Major Thomas Moody, was married to a daughter of one of Dougan’s two sisters. The two men took very different views of the treatment of the indentured servants; Dougan objected that Moody favoured the colonists, taking their part even in cases where there was clear evidence of ill-treatment. The two were required to submit independent reports, but Dougan’s health was failing and he was not able to see the matter to a conclusion. In September 1826 he died intestate, leaving his brother’s estate unadministered. His eight daughters were all unmarried; of his four sons, two had joined the British army in India.