White Beech: The Rainforest Years (30 page)

‘That the timber-getters, being the pioneers, and having gone to considerable expense in making roads etc., and as they form a considerable proportion of the population of the district, claim consideration at the hands of the government.’

He stated that the roads had been formed by the timber-getters in places where the Government could never have gone and that the roads being made opened up the country and induced settlement. The timber-getter was already heavily taxed, with license fee, divisional board rates, &c. (
BC
, 12 September)

Another motion provided for a committee charged with preparing and presenting the petition to the state parliament, on which Nixon was slated to serve. This motion was seconded by a ‘Mr Ginnay’, probably Timothy Guinea, who had selected one half of what is now CCRRS for timber, or perhaps his son John, who selected the other half.

Selectors were of course entitled to fell and/or sell the timber off their own land either as standing timber or logs.

Quite a raid is now set in upon all useful timber, whether pine, beech, or hardwood, and the number of saw mills south of Beenleigh has, during the past year, quite doubled the power of reducing logs into quartering and boards, so that every settler who has trees is courted by two or three parties till he sells all the trees on his selection . . . Further south, settlers without means to obtain bullocks and trucks for drawing logs are casting about for someone to find the money, so that their sons may go to work in stripping the farms of the timber. But settlers and millowners both in the bush and in the town should recollect that while cabbages may give a crop every year, it will be widely otherwise with crops of timber trees. (
BC
, 25 April 1884)

It was already too late to protect the forests, even if a timber royalty, as the cedar duty came to be called, had been the way to do it. On 20 May a meeting of timber-getters was convened at Nerang.

There were about 60 persons present representing about 60 teams engaged in the timber trade. Frank Nixon Esq. J.P. of Numinba, Upper Nerang, occupied the chair.

Eight resolutions were passed
nem con
, including:

1. That the proposed new timber regulations would materially cripple the interests of the district

2. That the proposed royalty will be (a) unjust, (b) excessive, (c) vexatious, and (d) almost impossible to collect

3. That the Ranger could not distinguish on a wharf the timber taken from Crown lands from that taken from free-holds

4. That it was an utter impossibility for a ranger’s measurement to be anything like a buyer’s measurement

5. That New Zealand timber could be sold in Brisbane at less price than the Queensland timber getter could produce it for . . .

Nixon made his own contribution, which was reported thus:

From the Coomera River to the border there were six rivers,
viz
., Coomera, Nerang, Little Nerang, Mudgeraba, Tallebudgera, and the Currumbin. All the timber on those rivers that is get-at-able with horse or bullock teams has been removed years ago. The timber now left was in small patches, and very little in a patch, at the heads of these rivers, in difficult places near the main range. Cedar was not even found there in more than 2 or 3 in a group, and sometimes were from half a mile to a mile apart . . . The only payable method of working these cases was to put the timber into the river and wait for a flood, and sometimes 3 or 4 years are lost before anything can be realised.

Charles Batten, Ranger of Crown Lands, was already busy seeking out and confiscating felled timber that had not been removed from the forest. On 2 June 1885, 99,000 super feet of cedar, marked with a broad arrow, were sold in four lots at the Nerang police office (
Q
, 23 May). A smaller lot was marked and sold in August to be followed by an astonishing 115,229 super feet in October (
Q
, 8 August).

Government inspectors kept pointing out that certain clauses associated with the timber contracts had lapsed. In one inspector’s count Nixon had 62 logs of cedar, totalling 54,000 super feet, left in the forest. The timber was seized on paper and put up for sale in the hope that some other person might risk the transport difficulties. Nixon bid unsuccessfully, three pence per 100 feet for his own timber, which was passed in without a sale being made. He gave up the cedar business as a costly failure. (Groom, 90–1)

In 1888 the timber taxes were abolished, but for Nixon as for many another timber-getter, it was already too late. The recession in the rural economy had bitten deep; bullock teams had had to be sold; sawmills had been closed down, and their equipment sold off. Nobody could afford to move the fallen timber.

All over the mountain slopes at the head of the Nerang River huge logs of Rosewood and Red Cedar are lying rotting, so slowly that after rather more than a century some are still solid. Dozens lie jammed in the creeks or thrown up on the banks, festooned with mat rush and climbing ferns, starred with elaborate fungi that shine out like lamps in the arboreal gloom. The CCRRS workforce knows better than to suggest moving them, even when a flood banked behind two of them wiped out the better part of a creekside planting. We could sell them even now, but to me they are monuments, not simply to the lost grandeur of the virgin forest, but to the many nameless men and boys who struggled to make a decent living the only way they could. Above all they commemorate Frank Nixon’s unfortunate Aboriginal workers, who could expect no medical attention for the terrible injuries that were the timberworkers’ lot and could well have paid for their weekly plugs of tobacco with their lives. Carl Lenz recalled a meeting with an Aboriginal forestry worker who he hoped would tell him the truth about the Bunyip:

I met a Richmond River native – his two mates arrived to take him away. They had a job scrub falling. The poor chap got a cut on the leg with an axe, they had no doctor, and he died . . . (Lentz, 26)

When the most inaccessible recesses of the Numinbah Valley were finally surveyed, and opened for selection, they were selected for their timber. The first owner of CCRRS, Timothy James Guinea, arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1836. The two parcels that make up CCRRS were among six selected by Guinea and two of his sons. The whole Guinea family, who made their home at Advancetown, the hub of the timber traffic, was involved in logging and hauling of timber with bullock teams. As they gradually exploited their craggy holdings, hunting out the remaining Red Cedar deep in the gorges, and scanning the steep hillsides for signs of the deciduous trees in winter, or the flushed pink new growth of spring, they would carve out tracks to get to it. Once they had felled the target tree they often had to build roads with picks and shovels to haul out the carcass.

In 1893 Timothy’s youngest son Din Guinea, working in the forest at Cave Creek along with his mate Sandy Duncan (who found the Natural Bridge), came across the biggest cedar they had ever seen. Confronted with this botanical marvel with its unusually bottle-shaped trunk, deep in the trackless forest, the only thing they could think to do was to cut it down. This proved something of a challenge, because they couldn’t find anyone who had a cross-cut saw that was long enough. Eventually, having joined forces with Hector Burns, a famous bullocky and an erstwhile confederate of Nixon, Guinea found a Canadian who did.

The splitting of the big cedar log was done by an American named Henry Fritch, who had at one time in his adventurous career been a trader among the Red Indians. He had his special saw which he brought from America, with what he called the ‘Lumberman’ tooth. With great skill he bored a row of holes along opposite sides of the log, using a six foot long auger. These holes were only two or three inches apart, and he used blasting powder in them to start the splitting process which was finished with huge wedges and a screw-jack. (Burns narrowly escaped death with a mistimed blast.) The edges were then squared with a broad-axe to reduce the width to what would fit on the bullock waggon beds. After all this wastage Messrs Guinea and Burns were paid for more than 4,100 super in the two pieces of one ten foot long log. The tree was believed to contain a total of 11,000 super feet in five logs. (Hall
et al
., 82)

The butt log of the great tree was full 34 feet round.

The second log was the best and was sent to the first World Fair to be shown in Paris, 1900 A. D. It was then sent to the Crystal Palace in London, put in a glassed-in room for show with bright metal plates of the names of the getters, also where it grew, to be left for perpetuity.

Perpetuity is not what it used to be. The Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936 and the great log went with it.

That amazing tree was not the only candidate for the biggest Red Cedar ever; every district had its own and the Numinbah Valley had several. A cedar removed at about the same time from CCRRS is said to have yielded a record 18,000 super feet of marketable timber. It is odd to think now of the Guineas felling and carting hundreds of trees off Cave Creek properties, yet leaving the valuable timber felled by Nixon to lie where it fell, but there was an honour among timber-getters which required them never to saw or ship another man’s wood. Duncan and Guinea were probably not informed when Nixon died in Thargomindah in 1896. Perhaps they were afraid of Mrs Nixon, who until 1904 was the most powerful landowner in the valley.

The land that is now CCRRS changed hands regularly. At one point part of it became the property of one Albert P. Abraham, who lived there with his family until one rainy night in January 1910 tragedy struck:

Albert F. Abraham was . . . last seen alive at Upper Nerang on Saturday evening, and left about 9.30 to ride to his home. Rain was falling heavily, and the creeks and gullies which he had to cross were flooded. About 5 p.m. yesterday a search party discovered the dead body of the unfortunate man in the creek, about three chains from the crossing. His horse was found alive near by, having been caught in the vines growing on the bank. Abraham was a native of the district, 30 years of age, unmarried, and resided with his parents. (
BC
, 19 January)

There was no other way for young Abraham to get from ‘Upper Nerang’, since 1939 called Numinbah Valley, to his parents’ property than to follow the track that crisscrossed the river, in those days still known as Nerang Creek. When rain falls along the McPherson Range, the headwaters of the Nerang can become raging torrents shifting millions of tons of turbid water, rolling rocks as big as houses, only to subside within a few hours, leaving the streambeds entirely reconfigured. These were the ‘freshes’ that the timber-getters hoped would shift their timber. Travelling along these mountain streams was always dangerous; drownings of men and beasts were common. Soon after the loss of their son, the Abraham family sold up and left Numinbah.

The devastation of Numinbah did not stop when the Red Cedar and White Beech were exhausted. There was still demand for cabinet timbers like Black Bean (
Castanospermum australe
), ‘used for veneers, radio cabinets, turnery and furniture’ (Floyd, 2008, 159). The Tulip Oaks or Booyongs (
Heritiera trifoliolata
and
H. actinophylla
) were also sought for their fine grain, as was the sweet-smelling fine-figured Rosewood (
Dysoxylum fraserianum
), one of the biggest but also one of the slowest-growing trees in the forest. Next to be cut out was the Hoop Pine that grew on the upper reaches of the valley floor under the scarps. It was used for ‘plywood veneer, butter boxes, all indoor work, flooring, lining, and all joinery’ (Floyd, 2008, 59). After Hoop Pine disappeared from the wild an attempt was made by the Queensland Department of Forestry to grow it in plantations. The remainder of a plantation still survives within the confines of the neighbouring national park, a mass of close-planted dark trees that cannot now be felled. Instead they are gradually falling, as the rainforest rises slowly, inexorably around them.

The Numinbah Valley was the preserve of timber-getters and bullockies for a hundred years. For most of the 1920s twenty-six bullock teams were occupied full-time in removing its timber. Some was shipped whole; more was sawn into slabs in sawpits where the tree trunk was laid over a trench, so that the two-handed cross-saw could be used to cut it longways into slabs, with one man working from above and another below. The earliest dwellings in the district were built of pit-sawn slabs. For twenty years the only sawmill was at Nerang; in 1881 another was built down the valley at ‘Pine Mountain’ (now called Pages Pinnacle) for a Brisbane firm specifically to mill Hoop Pine.

From the beginning Cudgerie (
Flindersia schottiana
) had been harvested along with Red Cedar. Crow’s Ash (
Flindersia australis
), sometimes called teak, which was greasy like teak, with a hard interlocking grain, was the timber of choice for ballroom floors, as well as railway sleepers, decking, and carriage and coach building. Next came Bolly Gum (
Litsea reticulata
), Red Carabeen (
Geissois benthami
i
) and Yellow Carabeen (
Sloanea woollsii
), which took over some of the uses of White Beech, as well as serving for plywood and boxes. Brush Box too was sought for heavier duty in wharves and bridges.