A Single Tree Read online

  Upper Richmond was very free from vines. I have walked through it for miles and never seen the sun except where some great tree had fallen and made a gap in the green roof overhead. As you stood and looked around your view was bounded by the great brown tree stems which closed in around me.

  Visions of Australia: Impressions of the Landscape 1642–1910,

  Eric Rolls (ed.), Lothian, Melbourne, 2002

  Caleb Burchett

  1920

  Next day Sam and I walked up McDonald’s Track; walking leisurely and camping at a creek to boil our billy and take our dinner. Then we pushed on until we came to a track leading into Mr. Littledike’s selection. We soon found his camp, and waited there till he and his two men came in from their day’s work. They looked like aboriginals, as they had been “picking up”, as it was called, after the first burn. Mr. Littledike received us most hospitably. He was a true pioneer and one of the best bushmen who ever led settlers into South Gippsland.

  Next day, Saturday February 26th, 1876, my good friend Mr. Littledike accompanied us four miles further up the “Track”. Surveyors were then cutting some of the lines of the blocks selected. We partly followed on their work, but it was hard and laborious toil, and it was not till 3.30 p.m. that I drove in the fourth peg with my name, and the date of pegging attached . . .

  The land I then selected is that on which I now reside. It was all covered with dense scrub of hazel blackwood musk and tree-ferns. The large trees were blue gum, with a very few white gum. I had to cut down sixty blue gums on the two-acre site cleared for house and garden. One of these I measured when felled, and it was just over 300 feet.

  I built my house with blackwood poles – four rooms and a kitchen. The poles were placed perpendicularly; then with a paling knife I split out enough laths to do the whole interior of the walls, and plastered them with mortar made of the soil without a particle of lime. Two of the ceilings also were lathed and plastered with the same materials. These four rooms are still standing, with the lath and plaster work in good order after nearly 40 years of use; the coolest house in Summer and the warmest in Winter to be found in Poowong. I also made and burnt a kiln of 60,000 bricks, and with some of these built the first underground cemented tank in the district which has been a boon every Summer since. The residue of the bricks I built into chimneys all around the district, for which payment was made.

  The first religious service held in the district was an impromptu one, held in a tent on McDonald’s Track, about a mile west of the site of the township of Poowong, in the early part of the year 1877. The service was conducted by the Rev. J. C. Symonds, Wesleyan minister, during a visit to one of the early settlers, Mr. W. V. Hill; and at it was celebrated the first christening in the settlement, being that of David M., the infant son of the pioneers, Mr. and Mrs. James Scott.

  The first church service in Poowong was held in the room where I am writing these notes. I wrote a notice and nailed it to a gum tree on McDonald’s Track, inviting the settlers and others to Divine Worship. This was held on Sunday, December 30th, 1877, at 3 p.m. Mrs. Burchett played on our harmonium and led the singing on that occasion, but to her great relief, on the next Sabbath Mr. Cook kindly volunteered his help. The congregations increased, and soon the house was too small, and at a meeting held, presided over by the late Mark Gardner, J. P., it was decided to build a church. An immense tree was felled, sawn into plates, studs, joists, rafters and weatherboards. The present site was chosen. A “Bee” was held, the ladies providing refreshments . . .

  The Land of the Lyre Bird: A Story of Early Settlement

  in the great Forest of South Gippsland, Gordon and Gotch for the

  Committee of the South Gippsland Pioneers Association, 1920

  David Cameron

  2010

  Following the split in the Labor Party in 1955, the Country Party, led by Frank Nicklin, was elected to government in 1957. Nicklin quickly instituted the long promised changes to rural lands policy to allow freeholding of new rural land and existing long-term and perpetual leases, along with other farmer friendly measures. For most of the period from the 1870s through to 1957, rural land legislation favoured leasehold tenures for pastoral and agricultural holdings rather than permanent alienation through freeholding. Nicklin’s freehold policy won great support among rural voters, particularly farmers and rural workers who had aspirations of owning a farming property. By 1957 only six per cent of land in Queensland had been alienated under freehold tenure. By way of comparison, almost 60 per cent and 33 per cent of land in Victoria and New South Wales respectively, had been freeholded by this time. However, within two decades, Country-National Party governments had tripled the area of land freeholded in the state to almost 34 million hectares, or about 21 per cent of the state.

  The Nicklin government would also implement the last of the large-scale closer settlement schemes in Queensland; a scheme that was distinctly agro-pastoral in character and application. The Fitzroy Basin Brigalow Land Development Scheme, better known as the Brigalow Scheme, was initiated in 1962 to develop 4.5 million hectares of virgin brigalow scrub in Central Queensland for broad-acre grazing and cultivation. Between 1962 and 1977 a total of 247 freehold and freeholding lease blocks encompassing an area of 1.4 million hectares were taken up. This scheme, unlike most of the closer settlement schemes that came before it, has proved to be a reasonable success.

  The difference between the Brigalow Scheme and earlier projects is that is was based on reasonably sound rural economic principles, if not environmentally sustainable ones. Most of the brigalow blocks were big enough to be economically viable cattle grazing properties. Markets for beef were expanding during this period, as were prices. The cleared soils of the brigalow belt supported very productive improved pastures. The government built a good network of ‘beef’ roads to allow efficient transport of cattle and provided technical and scientific support that was both comprehensive and useful. The government established brigalow research stations to develop property management practices, pasture improvement and animal husbandry techniques appropriate for application on the Brigalow Scheme properties. Most importantly, the calibre, determination and practical experience of the brigalow settlers enabled them to succeed where others may well have failed. The Brigalow Scheme selectors are great exemplars of the new breed of independent graziers who are now dominant within the Queensland cattle industry.

  ‘Closer Settlement in Queensland, the Rise and Decline of the Agrarian Dream,

  1860s–1960s’ in Graeme Davison and Mark Brodie, Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal

  in Twentieth Century Australia, Monash University ePress, Melbourne, 2005

  David Campbell

  1943

  The Stockman

  The sun was in the summer grass,

  the Coolibahs were twisted steel;

  the stockman paused beneath their shade

  and sat upon his heel,

  and with the reins looped through his arm

  he rolled tobacco in his palm.

  His horse stood still, His cattle-dog

  tongued in the shadow of the tree,

  and for a moment on the plain

  Time waited for the three,

  and then the stockman licked his fag

  and Time took up his solar swag.

  I saw the stockman mount and ride,

  across the mirage on the plain;

  and still that timeless moment brought

  fresh ripples to my brain;

  it seemed in that distorting air

  I saw his grandson sitting there.

  Fivefathers: Five Australian Poets of the Pre-academic Era,

  Les Murray (ed.), Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK, 1994

  David W. Carnegie

  1898

  In many places the alluvial soil is not more than a few inches in depth. It is in such places that “specking” may be carried on, which consists in walking slowly about with eyes to the ground, and picking up any nuggets that m
ay be seen. Many thousand ounces of gold have been found in this simple manner. Where, however, the alluvium is deeper, a considerable amount of labour must be expended before gold can be won. In countries blessed with abundant rainfall the nuggets can be separated from the dirt by a comparatively simple arrangement of sluices and cradles. In the drought-stricken west of Australia other means must be adopted, which I will endeavour to describe.

  Having picked and dug out a certain amount of the alluvial ground which, it is hoped, contains nuggets of various sizes, the digger then breaks up any lumps of clay or earth by means of a heavy billet of wood, or like implement, and this prepared dirt, as it is called, he treats in one of the following ways:

  1. By means of two iron dishes, in diameter 15 to 18 inches, and in depth 4 to 5 inches.

  One dish is placed empty on the ground, the other, filled with the prepared dirt, is held up at arm’s length above the head, with the mouth of the dish turned to the wind; the earth is then allowed to fall gradually into the dish beneath, all light particles and dust being blown away by the wind.

  Exchange of dishes having been made, the same process is repeated again and again. When there is only a small amount of dust left, the full dish is held in both hands, and given a circular movement, which causes the larger stones or pebbles to come to the surface; these are cleared away with the left hand, and a sharp look out is kept for nuggets or quartz specimens. This is repeated until nothing is left in the dish but a small quantity of dust, ironstone-gravel, and possibly fine gold, or small nuggets. The dish is then held up at an angle, and shaken from side to side until a compact little heap remains, to the bottom of which the gold will have sunk. The next and final operation is to hold the dish up to the mouth nearly horizontally, and blow the little heap across the dish. Any fine gold will then be seen lying on the bottom Just under the nose of the operator.

  Given a good hot summer’s day, flies as numerous as the supply of water is scanty, clouds of dust, little or no breeze, and the same quantity of gold, and a few score of men working within an area of nine or ten acres, one is sometimes tempted to think that gold may be bought too dear. But the very lowest depths of despair, cannot compare with the heights of satisfaction, attained after a successful day’s “dry-blowing”.

  Spinifex and Sand: A Narrative of Five Years’ Pioneering and

  Exploration in Western Australia, Penguin, London, 1973

  Paul Carter

  2010

  The Mallee is a prediction of the future. Recent archaeological discoveries push back the time of first human occupation by a further fifty thousand years, but it is the future pulverisation of the globe that you witness as you drive the wire-thin grid of roads between horizon-following paddocks. Like its wires, it is a country stretched between the extremities of imaginable life. One dryness deposited the past; another deposits the future. Laid down out of shells, its prehistory is marine. Buried shorelines, Aeolian dunes and the general drift of sand are the dry relic of that Gondwanaland Mediterranean. But driving north you are also accelerating to the vanishing point of the habitable earth, towards the return of a nature which, pushed to the brink, comes back with listless malevolence to mock our long agrarian dream. The Mallee is a picture of the world after the Amazon forests are cleared, after the forests have withered and after the limit of limitless expansion has been reached. The settlers of the Mallee were in retreat almost from the day they began clearing the trees. What emerged was the spreading certainty that nothing could be sustained here in the ordinary way. Soil spiralled up in angry storm fronts and bore down on one-horse towns, and the deadly glitter of rising salt formed a cold fire around the once fresh pools and wells. The husbandry that produced this deso­lation deserves study, the goodwill that strangled every natural instance of fertility, staking out the bare paddocks with tenant sheep.

  Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region,

  UWA Publishing, Perth, 2010

  Reverend Coles Child

  1850

  I went down among the sawyers at the lower part of the river, with a black fellow as guide for twenty miles – the way lay over some ridges, a mere track, and the last part we were three hours going through one of these brushes – merely walking the horse – the trees are immense – there is the tree bearing the purple plum that grows on the Hunter – in fact all those kinds of brush trees, only enormous – the time we took will give you an idea of the size and width of the brush, and then we did not arrive at the river, only a creek where the sawyers are – seven huts – men, women and children, all in the brush under immense trees – women and children are quite pale with a yellowish tint – got here almost dusk one evening and slept in one of the huts, not the best of quarters, and the following day went down to the bend of the river where I had to marry a couple – it was ten miles by water, the beaches lined with dense brush to water’s edge – and in some part pine trees 100 ft high – but not the least value.

  The sawyers were indeed a race apart and in appearance a strange ghost-like band. The schooners of the timber fleet which brought their supplies and returned to Sydney loaded with cedar were their only contact with civilization. Hard work and a poor diet had reduced their bodies to bone and muscle on which their clothes hung ungracefully. Only the piercing eyes shining out from bearded faces showed the man within. Like pigmies, they toiled among the giant trees – eighty feet or more in height – teetering on shaky spring boards or snigging the logs to the river bank where they squared them with the pit-saw. Young men grew old and old men grew young and silly in the mono­tony of the work. To many, the colour of life was a reddish brown, like the earth they walked on, like the boles of the cedar trees when they were sliced through, like the lubras they lay with. The dreadful beauty and unreality of the forest was a subconscious fear they tried to subdue in wild drunken sprees. ‘Existence was always so close to the knife-edge of disaster’ from a falling tree or in the raging creeks at floodtime.

  Men and a River: Richmond River District 1828–1895,

  Louise Tiffany Daley, Melbourne University Press, 1966

  Frank Clarke

  1916

  Clarke castigated the ideas of city men, particularly the ‘fixed idea that a farm is necessarily a certain means to happy competence’. ‘Will no experience teach us’, he asked, ‘will we forever insist that the facts can and must be made to fit the theory? If ever a country had an example, if ever a country bought knowledge, Victoria has.’ Clarke then reviewed the story of civilian closer settlement as reported by the 1915 Royal Commission:

  It was a tale of hopeless struggle, of deterioration, of a forty percent failure and of money lost to no purpose. I spent six months with that Royal Commission taking evidence from settlers in all parts of Victoria and everywhere was the same tale for him who ran to read; the settler’s lot meant toil from daylight to dark; it meant wives working like slaves and children milking before dawn and after dark. There were hard-won successes; there were men who were slowly winning their way; but there were so many others who were drifting backward; there are so many who have given up to make a different start in life after six years wasted. There is little possibility of remedying this state of affairs. Even if our returning soldiers are afflicted with the prevalent idea of the townsman as to fresh air, lowing herds, waving wheat and the charm of being one’s own master – even if they expect land, those who know the reality should not keep quiet . . . years of the hardest struggle are nothing like adequate reward for the men of Anzac.

  Clarke sketched an alternative plan for spending the money on establishing co-operative factories, which he estimated would only cost £500 per person instead of the £3000 per person allocated for settling someone on the land:

  We import millions of pounds worth of woollen goods . . . millions of pounds worth of copper goods . . . I confess I rather allow myself to dream of these factories. They will be decentralised on our unused harbours, on our unused coal deposits; there will be technical schools a
ttached to make skilled workmen. The men will own everything and will only strike against themselves.

  Is it so impossible; is it not rather the chance of a century, the nucleus of a solution which will slowly permeate all Australia . . . to stop short at a larger scheme of the discredited soldier settlement is to show oneself bankrupt of all imagination!

  The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–38, Marilyn Lake,

  Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987

  Marcus Clarke

  1871

  The “hut” was built after the following manner:

  “Having first erected a snug hut for my men, with a good sleeping-loft above – which was very easily done by making the frame proportionately higher, and laying a floor of thinly-split logs neatly across the joists – I added a very good kitchen, with a fireplace almost as big as a small room behind, a storeroom, a bedroom for my children, with two pretty little four-pane windows looking on the river, a study with a long bench or desk, which served as a library, a workshop, a schoolroom, and spare bedroom by turns (this place had three little windows to it, was lined with shelves all round, stuffed full of old books), a small apartment for my nursemaid and youngest child, and a verandah with a porch in the centre, supported on four real Doric columns, formed of equal-sized barrels of trees set upright with flutes and other carving of bark as nature gave them. They were, though I say it myself, very pretty, and gave my cottage, with very little trouble, an unassuming, but comfortable, rural appearance. I lathed the whole, inside and out; and with the help of the sand and loam which I found at my door, mixed with chopped grass, I gave it two coats of plaster, that hardened and stuck, and sticks to this day, for aught I know, as well as any stucco. My two principal rooms were more­over nicely ceiled up to the rafters in the roof, giving them a lofty and arched appearance. There were 14ft. or 15ft. high in the centre, and the arching had this advantage, that it lessened the downward pressure, and saved it from falling, as I have known ceilings in houses of far higher pretensions often do – and especially at the most inoppor­tune times, when the fumes of the dinner on the table informed the treacherous though blind mortar that the guests were assembled below. There was a very beautiful grass plat or lawn, of two or three acres in extent, a little to the right in front of my cottage, and elevated not more than two yards above the margin of the river. I took a great deal of pains with this little spot. I fenced it very carefully round, in connection with my garden and lawn that fronted my cottage, with good 6ft. paling on all sides, except towards the river, which of itself was a sufficient fence; besides that the opposite side overhung the stream, as I have said, with beautiful, basaltic, perpendicular rocks, with here and there a tuft of flowering shrubs growing out from the crevices. A long straight path, of four yards in width, stretched from end to end, on the borders of which grew several English flowers, from seeds I had bought with me intermixed with indigenous ones collected from the bush.”