The
Old Wild Days
|
Nerang
and Tweed
|
Early
Brisbane
|
Cairns
Herberton Railway
|
Johnstone
River
|
Dalrymple,
Johnstone and Hill
|
Hard
Fighters and Hard Drinkers
|
Marvelous, beyond the power of the mind to grasp it
all, is that amazing panorama of 53 years, when one looks far
back into the past and beholds that ever-shifting scenery,
that great panoramic dissolving view represented by the
pioneer settlement of a new country being transformed from a
primeval wilderness to the conditions of modern civilization.
And what splendid characters there were among those old
pioneer men and women, true heroes and heroines as ever
adorned the page of history.
Beautiful were the mutual friendships, the unselfish
hospitalities, the mutual self-help, the general cheerfulness
with which all difficulties were faced and overcome.
And there were some original characters among these
pioneers, a few of whom we shall pass across the screen in
this article.
On my arrival in Brisbane in 1870 by the West Hartley
No. 2, Captain James Holden, my first night was spent in the
Steam Packet Hotel, kept by Harry Biggs.
On the first evening, Holden and myself went to a
theatre in Edward Street, next to an hotel kept by Lenneberg,
who was also owner of the theatre. While standing a moment at
the door a man and a woman passed in, a very handsome woman,
who was pointed out to us by Scott, of the Post Office as the
widow of Palmer, then recently hanged for the murder of
Halligan, the gold buyer.
From Bigg’s Hotel I went to a big stone house kept by
Mrs. Phillips, on the bank of the river, at Russell Street,
South Brisbane.
In after years it was occupied by Sir J. P. Bell.
Mrs. Phillips had two very handsome daughters, Lydia
and Kate, and Lydia married Gore Jones, the barrister of
today, and she, too, is alive and well.
The hotel on the corner opposite the previous
Hardgrave’s Buildings was the Royal Mail Hotel, kept by Johnny
Graham, two of whose daughters in after years married the late
James and the present William O’Connor, of Wynnum.
Cobb and Co’s mail coach started from Graham’s hotel
for Beenleigh and Pimpana, which was then the terminus. It was
driven by “Flash Harry,” who, like all Cobb’s drivers, was an
artist with the “ribbons.” He was a good-looking fellow with
dark curly hair and beard, very vain, and had an idea that he
was specially created, and not born in the usual fashion.
At Beenleigh we had dinner at an hotel kept by Michael
Tansy, who afterwards went to Taroom, on the Dawson. Pimpana
consisted of a store kept by Lenneberg and an hotel by Drew.
Among the visitors was a tall broad-shouldered fine man named
Shelley, who was starting a sugar plantation on the Coomera.
He married one of the daughters of Binstead, the Coomera
timbergetter, splendid girls of splendid parents, Binstead
being a very powerful man, 16 stone of hard flesh and muscle.
Shelley had corduroy trousers, silk shirt, a red sash
for a belt, and a formidable looking Bowie knife, so named
from Colonel Bowie, the inventor.
He became at once my ideal type of heroic brigand. A
pugnacious little red-headed man insulted Shelley, who
promptly picked him up and threw him out in the road as if he
had been a dead rat.
Another visitor was Jim Cockerill, a real wild man, who
lived on the border of the big swamp beyond Nerang.
The solid fact told of him seems incredible, but it was
well known to all who knew him.
He was a genial, honest settler, consistently sober,
except when he came in sight of a public-house.
It is a solemn fact that, in the last mile, if the pub
were in sight, he would arrive there as much excited as if he
had had two or three rums of whiskies. And after the first
glass of spirits you could give him cold tea, or sarsaparilla,
and he would not only not detect the fraud but actually become
as “tight as a fiddler’s dingo,” to use a quotation from the
backwood’s Iliad.
Another freak was an eccentric Hibernian gentleman from
near Pimpana. He would always take off his hat when he heard a
rooster crowing, and after each crow he would repeat the words
“Mel- na- ho- ya
–slaun” the rooster being supposed to speak pure Irish.
Any old Irishman can translate it for you, as it is an
ancient Irish classic.
After a few whiskies or rums, he would mount a stump,
or a log or a chair, wave his hat, give a wild yell that was
said by him to be the war cry of Brian Boru at the
Battle , and then he would drift to the blarney stone and sing
“There
is a stone there, whoever kisses,
Oh, he
niver misses to grow illoquint,
Tis he
may clamber to my lady’s chamber,
Or
become a mimber of Parliament”
He claimed to be a lineal descendant of “Bold Billy
Brennan,” the Dick Turpin of Ireland, and nobody cared to
dispute the claim!
Robert Muir, of Benowa, was one of the first two men
who took up selections on the top of Tambourine, named from
“tambreen,” a yam that grew there, but the blacks called it
“Wang-al-pong,” “Wang-goolbo,” and also “Calboon,” the name of
the lyre bird.
He drove Sir Samuel Griffith to the top in a light
buggy, with two splendid ponies, the first vehicle on
Tambourine, and he drove at such a pace that Griffith told me
afterwards that he had grey hairs when he came back!
Muir was a very expert driver, apt to be reckless, and
in his last drive, with his son Peter, he was trying to get
through to Brisbane, when the Logan and Albert were flooded,
and he drove into a flooded gully, where the culvert was
washed away, and he and his son and the two ponies were
drowned.
None of the Muir brothers could swim a stroke, and
though the son was a good swimmer, a heavy overcoat was too
much for him, or one of the ponies may have kicked him. That
gully is the one within a few yards of the present Stapylton
Railway Station.
Muir was once manager and sugar boiler of Captain
Hope’s sugar plantation at Ormiston.
In his early years he learned sugar boiling in Jamaica,
and rum making in St. Croix, where the best rum in the world
was made, and he taught me sugar boiling at Benowa in 1870.
He and his brother Matthew drove the first vehicle that
ever went through from the Logan to Casino. It was covered by
two-horse wagonette, and they went by Mount Lindsay, Unumgar,
the Beantree Crossing, and Kyogle. That was in 1866. That
track was ridden over by me, from Grafton to Ipswich, in 1874,
accompanied by R. W. Buchanan, a Brisbane produce merchant,
who married a handsome Miss Michael of the Bald Hills.
At least three men were drowned at that “Beantree
Crossing,” a deep wedge-shaped creek with steep banks 20 or 30
feet in height.
In 1870, where Nerang township stands today, there was
only one resident, a man named Hutchins, who had his wife, and
a man known as “Old George,” supposed to be her father.
Hutchins supplied most of the rum used on the river,
and did nothing else.
There were two timber-getter mates, big, powerful men,
Bill Thompson and Jack Barrett, and Jack was sent over by Bill
with a couple of three gallon kegs on a packhorse to get three
gallons for cash.
They drank rum out of pannikins in those days, but it
was genuine rum.
Jack could only get two gallons each, and he reported
accordingly.
“Oh, holy Moses, what the – two
etceteras – is the good of two gallons of rum among one of
us!” And there was no joke intended.
When going along the coast from Nerang to the Clarence,
in 1870, Muir wanted to call and see the Guilfoyle brothers,
who had just started a selection on Cudjen Creek, where Robb’s
mill stood in after years. They were the Guilfoyles from
Double Bay in Sydney, where their father had a nursery.
On the
edge of the scrub we met a tall aboriginal named “Billmin”,
who stood 6ft 6in. He was a hermaphrodite, always by himself,
for the other blacks were afraid of him. He showed us the
track into Guilfoyles’s and then went away towards the sea. We
came out on the clearing, where about six acres were felled,
partly burned off, and planted with fruit trees. The house was
of slabs and string bark, but there was nobody in, so I
followed a small track down a slope to a tea-tree swamp, and
met a man coming up with a bucket of water, wearing only a
shirt, with no boots, pants or hat. That was W. R. Guilfoyle,
afterwards for many years Director of the Melbourne Botanic
Gardens.
He had heard of my being up Mount
Warning (“Walloombin”) and said he intended making the ascent.
He stayed
all night on the summit to see the sun rise, and wrote an
eloquent account for the old “Illustrated Sydney News”.
That view from Walloombin is worth more than the climb.
It recalls Ruskin’s ideal mountains at the supreme cathedrals
of the world, with their giant grates of grey rock, their
payments of white cloud, their clouds of singing streams,
their great snow alters and the vast purple and blue vaults
traversed by the glittering stars.
Along the
coast, at a creek called Moball, a horseman was seen coming
towards us. He rode straight into a quicksand, and horse and
man actually disappeared for a couple of seconds. The horse
got a foothold, and managed to plunge out, where the quicksand
was shifting, and when we rode up to him he was a white as a
sheet, and shaking with the shock. I never saw a man so
scared, and no wonder. As a proof that he was right under, he
showed us the quicksand in the rim of his hat; an apparently
incredible thing, but the fact was there.
One of the
old Tweed settlers was Johnny Boyd, a once well-known timber
getter.
He had
been out looking for timber, and walked across from the scrub
to the beach, carrying an American axe, and he saw the hull of
a vessel, keel upwards, on the shore.
He walked
over and tapped it with the axe, being astonished at hearing
an answering tap from inside. He cut a hole in the vessel, and
out of that came two shipwrecked Frenchmen, who had been
breathing the imprisoned air.
That also
seems incredible, but it is a solemn fact, well known to old
Tweed people, and I heard Boyd repeat the story in Pilot
Macgregor’s house.
In 1866,
Surveyor Roberts ran the boundary-line between New South Wales
and Queensland, starting from Point Danger to Mt. Lindesay and
the Southern border.
He started
to rise at a point he calls “Woodjee,” only a couple of miles
from the Cape, and thence from places he called Bilinga,
Moolamba, Boolologang, Teemanggum, Talganda, Tomewin, Boying,
Thumberrigan, Wyberba, Mt. Cougal, East and West Peaks,
Thillaman, Biby, and Mt. Merino.
His line is measured across the crest of Mt. Lindesay,
so that one half one half is in each State, and he is
honourably distinguished by adhering to the aboriginal names.
53 YEARS AGO – SOME PERSONAL
RECOLLECTIONS COURIER 7 JULY 1923
The Brisbane people, whose knowledge goes back no
farther than 30 years, can have no idea whatever what the city
resembled 53 years ago, at the time of my first visit as a
youth of 17, when “smooth as Hebe’s, my unrazored lips,”
though my weight was eleven stone. Still, less can they know
what the original site of the city was like in the first of
the penal days.
When the settlement was transferred from “Humpy Bong,”
the name given by the blacks to the deserted, or “dead houses”
left behind, the landing was on the spot where the Customs
House stands today.
All the site of Brisbane was covered by thick timber
and heavy undergrowth, with patches of scrub, and all over the
site of the Botanic Gardens, right round the river, was thick,
heavy scrub, with magnificent pines, beautiful bean trees,
splendid tulip woods, and red cedars, also a fair share of the
stinging tree. There the scrub turkey built her mounded nest,
the wonga cooed in the tree tops, and a hundred other birds
warbled their melodious madrigals from morn to dewy eve.
What a thousand pities that splendid jungle was ever
sacrificed, for it would have made the grandest natural
botanic garden in the world. There was very thick scrub on
both sides of Breakfast Creek, down to the edge of the river,
and back for some distance.
All South Brisbane frontage was also covered by dense
scrub, the ridges at the back, away up to Highgate Hill and
Dornoch Terrace being timbered by light forest, with thick
undergrowth, and it was thus when I shot two small grey
wallabies in 1870, on what is now Dornoch Terrace, and they
were cooked at Johnny Graham’s Hotel.
The original site of Brisbane, even as seen by me in
1870, was not attractive.
A dirty, muddy mangrove creek started from where the
new Town Hall is being built, or even from the old Grammar
School, ran down along Adelaide Street, past where the Gresham
is, turned away eastward across Queen Street, and thence down
into the river, where the punt stands today at the foot of
Creek Street.
That was the creek in which young Petrie drowned. Where
it crossed Queen Street there was a little overhead bridge for
only foot passengers, and the vehicle traffic went round by
Eagle Street, so named from an eagle’s nest in a grey gum tree
there in the penal days.
Another dirty muddy mangrove creek started up near
Queen Street, joined by one small branch from where the
Commissioner of Police is today, then ran down the present
Albert Street to the river at the end of Alice Street. Albert
Street was a most unlovely spectacle, the whole area being a
muddy mangrove swamp swarming with frogs, whence the name of
Frog’s Hollow was derived.
It became in after years one of the most disreputable
parts of Brisbane, but those days have gone, and large
warehouses stand on the site of “Fairy Maggie’s” establishment
and the one storied abodes of many young ladies’ seminaries,
whose revelries would have rivaled those of “the Menads round
the cup, which Agave yielded up, in the weird Cadmean forest.”
Brisbaneites today are familiar with the famous fig
tree at the junction of Creek and Elizabeth Streets. That tree
grows from the site of a waterhole where the boys of the 1860s
bathed. It was their favourite “bogie hole.”
In South Brisbane, another mangrove creek started from
one end of the present bridge, continued right along Melbourne
Street to Vulture Street, finally heading where the West End
tram terminus is today.
An “old hand” named Barrett took me up there to show
where gold was got in 1854, about 10oz. There is gold there
still, and will yet be found.
Along from Melbourne Street, between Grey and Stanley
Streets, and up to near where our friend Gaffney dispenses the
potent potheen of his valiant ancestors to wild Hibernians and
fiery Scots with heather in their hair, was an almost
continuous swamp from which three small creeks ran into the
river, spanned by culverts at Hope, Peel, and Russell Streets.
At the corner of Stanley and Russell Streets, the Royal
Mail Hotel was kept by the genial Johnnie Graham, whose two
little girls of that time became in after years the wives of
William and the late James O’Connor, brothers of the well
known Denis O’Connor.
Opposite Graham’s hotel, a man named Paulovitch kept a
Store, a tall, dark
man of distinguished appearance.
On the bank of the river, at the foot of Russell
Street, was a big stone house, kept by a Mrs. Phillips, who
was Mrs. Paulovitch, but was usually called by the name of her
first husband.
She had two handsome daughters, Kate and Lydia
Phillips. In after years Lydia married Gore Jones, the present
day barrister, whose father was the famous Gore Jones, a
barrister of Brisbane’s early days.
He will remember a little episode in which he and I
were engaged when staying together in that year 1870. The
butcher next morning asked Mrs. Phillips if two of her
boarders had gone insane! It was supposed that he referred to
Jones and myself!
A punt, drawn by one man with a rope, came across to
Russell Street, from where the sanitary wharf is today, and
that one solitary punt carried all the traffic between North
and South Brisbane in 1870! Where the bridge stands today were
a number of broken wooden piles of the first bridge which one
day suddenly collapsed, a few minutes after Cobb’s coach, full
of passengers, passed over, on the way to Ipswich. The wooden
piles had either been rotten, or destroyed by cobra. It was a
close call for Cobb’s coach and the passengers. You could
stand in those days in Queen Street, at the top end, at
certain hours, and not see a dozen people between you and
Wharf Street.
The Australia Hotel was kept by J. A. Phillips, who
specialized daily in turtle soup, and there I tasted my first,
and gave it first prize.
Tom Cowell kept the Victoria
Hotel, where the Carlton is today, and George McAdam kept the
Sovereign.
Jerry Scanlan’s Hotel was away down Edward Street,
opposite Menzies boarding house. Duncan kept the hotel on the
corner.
My chief companion was a youth of my own age, named
Scott, whose father was Under Secretary in the Post Office,
and was afterwards knighted.
I had the pleasure of meeting two of his daughters in
Sydney six months ago.
Scott and myself had a swim in Charles Le Brocq’s
baths, went to see Bird and Taylor’s “Great American Circus,”
opposite the Victoria Hotel, in Elizabeth Street, on land
vacant today, where McLean afterwards had a blacksmith’s shop.
At night we went to Hussy and Holly’s Excelsior
Minstrels in the Victoria Hall, where the present hotel
stands. We have not improved on those minstrels today.
We went to a theatre in Edward Street in Edward Street,
on the left side, not far from Elizabeth Street, and next to
an hotel kept by Lenneberg senior.
One day I was introduced to Arthur Macalister, the
Premier in two Ministries, and as I was a nephew of Robert
Meston, who was a great friend of Macalister, he invited me to
a run down the bay with a Parliamentary party on the following
day. It would be a real pleasure to describe that trip and the
people I met, but that is another story.
We went in the Government steamer, Kate, Captain Page,
across to near Peel Island and back round St. Helena. Very
clear is my recollection of three ships in the Bay, the Flying
Cloud, La Hogue and Corinth.
I even remember the tonnage of the Flying Cloud, as
given to me by her Captain, L. Owen, who was on board the
Kate.
If I am wrong with 1100 tons, there is room for
correction.
A man who was here in 1870, and only came back today,
would not recognize any part of Brisbane. He could hardly be
persuaded it is the same place. Such is the rapid evolution of
the Australian city.
This article is written entirely from memory, which has
so far never failed or misled me, so the reader can accept it
with confidence.
After all I have only touched the fringe of my
subject
JOHNSTONE RIVER ADVOCATE 4 JULY 1923
This history of the story of the Cairns railway is now
told you for the first time. It is an amazing narrative, but
being told by a writer who was one of the chief conspirators,
from start to finish, it can be regarded as perfectly
authentic.
The question to settle was the best sea coast start for
a railway to Herberton.
The suitability of Herberton as a terminus was never in
question.
There were three rival ports engaged in the combat,
which was long and strenuous and with a war to the knife
spirit worthy of the gladiators who fought before Nero in the
Hippodrome of Olympia. There only three seaports concerned,
Mourilyan Harbour, Trinity Bay and Port Douglas.
In 1881 and 1883 we knew there was a vast belt of
magnificent rich scrub land on the Tableland between the
seacoast and Herberton.
We knew that Herberton was a district rich in minerals,
and we gladly and honestly believed it was destined to be a
permanent field.
And we all were satisfied that the mining wealth, and
the glorious prospects of the Herberton country, made a
railway to the coast an imperative necessity, apart altogether
for any possible and probable virtue in what is now the
Atherton Tableland, that marvelous belt of rich and splendid
basaltic jungle covered soil, stretching from the Barron south
across the watersheds of the Mulgrave, Russell, Johnstone,
Moresby and Tully, to the Herbert River.
The three rival ports were situated nearly equidistant
from Herberton, so that so far as distance was concerned they
were practically on equal terms.
There had been no railway survey and no one could
possibly say what would be the actual length of a surveyed
line from either of the three ports to the town of Herberton.
Likewise no one knew anything whatever of the engineering
difficulties, or had the least idea of where the most easily
surmountable of the Main Range was situated.
When the rivalry started in earnest, there were dozens
of amateur engineers who started up in a single night, like
Jobah’s gourd, and scores of amateur bushmen who claimed an
intimate knowledge of the whole Range from base to apex,
though they had never been over a foot of the area. Only a
very few old mature bushmen could tell you confidentially
where the Range could be ascended as easily as a staircase,
but they could never remember where the wonderful ascent was
situated, until they had at least a pint of rum.
Cairns relied entirely on the depth, capacity, and
safety of the harbour.
At first no one knew if the best route was to be up the
gorge of the Barron, along the ravine of Freshwater Creek, or
up the valley of the Mulgrave.
It was quite certain that Cairns did not care a cent
where it was to go, so long as it started from Cairns. In that
case it could go through a tunnel in the Bellenden Ker Range
and up the Russell behind Mt. Bartle Frere, and zig zag up the
Tableland if there were no better route available.
The route of the railway, and the cost, were as nothing
to the three contending rival ports so long as it started from
Mourilyan, Cairns or Port Douglas. Nothing else weighed a
pennyweight in the balance.
Port Douglas had the weakest claims. As a port, it was
only an open roadstead, with no protection from any direction
and there was no evidence whatever of any likely easy ascent
of the Range, either up the Mossman or the Mowbray, the only
two possible routes.
Cairns had most faith in the track up the gorge of the
Barron, via Stony Creek to the Barron Falls, but that looked a
wildly improvable route for a railway, to the ordinary
citizen, and a very ugly problem to a surveyor or engineer.
The strongest advocate of the line from Mourilyan was
John Macrossan, Minister for Works in the McIlwraith Ministry.
It is quite certain that Macrossan meant the line to start
from Mourilyan, unless there were some impossible obstacles in
the way, but he was singularly unfortunate in the methods he
adopted. Instead of sending qualified surveyors and engineers,
guided by competent bushmen, to carefully examine the face of
the Range, he asked Christie Palmerston to make an exploring
trip from Herberton to the coast. Palmerston had no
qualification whatever, except that he had been out about two
years in the scrubs at the head of the Mossman and Daintree
with a scrub black named “Toby” as an escort. He had no
knowledge of surveying or railway engineering, and any opinion
he might form with regard to a feature survey, or the general
contour of the country, could be worth nothing whatever to a
surveyor or engineer.
So Palmerston’s report went into the waste paper
basket, and then Macrossan instructed Inspector Johnstone, of
the Native Police, to make a flying trip from Herberton to
Mourilyan.
Instead of starting from Mourilyan and working his way
up the likeliest parts of the Range to the Tableland, he
started from the other end, came down without knowing where he
was coming out, got entangled in the teatree swamps of the
Moresby, and had considerable difficulty in reaching Mourilyan
at all, having a very unpleasant experience towards the end of
his journey.
In any case his opinions were of no more value than
Christie Palmerston, so his report also went into the waste
paper basket.
In the meantime much valuable time was lost by the
advocates of Mourilyan, and Cairns had been making the most of
all available opportunities.
At an early stage Port Douglas realized that it had
little or no hope, and the whole battle raged almost entirely
between Cairns and Mourilyan towards the last of the campaign.
Mourilyan was in no sense an adversary to be despised.
There were very strong vested interests in Mourilyan, and many
influential men interested in the Johnstone River. The
Queensland National Bank was largely interested, and the
Catholic Church selected 15,000 acres of Johnstone land, quite
a legitimate and very wise far seeing transaction.
This much is certain, that if Macrossan had wisely and
promptly engineered the route from Mourilyan, with a competent
surveyor and engineer, the railway from Herberton would be
running to Mourilyan today, and Cairns would be out of the
whole business.
The Surveyor would almost have certainly have found a
track from Mourilyan to Herberton, and probably an easier and
much less dangerous track than that from Cairns, and far less
expensive.
But Macrossan’s opportunities were wasted on Christie
Palmerston and Inspector Johnstone, and the last chance was
gone when he went out of office with the McIlwraith Ministry
on March 13th 1879, and then the Griffith Ministry
came in, with William Miles, “old Billy Miles,” as his friends
called him, as Minister for Works and Railways from November
13th, 1883 to August 22nd 1887.
When Macrossan returned to office on June 13th
1888, with the defeat of the McIlwraith Ministry, the railway
question was settled beyond reach, and the first section had
been opened for 7.37 miles to Redlynch, on the 8th
October, 1887.
It is certainly not known to the public that Griffith
was not in favour of the Cairns Railway, and that he was very
wild with Miles for promising to construct the first section
of ten miles How and where that promise was given, and under
what peculiar circumstances, will only appear.
That promise was the cause of considerable friction
between Miles and Griffith. Griffith dreaded what he saw would
be the awful cost of the second section from Redlynch to the
Barron Falls, and in fact he was doubtful if the construction
was possible. In this belief he was supported by more than one
of the railway engineers.
But Miles had given his promise, and the stubborn old
Scot refused to retract, even although it came nearly costing
him his seat in the Ministry.
And this is the story of the promise. Miles had gone on
a visit to Townsville, and Cairns and Herberton decided to
send a deputation to urge a decision with regard to the
railway, and call for tenders for s first section of which the
working plans
and specifications were ready.
At that time I was Chairman of the Cairns Divisional
Board, being chairman for two years.
The deputation from Cairns included James Kenny, a
member of the D. B. Archie Forsyth, then engaged in cedar
cutting business at Atherton with Burns, Philp, and Co., and
Herberton sent a gentleman named Moffitt, nephew of the late
well known John Moffitt, a mining celebrity in the North.
The deputation appointed me leader, to do most of the
talking for them. Forsyth and Kenny had charge of the timber
section to show there was a supply of red cedar, crow’s ash,
bean tree, walnut, pencil cedar, and other timbers on the
Atherton Tableland to last something like 300 years, and
Moffitt was prepared to prove that the mineral deposits of the
Herberton country went down to the center of the earth, and
were practically inexhaustible.
Part of my mission was to show Miles that the fate of
North Queensland depended on his verdict, that the starting of
that line would immortalize him and hand down his name to
posterity, associated with the authorship of the most
picturesque, most remarkable, most valuable, and most
profitable railway in Australia, if not the world!
That deputation was armed to the teeth, with every
available weapon, and did not forget very much.
The interview with Miles was in Buchanan’s Hotel in
Townsville, but old Miles reserved his decision until his
return to Brisbane.
Now, Griffith’s hostility to the railway was well known
to me, and I very seriously advised my mates that unless a
promise of a first section could be obtained from Miles before
he reached Brisbane, the Cairns railway would probably never
be constructed.
So Kenny and Forysth went back to Cairns, and Moffitt
and myself came on to Brisbane with Miles on the steamer.
Moffitt was a very amiable, very reserved man, and rather shy,
so he left all to me, and never even spoke to Miles on the way
down.
While the steamer was anchored at Broadmount, Miles
solemnly promised me to call for tenders for the first ten
miles, and he made it in the presence of Moffitt and the
Captain of the steamer.
On arrival in Brisbane, I wired the joyous news to
Cairns and Herberton, and received enthusiastic telegrams
congratulating me on the success of my mission.
Miles and myself had been three years in Parliament
together, on the same side of the House, and for over two
years I was Whip to the Griffith party, so that Miles and
myself understood each other.
The telegrams all appeared in the Brisbane papers with
complimentary paragraphs and some chaff for myself on having
“so successfully cornered Miles, and got the promise of that
ten mile section of the Cairns railway.”
So there is clear evidence that but for my coming down
with Miles and securing that promise, the Cairns Railway would
not have been constructed.
Most certainly Griffith would have left it alone, and
it would never have been built by Macrossan on June 13th,
1888.
Had the line not been started before the collapse of
the Herberton mines, and with no settlers on the Atherton
Tableland, there would be no Cairns Railway today.
SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE
“ADVOCATE.”
The Johnstone River of North Queensland represents a
larger area of highly fertile soil than any other river in the
State. On the East coast of Australia it is paralleled only by
the Richmond and Clarence Rivers, and even their splendid
lands were not as rich as those of the Johnstone, covered as
it was for countless ages by dense luxuriant tropical
vegetation, that grew, and fell, and decayed into a mould that
was really a compost heap of manure mixed with the mineral
salts of years, those great jungles grow and reproduced
themselves, and fell and became soil; and the beautiful wild
flowers bloomed and vanished, and the birds of gorgeous
plumage and sweet voices sing and reveled in all the glories
of the primeval vegetation uncared for, unseen and unknown by
mankind, except the wild Stone Age savage, who for unknown
ages roamed through these tremendous solititudes, and lived
and loved, and sang his wild songs, and hunted and fought and
died, taking his food from day to day merely from the hand of
Nature, and not cultivating a single flower, or one food
producing plant.
Thus he lived hand in hand with Nature only, while afar
off, across vast oceans, the mighty empires of civilized man
rose and fell, and the great ancient cities of Karnac,
Babylon, Memphis, Alexandria, Persepolis, rose to unimaginable
splendour, and declined and perished, and were mercifully
covered by the sands of the desert.
As the Johnstone River blacks were in the days of
Babylon, whose Hanging Gardens fell far short of the gorgeous
splendour of the tropical jungle, so they were the same when
Captain Cook sailed along northwards inside the Barrier reef,
in that memorable year 1770, when doubtless some of the
Johnstone blacks, gazing from the headlands, saw with fear and
wonder, that mysterious white winged ship, like a gigantic
pelican, passing away along the Eastern horizon, and vanishing
into Eternity.
The first white man who saw the Johnstone River is
probably not recorded, like so many others who were the first
to discover certain localities, without recording them, and so
for ever have remained unknown.
But the first man to proclaim the existence of the
river was Sub Inspector Robert Johnstone of the Native Police,
when he was searching that coast for survivors from the Barque
“Maria” wrecked on Maria Reef off Hinchinbrook Island, on her
way from Sydney to New Guinea, with a large party of
prospectors in 1872.
One boatload of refugees reached Cardwell, among them
being the late Kendall Broadbent, for many years the zoologist
and taxidermist of the Queensland Museum, and William Tate,
for many years a teacher of public schools.
The captain had behaved badly by leaving the vessel
soon after she struck, taking the long boat and only four men,
but they were all killed and eaten by blacks at Tam O’Shanter
Point, named from the vessel that took Kennedy’s unfortunate
expedition there in 1848.
Nine men on one of the rafts landed near Mourilyan
Harbour of the present day, and they too were killed and
eaten.
Another raft landed towards Point Cooper, and those on
board rambled away north to near the mouth of the Mulgrave and
were rescued.
The Johnstone River blacks acquired a worse record than
those of any other part of the Queensland coast.
Johnstone and his ten black troopers were out with
George Elphinstone Dalrymple’s North Coast Expedition in 1873,
and he piloted Dalrymple to the mouth of the river on the 4th
October, the river carrying two to eight fathoms for fifteen
miles, the fresh water appearing at eight miles.
Before Dalrymple saw the Johnstone it had been
navigated by a man named Phillip Henry Nind, then a well-known
sugar planter on the Logan River, and for a time member of
Parliament for the Logan.
Nind was cruising along that coast with four men in a
whaleboat, looking for sugar land, and he saw and entered the
river, but Johnstone had been there before.
With Dalrymple’s party as allies, Nind went back on the
river; he and Johnstone and Dalrymple navigated the south
branch for ten miles. They passed what is still known as
“Nind’s Camp”, the site of it seen by me in 1882.
Johnstone and his troopers, when away on a tour by
themselves, reported a good site for a camp at the junction,
on the site of the present town of Innisfail, which was for
some years called Geraldton, but the name was changed to
prevent confusion with the Geraldton in Western Australia.
With Dalrymple’s party was Walter Hill, the botanist,
who was the first curator of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens to
which he was appointed in 1854, and held the position to the
date of his death.
Hill was enraptured with the richness of the soil, the
glorious and gorgeous vegetation, and the apparently vast
extent of the available area of fertile land, which he
estimated at half-a-million acres, of which 300,000 was
available for sugar. He regarded it as “the most valuable
discovery in Australia.”
Allowing for the excessive enthusiasm there was an
excuse for some extravagance in a description of the first
impression made by a sight of that wonderful region. Hill
measured a red cedar which was 23’ 6” in girth at three feet
from the ground, or nearly eight feet in diameter. He took
away a specimen of a new wild banana, 30ft in length and 3ft
6in in the girth.
They named and navigated “Nind’s Creek” for seven
miles, and saw a great number of blacks with rafts made of
three logs of the stems of wild bananas, tied with lawyer
vines. While one black, a very big man, was swimming across
the river, he was taken down by a crocodile, while Dalrymple
was looking at him.
One would think that the blacks, with their knowledge
of crocodiles, would avoid all such unnecessary suicidal
risks, but the fact remains that they incur these insane
dangers frequently, and at times with fatal results.
An old black, crossing the Russell on half a dozen wild
banana stems, was taken off by a crocodile not thirty yards
from my boat. An aboriginal woman, standing in knee deep
water, was cut in two by one snap of a large crocodile, who
took away one half and came back for the other, to be killed
by the crowd of blacks waiting for him with woomera spears, of
which about twenty were driven into him simultaneously. They
then cooked and ate him, and regarded the account as settled.
Dalrymple, Hill and Johnstone cut a track through to
one of the hills, taking three hours to go two miles, and had
a magnificent view.
Dalrymple named the Walter Hill Ranges, in honour of
Walter Hill, and Mounts Maria, Annie and Arthur from members
of Johnstone’ family.
He named the Basilisk Range from H.M.S. Basilisk, and
Flying Fish and Coquette Points at the mouth of the river from
the two cutters used on the expedition. He also named Banana
Island in the middle of the river and gave the length as 300
yards.
He gave the name of Perry’s Point to the north head of
the Johnstone River. He reported finding very fine fire clay
and excellent slate, apart from fair gold prospects in at
least two places.
He predicted a payable gold discovery in future years
somewhere in the adjacent country. A considerable quantity of
alluvial gold was found on the upper Russell not far from the
Johnstone, and was worked for years by white men and Chinese.
Christie Palmerston found gold in the Russell above the
falls under the basalt.
All that Dividing Range is gold bearing, from the
Herbert River north to the Bloomfield.
When Dalrymple and all his party, Nind and his four
men, returned to the mouth of the river, they camped on
Coquette Point, where Hull, the fisherman of the expedition,
caught a lot of big silver bream and other fish. His name is
borne to day by the Hull River which runs into Rockingham Bay.
From the Johnstone, Nind and his men went away South,
and Dalrymple’s party started North, discovering and entering
the Mulgrave River on November 18th, 1873, naming
it from the Earl of Mulgrave and the Russell from Lord John
Russell.
With the departure of Dalrymple, Johnstone and Nind,
came a blank period until the arrival of the first timber
getters in 1874, and a great quantity of splendid cedar was
shipped from the Johnstone.
Among these pioneers were two men named Stumn and Schou,
who, if my memory is correct, were the two first homestead
selectors on the Johnstone.
Among the first cedar cutters was Terence Ahearn, who
afterwards went to the Daintree to cut cedar, and was badly
speared in an attack by the blacks, one spear going through
his left lung; but they got him to Cooktown to Dr. Korteum,
and he recovered.
In after years he became a well-known railway
contractor in South and Central Queensland, associated with
O’Rourke and McSharry.
Those cedar cutting pioneers on the Johnstone had to
face some very dangerous malaria, and a schooner lying at the
mouth of the river loading cedar lost four men, including the
first mate and the cook, who were buried on Flying Fish Point,
beside several other white men who died with a fever which had
some of the symptoms of the West Indies. With the clearing of
the jungle, and the burning of masses of decaying vegetation,
the fever rapidly disappeared, until today the climate of the
Johnstone is
just as healthy as any part of the east coast of the North.
The pioneers frequently suffered by not being careful with the
quality of the food they ate and the water they drank, or the
situation of their camp. In the jungle was an abundance of
game, including the scrub turkey, the scrub hen, whampoo,
topknot and crested pigeons, while the Torres Strait pigeon
could he shot in substantial numbers during the season.
Wallabies were also very numerous, and those tough old
cedar cutters occasionally sampled a cassowary. Fish were
plentiful in all the waters, so that good fresh food was
always in abundance, if they only tried to get it.
My first visit to the Johnstone was in the end of 1881,
going there in the Victory with Captain Lawson, and we landed
on Coquette Point on the morning that Patrick William Kerr,
with eight kanakas went up the river to cut scrub on what is
now the Innisfail Plantation, the first ever cut on the
Johnstone.
My first meeting with Kerr was when he was a counter
hand in the store of my brother-in-law Alexander Cameron, at
Maclean, on the Clarence.
Kerr took up one of the first 160 acre homesteads on
the Johnstone.
We went ashore and entered a very comfortable hut where
an old gentleman was seated on a chair, addressing another
chair as if it held the Speaker, and the scene was Parliament.
That old gentleman was Thomas Henry Fitzgerald, who was
Treasurer in the Lilley Ministry in Queensland from November
23rd 1868, to Jan 27th, 1869. When we
called he was slightly suffering from fever and imagined
himself once more in Parliament, but he recovered himself and
gave us a pleasant welcome, being a polite and courteous man,
a surveyor by profession. In that Lilley Ministry which lasted
from 25 November 1868 to 3 May 1870, there were three
Postmasters-General – T. B. Stephens, Dr. George Richard Gore,
and John Douglas, who was finally appointed Agent General in
London. Macalister was Minister for Lands.
In after
years, in 1881, Fitzgerald became the real pioneer settler
of the Johnstone, and the next chapter records the
subsequent history of that river.
EARLY EXPLORERS
JOHNSTONE AND HILL
10 DECEMBER 1923 THE
DAILY MAIL, BRISBANE
In addition to Dalrymple’s own very complete report of
that North-East coast expedition of 1873-4, there were two
other highly interesting reports sent in by Walter Hill,
curator of the Botanic Gardens, and Robert Johnstone,
Sub-Inspector of Native Police, both being included in
Dalrymple’s party.
Walter Hill was our first curator of our Botanic
Gardens, being appointed in 1855. In that year he went to the
South Percy Island with Strange, the botanist and four other
white men, three of whom went ashore with Hill and Strange,
leaving Maitland, the master, on board the ketch, Vision.
An aboriginal named Deliapee also went ashore. Four of
the white men were killed by the blacks, and only Hill and
Deliapee got back to the ketch.
Hill told the story to me two or three times, but it
was never quite clear what actually did happen on the evening
of October 14th 1855, but Strange, Spurling, Stack
and Gillings were never seen again. At the subsequent enquiry,
Hill said that he say Spurling’s dead body lying floating in
the mangroves, and Deliapee waving his shirt to the Vision.
But we are wandering away from Dalrymple. After he had
examined the Daintree and Cape Kimberley, and named the
heights of Dagmar and Alexandra, the Thornton Peaks and Palmer
Range, also “Wyambeel” Point, at the mouth of the Daintree,
from the blacks name for a canoe, he sailed away for the
Endeavour River, entering Cooktown Harbour on October 25 in
time to see Captain Saunders and the Leichhardt entering with
70 diggers, Howard St. George, A. McMillan, and all the rest
of the official party, bound for the new Palmer diggings.
On the 28th he went some miles up the
Endeavour River, and on the 31st the whole party
left in the Leichhardt for No. 2 Barnard Island, to camp there
until the arrival of a better vessel to replace the Flying
Fish, and Coquette, which had been found to be too small and
unsuitable.
At Cardwell, he chartered the schooner Flirt, and on
November 14 anchored near Johnstone’s camp, on Dunk Island.
Johnstone was camped on the lower Herbert with a
detachment of Native Police when ordered to join Dalrymple at
Cardwell. At that time he had been out along the coast north
of Cardwell, looking for the wrecked men of the brig Maria,
and had seen the river which bears his name today, so he acted
as guide to Dalrymple along that coast.
It is interesting to read his own and Dalrymple’s
independent reports of one particular scene they both saw on
the coast opposite Double Island, about 14 miles north of
Cairns.
Dalrymple says: “In every camp along the beach for two
miles was unmistakeable evidence of wholesale cannibalism;
heaps of human bones and skulls were found in each camp, and
in some were roasted and partially eaten bodies beside the
fires at which they had been cooked. Lumps of half-eaten human
flesh were found in the gin’s dilly bags. These people are of
the most ferocious expression, and are large and powerful
men.”
Of the same scene, Johnstone says: “I saw a mob of
blacks coming toward us, yelling and brandishing spears,
poised on the woomera, each with a bundle of spears in the
left hand. I saw at once they intended to attack us, and
prepared accordingly. We found the flesh and part of the
skeletons of four men they had eaten, and the cooked flesh
stowed away in dilly bags for food. The blacks here have
splendid canoes, made from solid cedar logs, neatly dug out,
with outriggers, and capable of carrying 15 or 20 men.”
In 1882, just nine years afterwards< I met that
Double Island tribe, “Mauggooloo,” and they told me the
cannibal feats seen by Johnstone and Dalrymple was on the
bodies of a party of white men, washed ashore from,
presumably, some shipwrecked vessel, and not blacks at all.
Johnstone’s journal mentions that Dalrymple at the time
was very ill with fever, a bad leg, and had cold. He said he
had fallen across a hatchway and was afraid he had broken a
rib. Dalrymple was so ill in the Russell River that fatal
results were expected.
Henceforth I shall confine this narrative to the
journals of Johnstone and Walter Hill. Johnstone was a very
expert rifle shot, one of the best in Queensland, and equally
good with the shotgun.
On that trip he did his first shooting on the South
Barnard, bagging a lot of Torres Strait pigeons, and his first
Victoria rifle bird, of which he says: “The shading of the
colours of this glorious bird baffles my power of
description.”
He was especially not aware that McGillivray, of the
Rattlesnake, shot the first known specimen, of that rifle
bird, Phtilaris Victoria, on the same island in May 1848. The
Barnard Islands were named by King of the Mermaid on June 21,
1819, from his friend, Edward Barnard.
Blacks were very numerous on the Johnstone in 1873, and
Johnstone had no affection for them, as he saw too much of
what they had done to the shipwrecked men of the Maria.
When on the river on October 10 he records: “I went up
the river and found a large mob of blacks collected to oppose
us so we dispersed them. In the afternoon I found the blacks
closing in on the camp and dispersed them. In the morning they
came out below the camp and challenged us, so I dispersed
them. On arrival at Coquette Point, the blacks were there so
we moved them on.”
That is the brevity which is the soul of eloquence. No
waste of language in Johnstone’s reports on the blacks.
In brevity they are not excelled by Colton’s Lagen or
the Laconics of Pausanias
the Spartan.
But Johnstone had good reason for some of his gentle
“dispersals” and requests to “move on.”
The blacks of the Johnstone River behaved badly to the
Maria men, and Sub-Inspector Robert Johnstone, of the
Queensland Native Police, was taking no unnecessary chances
with treacherous, hostile, scrub blacks, who could make good
practice with the woomera spear at a hundred yards.
And yet the Russell blacks a few miles north behaved
well by Tom Ingham and his party, and took good care of them
until they were rescued; but Tom and one of his mates had red
hair, and that was the saving clause.
On the South Franklyns, Johnstone “shot eight scrub
hens and enough pigeons to supply all hands. They also got a
lot of cocoanuts from some of the only trees known then in any
part of Australia, first seen there by the Rattlesnake people
on June 19, 1848.
During one of my visits there, when camped on the South
Frankland, I found that some worthless vandal had recently cut
down one of the grand old trees to get a few nuts. He had
called there when passing in a fishing boat, and I was sorry
it was not during my visit, as the cocoanuts would have
disagreed with him. On Rocky Island, a small rough island in
Trinity Bay, Johnstone shot 43 Straits pigeons, and on
December 20, on one of the Barnards, they shot 83 Straits
Pigeons, and Johnstone got six Victoria riflebirds. Close to
the site of the present Innisfail, they measured a giant fig
tree, 160 feet in circumference, at 3 ft from the ground. The
largest measured as seen by me was 146 feet, on Freshwater
Creek, seven miles from Cairns.
Johnstone, on December 11th, got 22 pigeons
on the Franklands, and a load of cocoanuts, for which his
black troopers climbed the trees.
He got a remarkable mummy on the Mulgrave, on December
2, “a woman about 5ft 2in, squatted on her haunches, her hands
clasping her face, the body well preserved, and even the eyes
perfect, the ears, fingers, toes, and muscles all showing as
in a person dead from hunger.”
He must have shot about a dozen crocodiles, including
two in the Mulgrave.
On November 10, when passing a case of ammunition from
the boat to the cutter,
a sea struck the boat, the case went overboard, and was
lost beyond recall, so he had to get more from Cardwell.
In the Mulgrave he shot black ducks, pigmy geese,
redbills, pigeons and scrub hens.
These Straits pigeons come down annually from New
Guinea in countless thousands to breed on the Queensland
coast, on the islands from the Hinchinbrook North to the
Flinders Group.
They are larger than a tame pigeon, with a handsome
white and blue slate plumage, very strong and swift fliers.
They nest on the new trees on the islands, and fly off each
morning to feed on the fruit trees of the mainland, returning
to the islands from about 3 o’clock to near sunset. They have
a most mournful voice, a monotonous moan, and when they are
gathered together, the noise is deafening and horribly
depressing.
On arrival from New Guinea, they are out of condition,
but soon fatten, and is then a dainty diet, much superior to
the tame pigeon, but the flesh is not white as that of the
wonga, which is not found north of Mackay.
The late J. A. Macartney told me he had seen the
Straits pigeon as far south as Broadsound, and that was quite
a surprise. They would be a few stray birds out of their usual
latitude, like the occasional stray crocodile that came south
to Sandy Strait.
On November 25, Johnstone, Walter Hill and eight
troopers, started from the Mulgrave to ascend Bellenden Ker,
returning on the 28th. He only records one altitude
of 2100 feet, and is strangely silent thence onwards.
In 1889, the year of my first ascent of the whole of
the Bellenden-Ker Range, the blacks of the locality showed me
where Johnstone camped on the summit of Mount Toressa at 2000
feet but he never got beyond that. Besides being a dead shot,
Johnstone was a first class bushman in either scrub or forest
country.
With Walter Hill’s journal we step into the domain of
the botanist. He was a remarkable man, well-known to me
personally for a number of years, very reserved, somewhat
taciturn, with a thorough knowledge of his work, and all the
essential enthusiasm.
The late F. M. Bailey, Queensland’s great botanist, had
a high opinion of him, and was satisfied the Botanic Gardens
had never been the same since Hill’s time. Hill was both a
botanist and scientific gardener, and was a man very much
understood. He was the botanical collector of Dalrymple’s
expedition of 1873, and made a valuable collection, besides
discovering a number of new species, including the scrub
ironwood named from him Myrtus Hilli.
He was a hard-headed, practical Scot, and all his
descriptions of the Johnstone, and other rivers, his account
of the quality and probable extent of the timbers, have all
been verified as amazingly accurate predictions. He brought
down 33 samples of soil, he collected 469 specimens of shell,
representing 37 species of land shell including 23 Helxi
and 90 Searabacus.
His classification of the timbers and plants on that
expedition was afterwards fully confirmed, and as an
illustration of the amazing energy and enthusiasm of Hill I
shall record here, for the astonished readers’ information,
a list of the plants and seeds he took with him for planting
on the mainland and on the islands. They included Guinea
corn, and millet, and buckwheat, Guinea, Angora and prairie
grasses, ground nuts,, loquats, sweet sop, cherimoya,
custard apple, mango, alligator pear, Chinese date plum,
bread fruit, jack fruit, cocoa, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves,
black pepper, ginger, vanilla, tapioca, two arrowroots, six
varieties of pines, six of mulberry, three of sweet
potatoes, and 12 varieties of American vines. And all these
were actually planted. He also put a male and female Guinea
fowl on Brooks’ Island, and Sheridan, the Police Magistrate
of Cardwell, put another pair. It was all a fine testimonial
to Hill’s unselfish energy and enthusiasm, which were all
wasted, for not one of these plants, or the results of the
seeds have ever been seen since. It was the same with the
explorers.
BACK IN THE FIFTIES
OLD QUEENSLAND
STORIES GRAVE AND GAY
HARD FIGHTERS AND HARD
DRINKERS
DAILY MAIL 21 JANUARY 1924
In my previous article, there was mention of a
notorious aboriginal called Dimdahli, hanged in 1834 on the
site of the present Brisbane Post Office. Here is some
information not hitherto published. It was taken down by me
from the man who captured Dimdahli and got £25 pound reward.
His name was William Baker Tomkins, always known as
plain William Baker. When known to me, from 1878 to 1881, he
was a well-known farmer in the Rosewood Scrub, where he
afterwards kept a hotel near Walloon. Both he and Mrs. Baker
were fine, genial, hospitable people, and great favourites.
His narrative, taken down by me in 1878, is now before me, and
in after years, when he was dead, it was clearly corroborated
by his widow, who added one or two items, being present at the
time when Dimdahli was arrested.
Dimdahli was accused of the murder of 13 whites,
including Gregor and Mary Shannon, and two sawyers, on the
Pine River. He was also charged with spearing a German
missionary named Hausmann, at Humpy Bong.
His reputation was so bad that any outrage in any
direction was promptly placed to his credit. All efforts at
capture were failures, even when a reward of £50 was offered.
Dimdahli was a Bribie Islander, of the tribe of
“Jooaduburrie,” and if he had remained on Bribie, among his
own people, or kept away in the scrubs of the Blackall Range,
he would probably never have been captured.
But he came in to Fortitude Valley, and was stripping
bark for the settlers, going under the various names of “Jimmy
Donald,” “Wikou,” and “Brown.”
But the other blacks knew he was the terrible Dimdahli,
and one of those, “Woomboonggoroo,” a Brisbane black, told
Baker, who enticed him in and gave him work stripping bark.
Then he went straight to Sneyd, the gaoler, and asked for
assistance. Sneyd said it was useless, as a reward of £50 had
been offered in vain. But he sent two constables, Downes and
Frederick, who went in plain clothes, carrying a halter, as if
looking for horses.
At the right moment, Baker, a tall powerful man, caught
Dimdalli suddenly by his mass of long hair and pulled him
back, calling to the constables: “This is the notorious
Dimdalli.”
The constables seized him, put on the handcuffs, and
tied his legs with the halter.
This was alongside Massey’s brickyard in the Valley,
and Massey’s dray was requisitioned to take the black to the
lockup.
Baker hauled him to the dray by his feet, and Dimdahli
made one tremendous spring and nearly got clear, but Frederick
hit him across the nose with a pistol, and then he remained
quiet.
Both Mr. And Mrs. Baker were among the crowd who saw
him hanged. It was a gruesome scene. A hangman was brought
from Sydney, and he allowed too much of a drop, the result
being that Dimdahli came down with both feet on his coffin,
which was underneath, and the hangman put all his weight on
his shoulders, so that instead of the neck being broken, he
was actually strangled. A large mob of blacks was on the
Flagstaff Hill, and they and Dimdahli called loudly to each
other.
His last request to them was to “kill Baker and
Woomboonggoroo,” “Gneen nurwain billarr, baiginn Bakeram,
Woomboonggoroo, wacca weereppie.”
“You throw the spear, kill them both so they never come
back.”
He came out on the scaffold wearing dark tweed
trousers, blue twill shirt, and a handkerchief round his neck.
Mrs. Baker told me she was paid the £25 under the
archway of the old barracks, then used as a courthouse, the
money being paid by Brown, afterwards Usher of the Black Rod.
The two constables got £3 each.
A well-known settler in the Ipswich district was Robert
William Le Grand, a genial humourist of the first water.
He called his place, not far from Blantyre,
“Wooyimboong.”
He was on a wedding tour in France and Germany in the
year of the Paris Exhibition in 1861.
He noticed that porters and sailors threw small trunks
and boxes in all directions, so when he came to Queensland, he
had a special box made to stop that sort of thing. Amongst
other things that box held a piano and a suite of furniture,
and required all the ship’s company to handle it.
When it arrived by river steamer at Ipswich, in the old
“Settler,” Captain Mellor, a whole dray and one team were
required to take that box to “Wooyimboong.”
On arrival there it was too big to go in at any door,
so he put it down and built a house over it, and on my first
visit his sister was sitting inside the box, playing the
piano.
He had an eccentric Teutonic neighbour named Jasper
Coop. During one of my visits Coop came over to tell Le Grand
that he had received a letter from his brother in America. He
said that his brother wrote the letter from “Nyejirk,”, but
had since gone to “Shakky-yahgoo,” suggesting at the same time
that Le Grand would know these places. Le Grand admitted that
though he knew all America as well as he knew every acre of
Wooyimboong, Coop’s two cities pulled him up with a round
turn. The fact that Le Grand has never seen any part of
America was only a trifling detail.
“Vell, den,” said Coop, “never you vas know your
shography.”
At this stage I suggested that Coop’s two cities were
New York and Chicago, and Coop said: “By shingo, dis
shentlemans vas know his shography; he vas right!”
And so the mystery of “Nyejirk” and “Shakkyyahgoo” was
solved.
On another occasion of a visit, Le Grand and myself
were eating grapes in the vineyard when Coop strolled up with
a tomahawk in his right hand, and a wild and warlike look in
both eyes.
Foreseeing trouble, I moved gently near to Coop, to be
very prompt with the favourite left hander of Jem Mace on the
“point” if there was any movement with the tomahawk.
Coop said: “Missa Le Grand, de peoples de vas say you
call me de biggest schoundrel in dis country, an never I likes
it!”
Le Grand, cool as a cucumber, in a friendly fatherly
voice, replied, with deep earnestness: “No, Mr. Coop; no man
in Queensland would dare to say you are the biggest scoundrel
in this country!”
And Coop smiled, and said: “Ah, vell, ven you ‘pologise
like dat, never I minds it!”
And he went away quite happy, eating a big bunch of
grapes.
Le Grand had another neighbour – a Hibernian gentleman
whom we shall call Casey.
Casey had two freak pigs, one a black sow with a white
ear, and the other a white boar with one black ear.
Those two eccentric porkers occasionally rambled over
to fraternize with Le Grand’s pigs, and one day he got the two
in a crush, painted the sow’s white ear jet black, and the
boar’s black ear he painted white.
Then they went home to Casey, who gazed at them as if
they were two uncanny ghost pigs.
He and Mrs. Casey lay awake most of the night,
regarding the pig mystery as indicating some dire domestic
calamity wrought by a malicious “leprechaun,” or by some
vindictive enemy placing them under the dreadful spell of
“Drimial agus gthorial!”
Then Casey remembered that when on his last visit to
Ipswich he saw a woman with a red petticoat, and three crows
flew over his head on his way home.
And Mrs. Casey had found a blue bug and a red flea in
the bed, so how could you wonder at the pigs changing their
ears!
The troubled Casey went over next day to Le Grand, and
thus addressed him: “For the love of hivin and all the saints,
Le Grand, come over and see my pigs, and tell me which is thee
sow, and which is the boar, for they’re both bewitched, and
have changed their ears, an’ its an evil day when an Irishman
don’t know his own pigs! Come over an’ see if it’s the pigs
are mad, or mesilf an’ the old woman is mad! May the divil fly
away wid the pigs!”
Le Grand calmly told Casey to let his pigs run loose,
to come over to Le Grand’s pigs, one of which is believed to
be really a witch, and responsible for the transformation of
Casey’s sow and boar.
He said he would put an effectual spell over his witch
pig, but Casey was not to come near while the spell was
working!
So Le Grand yarded Casey’s freak porkers, and spent an
hour removing the paint from their ears with turpentine, and
sent them home restored to their original perfection.
And Casey and the wife next Sunday prayed fervently,
out of gratitude for “Le Grand’s miracle!”
And Le Grand told Casey that he had shot his witch pig
with a small piece of wax candle, and had the body burned to
ashes, but he informed me that the witch pig, or the pig he
killed in the usual way, made some of the finest bacon he had
ever cured!
There is a tributary of the Mary River called “Brandy
Creek,” and here is the origin of the name.
Back about 1874, there was not much population on the
Upper Mary, only a few rough timbergetters, a combined
solitary pub and store.
Every man had a boat, chiefly made of red cedar,
plentiful in those days.
There were only bridle tracks, or timber tracks,
through the scrub, and there were rough roads to the interior,
or the sea coast.
Among the timber men at that time were two known as
“Racehorse Jack” and “Jimmy the Snob,” good men with the axe
and crosscut saw, but not to be trusted alone with beer or
rum.
From New
Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day, they had been holding high
festival, and drinking the healths of all their friends and
relatives, with a few extra toasts thrown in.
Then they
put some rations and a case of brandy on their boat, and
started for the camp, six or seven miles up stream.
By that
time they were both on the verge of delirium tremens, and the
brandy finished the contract. Two days afterwards the blacks
found the boat at the mouth of a small creek, three or four
miles below the pub.
“Jimmy the Snob” was lying at full length, dead, in the
bottom of the boat, and “Racehorse Jack” was lying with his
head over the side of the boat, black as an aboriginal, and
stone dead. Those two dead men must have drifted up and down
with the tide, and passed the public house in the night.
Heavy rain was falling all the time, and the brandy and
exposure were too much for them. The boat was taken up to the
pub, and an inquest was held on the bodies.
It was a
very hurried verdict by a coroner’s jury, of whom about three
were sober. They returned a verdict of “Found drowned,” though
neither of the men had been in the water, and the coroner
said, “Yes, gentlemen, they were drowned in ‘Brandy Creek!”
And
“Brandy Creek” it remains to the present day.
The late Bartley Fahey, M.L.C., was once Collector of
Customs at Cooktown.
While there a big bully insulted him one night at the
“Great” Northern Hotel.
Fahey demanded that the bully go down with him to the
beach and fight it out. So both went, and it was the night of
the full moon. Fahey’s friends warned him that the fellow
“stripped like a bullock”, and was dangerous.
Fahey merely smiled, for he had in him the blood of a
hundred Irish kings, and a pair of hands that could have been
used to break road metal.
In about ten minutes the bully was covered with gore,
and felt as if he had been blown up in a mine. Fahey’s hands
cut him to pieces like a blunt tomahawk. The bully called
for quarter an offered his hand to Fahey, who scornfully
refused it and said “I never shake hands with a blackguard!”
OLD
TRAGEDIES
EARLY INCIDENTS
NOTABLE WRECKS
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE FRASERS
Were all the tragedies enacted In Queensland, since the
first white men settlers on the coast, published collectively,
they would make an amazing volume.
History has only recorded a fraction of all that
happened and even much of that fraction has been dismissed
with a brief chronicle, whose brevity left no clearly
distinguishable picture on the mind of the reader.
Among those so far unrecorded by any book or newspaper
was the wreck of a barque called the Thomas Lord, lost on the
Queensland coast in the year when Captain Wickham was Police
Magistrate, and W. A. Duncan was Collector of Customs.
The late Hon. T. L. Murray Prior, father of Mrs.
Campbell Praed, the novelist, told me that Captain Wickham
married Annie Macarthur, of Sydney, her sister, Elizabeth,
marrying Phillip Dudley King, and her sister Kate married
Patrick Leslie, the first squatter in Queensland.
W. A. Duncan came from Donside, in Aberdeenshire, his
family and ours being only three miles apart.
I remember Tom and William Fraser, two fine old
Highlanders, who were expert players on the bagpipes, and
could dance the sword dance, the Highland fling, and the reel
of Tulloch like two champions.
William lived away out on the Ipswich Road, not far
from the Rocky Waterholes. The old house and the tall pines
trees are still there, but the grand old couple, who were
living there in the sixties (1860s) and seventies (1870s) have
“vanished trackless into blue immensity.”
Alas! We are but as bubbles in the foam on the surface
of the illimitable ocean of Eternity.
In the years 1874 and 1875 I was manager and
sugar-boiler of Dr. Waugh’s sugar plantation “Pearlwell,”
having succeeded John Buhot, the first man to make sugar in
Queensland, on April 24, 1862 in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens.
William Fraser was only a mile away, and it was a real
joy for me to go over and spend an evening with him and listen
to his fascinating stories of the past, some of which were
taken down by me, and among them is the astonishing story of
the Barque “Thomas Lord.”
The Frasers were men who were afraid of nothing on the
face of the earth. On their arrival in Queensland in 1844,
their first engagement was with Charles Archer on Durundur.
Those were the days when the blacks were not too reliable,
though Heavens knows they had many grievances to avenge.
Fraser was on Kilcoy station on the day after the
poisoning of the blacks by two of Mackenzie’s shepherds, who
poisoned a lot of flour with arsenic. Fraser told me he
counted 28 bodies, but said that was not all.
On one occasion he was in charge of Durundur homestead,
and Thomas and David Archer were about two miles away washing
sheep, a mob of blacks came in, the warriors coming over the
creek, and the old men and women going round.
The men stood on the fence, chewed the ends of their
beards and spat them out, with many a hiss, and burr, and
“wooh-wooh,” not friendly signs, but they evidently were not
intending murder, or the women would not have been there.
Mrs. Tom Fraser, Mallon, the gardener, and two of
Mallons’ children, were with Fraser, who went out with a gun
and the blacks went away, killing a bullock as they went, and
leaving the carcass untouched.
A blackboy named “Neeca” had gone round to Fraser, and
harangued the blacks, advising them to go away.
“Neeca” in after years, died in the service of George
Raff, at Caboolture.
Two weeks after this episode the blacks went to
Gregor’s station and killed Andrew Gregor and Mary Shannon.
Gregor’s brother, a clergyman, was drowned in a
waterhole between Brisbane and Sandgate.
Fraser was at Amity Point in March 1847, and helped to
bury the bodies of the drowned, including Mrs. Gore, who was
washed ashore still breathing, and was confined on the sand.
That was at the wreck of the Sovereign on March 11. Fraser
said that they had, in many cases, only legs, arms, and heads
to bury, from bodies cut to pieces by the sharks. The
Sovereign made three attempts to get over the bar, and then
the main shaft broke, and left her at the mercy of an angry
sea.
Now we come to the tragic story of the Thomas Lord. One
day a shipwrecked sailor walked into Brisbane, in charge of an
aboriginal woman from Toorbul Point.
The warriors were afraid to come, and they knew the
white men would not hurt a woman. They came to Brisbane by way
of Breakfast Creek and the Valley.
On the following day the captain came in, also in care
of another woman, and he and the sailor stayed at Macadam’s
Hotel in Queen Street.
When Captain Wickham asked them where the others were,
the captain said, “All murdered at Murrimcootchie”, the river
beyond Caloundra.
The blacks called it “Maroochie,” “Murrimcoochie,” and
“Mooroocochie,” all names of the swan, the last from “Mooroo,”
the nose, and “Coochie,” red or “red nose,” common name of the
swan, whose bill is red.
Fraser volunteered to go out in search of the others,
and he was accompanied by two men, named Strange and Richard.
Strange was a naturalist, and he and three others were
killed in 1854 on the South Percy Island, only Walter Hill,
and Captain Maitland, and an aboriginal escaping.
A captain of a vessel anchored in the bay, told Fraser
to go on board and tell the mate to give him anything he
wanted, but the mate refused without an order, and so they had
to go back to Brisbane. Finally, they reached Toorbul Point,
where the blacks told them the white me were all “bong”
(dead), except “boolah makoron yanman Maginchin,” two white
men who went to Brisbane!
Then the courage of Fraser’s mates evaporated. In the
morning Richard stayed in the camp, refusing to go on, and
Strange continued for a short distance, but returned to
Richard.
But the stern Highlander, with the invincible courage
of his clan, was built on different lines, and he went along
the coast, accompanied solely by four Toorbul Point
aboriginals.
Beyond the Maroochie River they found the body of a
sailor, dead only for a day, quite naked, except for a rope
around his wrist. He had a set of false teeth which Fraser
took back to the captain, who said they had belonged to the
boatswain.
Another body was found near that of the first. On the
way back they met a party of blacks, one of whom had the
captain’s watch over his shoulder, the back of the case gone.
The blacks felt Fraser from head to foot.
At that time Fraser had acquired a considerable
knowledge of the blacks, and could speak a little of their
language. He was also wise enough to go unarmed, and take no
firearms. They would be his death warrant. One black had a
dilly bag full of American dollars, about 400, and these and
the captain’s watch, were exchanged by the blacks for a dozen
fishhooks, a deal to satisfy even the most canny Scot.
Fraser also got the captain’s pocket-book with a draft
for £500 on a London bank. He also got a miniature of the
father of the ship’s doctor. It was set in gold, and the
captain was specially anxious to have that.
Fraser got safely back to his two mates, comfortably
camped at Caloundra, and they all returned to Brisbane.
The captain told Fraser to keep all he found, except
the miniature and the bank draft, but the honest Scot handed
everything over to captain Wickham, and that was the last he
heard or saw of them.
He and his two cautious mates, who took no risks,
received the same reward of £10 each.
The Thomas Lord had been on a voyage from Sydney to
China, in ballast, and was wrecked somewhere off the
Queensland coast.
The survivors reached the coast somewhere between the
Maroochy River and Noosa Heads.
The blacks told Fraser that all the whites had been
killed, except the captain and the sailor. Why they were
spared was not explained, possibly because they had a fancied
resemblance to two
dead blacks who were relatives of some of the living.
That was the reason that Davis, Bracewell, and Baker
were spared.
When the captain of the ketch Aurora, was killed by the
Bribie blacks, Tom and William Fraser went down in the Customs
boat, with Dr. Ballow and Thornton, the then Collector of
Customs.
They found the captain’s body lying naked on a lot of
oyster shells on the first small island in Bribie Channel.
They buried it in a grave on Toorbul Point. Is there
anything marking the site of that grave? The blacks had taken
the sail away, and tried to burn the ketch.
When Gregor and Mary Shannon were killed, they were
both buried by William Fraser. He told me that Mrs. Shannon’s
three children were taken away by the blacks and returned,
safe and sound, with an old aboriginal woman after having been
well cared for.
On the Obi Obi flats Fraser met a black with a gun,
which had belonged to one of the wrecked men of the Stirling
Castle in 1836, and took it away from him.
He was present at the launching of the first vessel
ever built in Brisbane, a schooner called the St. Helena,
which left for Sydney on May 15, 1847, and was lost with all
hands.
He knew all the people concerned in the murder of Cox,
at a hotel on Kangaroo Point, in 1848. All the evidence taken
at the inquiry has been read by me, but Fraser had a lot of
unpublished facts.
It was a murder that has no parallel in Australian
history.
A timbergetter named Cox, from the Tweed River was
staying at the hotel, where the cook was a man named Fyfe. Cox
and three others were seated at the parlour table, playing
cards, and a dispute arose. One of the party took up a heavy
pair of old time brass snuffers, and threw them at Cox, the
projecting sharp point, used for poking the wick, entering the
brain, and killing him on the spot. It was an unfortunate
accident, where certainly no murder was intended.
There were two easy ways out of the trouble, but those
three men, in an uncontrollable spasm of fear, conspired to
place the guilt on an entirely innocent man, the unsuspecting
Fyfe, the cook, and they succeeded so well that they sent him
to the gallows, and he was hanged in Sydney.
Fraser told me that Fyfe was not even in the hotel on
the night of the tragedy; that he came home just before
daylight, and that a woman could have saved Fyfe, who was so
chivalrous that he faced death rather than disclose her name.
Thus for a brief period is the curtain raised on some
of the lurid scenes of the past, giving the reader a glimpse
of a tragic picture –before it slides into the number of the
nameless tides.
HISTORIC SCRAPS
EARLY QUEENSLAND
SOME STIRRING INCIDENTS
CONVICT DAYS RECALLED
DAILY MAIL 1 SEPTEMBER 1923
The human mind today is face to face with so many
problems, and has to scan such a vast area of recorded and
unrecorded history, that the sensible man and woman have to
consider the question of reading only what the mind can
assimilate and of being sure that it increases a healthy
knowledge of the world and mankind.
The omnivorous reader, who
consumes many shallow novels, and other poisonous trash of a
literary toadstool character, usually knows very little about
any particular subject. The mind of the most intellectual man
or woman is only capable of digesting carefully selected
knowledge. Beyond that one is in danger of mental dyspepsia
just as the man who outrages his stomach with an excess of
food will assuredly one day find that organ on strike. And bad
mental and physical food give the same results.
It is wise for young men and women to keep note and
scrap books, and record any interesting and instructive facts
which they will find very useful for reference, and be a
source of pleasure in after years. This article is written in
the hope that those authentic records are to be of interest
among those to whom they are not readily accessible, and that
the brevity, which is the soul of eloquence, will appeal to
them.
In 1874 it was my lot to meet in Brisbane a man who
claimed to be a grandson of the author of that remarkable
book, “Paul and Virginia.”
He had the name of his famous grandfather, James Henry
Bernardine de St. Pierre, and a note of that was made by me
very promptly. He came to bid me goodbye, on leaving for the
Palmer Diggings, where he became one of the many splendid
fellows who died there with fever.
The first Police Magistrate of Brisbane was Captain
Wickham, appointed in 1842, with a salary of £300 and a free
house.
He had been for years the captain of H.M.S. Beagle.
He was present at the first Brisbane land sale, where
13½ acres were offered at the upset price of £100 per acre,
and realised £4637 10s.
The value of that area in Brisbane today would make the
Treasurer smile if he had it for sale.
What is called “Spicer’s Gap” in the main range,
plainly visible from Spring Hill, was named after Peter
Spicer, who was superintendent of convicts at Moreton Bay,
from 1824 to 1839, the entire convict period of 15 years. He
was a son of Captain Peter Spicer of the Royal Navy.
“Cunningham’s Gap” bears the name of Alan Cunningham,
the famous botanist, who discovered and named the Darling
Downs. The mountains on each side are Mitchell and Cordeaux,
known to the Cateebill speaking blacks as “Coonyinirra” and
“Niamboyoo.”
The first hotel in Toowoomba was called the “Seperation
Hotel,” the spelling being a little out of gear, a building
erected with stone brought from the foot of the range. It was
renamed the “Royal,” and is still standing, but no longer a
hotel.
Travellers on the Toowoomba line pass a station, the
old “Western Creek,” where in the fifties (1850s), a lady
called Sally Owen kept a famous pub.
Back near Marburg of today was an open forest space
known as Sally Owen’s Plains, where she kept her horses and
cattle.
There were several small kegs of rum distilled on Sally
Owen’s Plains.
It was great stuff, that Sally Owen’s “potheen,” and
there still are three living Ipswich men who drank that
stimulating elixir of barley, and said that it was far better
than the rum of today. And this is mentioned, because that was
almost certainly the first illicit still in Queensland, and it
was never discovered.
In the year 1848 a dairyman named John Slack had all
the Woolloongabba country as a grazing paddock for his cows,
and that one dairy supplied Brisbane. Toady it would not
supply one street.
Vulture Street, South Brisbane, is probably the
longest, closely inhabited street in Australia. An old fellow,
who had walked nearly end to end in search of somebody, was
asked by another searcher at the river end, “Where is the
other end of this street?” “Well, I dunno, mister, but in my
opinion it must be somewhere down about Beenleigh.”
The first hotel at Laidley, when Pitt and Bonnifant
held the station in 1850, was kept by James Fletcher, and his
widow, a fine old lady, still kept it in 1876, when I was
captain of the Laidley Hunt Club and editor of the Ipswich
“Observer.”
At Grantham, called “Bigges’ Camp” in the early days, a
Frenchman named Douvere kept a hotel in 1843. That was the
squatter Bigges, who built a big wool store at Cleveland,
intending the place as a seaport, from which a line would run
direct to Ipswich, and so ruin Brisbane. The walls of that
store are now the lower story of the hotel next the main
Cleveland railway station.
There were at least two years when Ipswich had a larger
population than Brisbane. The first hotel in Ipswich was kept
by a man named Neal, and it was built by William Vowles, one
time mayor of Ipswich, and grandfather of the present Dalby
politician.
A once well-known man anmed Uhr, member of a well-known
New South Wales family, was killed by two aboriginals not far
from Ipswich. One was “Warkoon Jimmy” and the other
“Tee-wadlee Tommy.” Warkoon was “left-handed,” –tee was the
eye, and -Wadlee was bad, a bad eye, meaning blind oof one
eye. They came up on each side of the camp as he came out,
then speared him, and threw the body in the river.
In Ipswich, what is known as “Bennett’s Corner,” one of
the best in the town, was sold to martin Byrnes for 32s.
The first cones of Bunya pine sent to London in 1846
realised £10 10s for each in Covent Garden market.
Surveyor Oxley died at Sydney on May 25, 1828, and is
buried at North Shore. J. T. Bidwill, after whom the Bunya is
named, died at Tinana Creek, near Maryborough, in March 1853,
and Surveyor Burnett, who found the Burnett River, died at
Brisbane on July 18, 1854, and was buried in the old
Paddington cemetery.
The murder of 19 people on Will’s station,
Cullina-ringga, on the Nogoa, happened on October 17, 1861,
and the murder of the Fraser family of nine, the tutor, and an
old shepherd, happened at Hornet Bank station, on the Dawson,
in November, 1857.
Gilbert, the naturalist of Leichhardt’s Expedition, was
killed on the Nassau River, on June 28, 1845. In recent years
the old blacks showed me the tea tree flat where it happened.
Andrew Gregor and Mary Shannon were killed by the Pine
River blacks, in 1846. Captain Owen Stanley, of “Owen Stanley
Range” celebrity, died at Sydney in 1850. F. Strange the
naturalist, and three other men were killed by Percy Island
blacks on November 18, 1854, and Stevens, the botanist, was
killed at Maroochy in 1866, by an aboriginal afterwards known
to the whites as “Captain Piper,” who in after years died from
drinking poisoned rum.
The first Queensland editor, when the “Moreton Bay
Courier,” started on June 20, 1846, died at Cleveland on
October 22, 1861. His name was Arthur Sydney Lyon, said to be
a genial and amiable man.
The foundation stone of the first South Brisbane Bridge
was laid on August 22, 1864, and on my visit to Brisbane in
1874, on a few of the piles were standing, and all vehicular
traffic was done with a wooden punt pulled with a hand rope.
The steamer Gothenburg from Port Darwin to Sydney (Captain
Pearce) was wrecked off Bowen, on February 25, 1875, there
being 105 drowned. Putwain, the diver, recovered all the gold,
about 2500 oz.
The first white man killed by the blacks on the Darling
Downs was named John Manuel. It happened on Eton Vale station,
where he was speared by a black out on the run, and galloped
home with the spear sticking in his body. The story was told
to me by the late Christopher Gorry, a fine old Ipswichite,
who was with Manuel when he was speared, and thought the date
was about 1852.
When Major Lockyer was camped up the Brisbane River in
1825 he tells us that “emus were running about all night,
making an intolerable noise.” The noisy visitors were the
stone plovers, usually known as the grey curlew. The emus
never move or utter any sound in the night. The only two day
birds that call at night are Flinders cuckoo, and the scrub
hen, megapodius tumulus, of North Queensland. One of the
flycatchers, Musicapidae, will chirrup in the night during the
laying season. This does not include the waterfowl that feed
at night.
In 1852 there were 300 Chinese shepherds on the Darling
Downs, in charge of 3,000,000 sheep. The first lot came in May
3, 1850, so they must have been ordered before gold was
discovered, and therefore the justification was not the exodus
of the white shepherds to the goldfields. Some of the early
squatters made a special effort to introduce Indian coolies
but that was promptly refused by the Secretary of State, Lord
Normanby.
The Etheridge goldfield was discovered by the men
sinking post holes, when erecting the telegraph line. The
navies riot in Brisbane when they besieged Government House,
was on September 11, 1855.
The foundation of the Brisbane Masonic Hall was laid on
July 10, 1871, and the Grammar School was opened on February 1
of the same year, Governor Blackall having died on the third
of the previous month.
There were two disasters in 1865, the burning of the
Fiery Star on Good Friday, and of St. Mary’s Cathedral on June
29. One of my old schoolmasters, named Ronald, had a daughter,
Mary, lost in the Fiery Star. She was a handsome girl, with
beautiful rich auburn hair.
Our annual mild or sever visits of influenza recall the
year 1847, when hardly one family in Brisbane escaped, and
seven out of 10 families in Melbourne had to suffer. It passes
over Australia periodically, and is evidently the only “kink”
in an otherwise perfect climate.
The first Darling Downs fossils of the Diprotedon and
other extinct specimens of the giant animals of ancient
Australia, were found in King’s Creek in October, 1842.
Captain Logan, one of the rulers of the Moreton Bay
penal settlement, was murdered on November 16, 1830, at a
place well known as “Logan’s Creek,” between Ipswich and Esk.
He was found buried, face downwards in a grave, not more than
2ft in depth. There was subsequent clear evidence that he was
killed by his own men. He was the most severe of all the
rulers and the convicts sang
and cheered half the night on the day the news of his
death arrived at the settlement.
The most popular of the superintendents was Lieutenant
Gorman
The reader will be interested in knowing that during
the whole of the
penal period in Australia there were 40,000 convicts sent to
New South Wales and Tasmania. The year 1840 ended the penal years with the last
vessel which bore the suggestive name of “Eden”. The period
lasted from Phillip’s landing with the first fleet to 1840.
Now that this State is on the border of a great cotton
boom we may recall the London “Times” on December 8, 1859
saying that Queensland produces the best cotton that is sent
to Manchester.
The town of Mackay is the centre of a great sugar
district and is launching some great schemes today. And yet
we only look back to May 24, 1860, when captain Mackay,
Barbour and McCrossin stood on the beach at the mouth of the
Pioneer as the first white men that ever trod that region.
BITS OF HISTORY
GRAVE AND GAY
PICTURES FROM THE PAST
DAILY MAIL 1923
The late James Tyson was staying at the time on Pilton
station, on the Darling Downs, and a young lady from England,
in quest of a position, was staying at Hennessy’s Hotel.
She made no effort to avoid expressing her opinion on
the vast superiority of English people over Australians, and
the general absence of politeness and culture among
“Colonials” generally.
So that some joker at the hotel told her that James
Tyson, the millionaire squatter, was in need of a housekeeper,
as the last one had married the manager, who had a salary of a
thousand a year, and that Tyson himself was an eligible
bachelor, all of which was pure fiction.
But the lady wrote to Tyson, offering her services, and
the joker posted the letter. Then he wrote to a Pilton friend,
who sent the lady a letter, signed “James Tyson,” offering her
£120 per annum.
She promptly started for Pilton by the first train, and
there being no buggy to meet her, she drove out in the hotel
vehicle, called at the Pilton homestead, and sent in her card.
A message came out that Mr. Tyson was not to be seen, so she
sent in her own letter, or the bogus letter signed “James
Tyson,” and Tyson came out to have the conundrum explained.
The final scene was the departure of the lady for the
railway station, in the Pilton buggy taking her return fare
and a cheque for £5as some compensation for her wounded
vanity! She left for Sydney in the next week and never returned;
but Tyson was not known to be the victim of a second joke of
the same kind.
*
Sir Thomas Mitchell, on his exploring trip into South
Queensland/ in 1846, had among his party, a Hibernian
gentleman named Felix Maguire, who had the singular gift of
locating water in his dreams, then waking and going straight
to the spot. He did this on at least three occasions, but of
course skeptical people, who never believe anything outside
their own experiences, would be satisfied that Maguire found
the water on the previous day, and brought in the dream story
so that he might be credited with supernatural powers.
Evidently Mitchell believed him, and Maguire may have been a
genuine “geonancer” after all, but it was a precarious method
of finding water.
*
The late Robert Mackie, of Fairy Meadow station, on the
Condamine, was in 1864 managing “Old Warroo” station for
Thomas Fitzgerald of Sydney.
He was alone at the time, had just killed a bullock,
and had him partly skinned when an aboriginal, a very strong
man, walked coolly up without taking the least notice of
Mackie, who was a powerful, active, athletic man, and started
to cut a roast off the carcass with a sheer blade he was
carrying. Mackie caught him in a wrestling grip, so as to
disarm him, but the black proved to be a formidable
antagonist, and the result was for a time very doubtful, until
Mackie threw him and took the shear blade. The black was then
allowed to rise and walk savagely away.
*
In the middle of the night, Mackie was asleep in a slab
and bark hut, and unaccountably awoke when lying on his back,
to see the light of a star through the roof where he knew
there should have been no opening. In a second he was out of
the bunk and in the middle of the floor, and in the next
second a 12ft black brigalow spear was stabbed through the
centre of the bunk and into the ground. Then Mackie promptly
fired his revolver at the light of the star through the roof
and remained awake until daylight. To go outside would have
been folly, as he might have been speared the moment he opened
the door, and there may have been a dozen blacks around the
hut waiting for him.
Evidently the black was wounded, as next morning Mackie
found blood on the roof and ground, and the brigalow spear was
still impaled in the bunk, and the earth beneath. Either the
black was able to walk off, or he had mates who carried him
away.
When Bligh, of the Bounty, after the mutiny of Tofua,
reached the Australian coast, he must, before crossing the
Barrier Reef, and while far out at sea, have seen the great
granite mountains towering skyward beyond Weymouth Bay.
As he neared the shore he saw a small rocky island, and
ran the pinnace into the passage between it and the mainland
of Cape Weymouth. On the inner side of that island, which is a
rugged mass of granite rocks, he found a beautiful stream of
splendid water, and there he took in a full supply to continue
the voyage.
While on that island one of his men was insolent, and
Bligh threw him a sword, and drew his own, telling him it was
necessary to see who was master. The mutineer knew Bligh to be
an expert swordsman, so he promptly apologised, and gave no
more trouble.
There is a wonderful, and magnificent, view from the
small rocky hill on that island seaward, far out across the
Barrier Reef and small islands, and landward to a vast
amphitheatre of glorious mountains, valleys, and ravines; a
wondrous, romantic panorama that for expanse of scenery and
variety of shapes and colours can have but few rivals in the
world. The reader may understand my thoughts when seated on a
rock beside that stream, which is fed by a permanent spring,
looking at the beautiful spot where Bligh and his men were
camped, and where he watered the pinnace in which the
mutineers had set him adrift.
In recent years, two white men, beche-de-mer fishermen,
were speared on that island, and both were killed.
*
Among the earliest surveying ships on our vast coast
was H.M.S. Fly, Captain Beete Jukes, who was out from 1842 to
1846.
The Fly people, unfortunately excited the hostility of
the aboriginals at nearly every place they landed, and of
course, that left a bad legacy of ill-feeling against the next
white men who came along the coast.
At Cape Direction, Bayley, the boatswain, was one of
those who went ashore, and he was so badly speared that he
died on the third day.
That cape is a most romantic spot, with the most
eccentric granite forms ever seen by me on any part of the
coast.
Jukes writes of the Cape Cleveland blacks as “well
made, active men, erect, free, and graceful, with good faces,
and soft vocalic speech.”
*
In Wickham’s River, now the Burdekin, they were “tall,
athletic, bold and confident, one man with a Nubian-like
face.”
During a visit by me to Cape Cleveland, in 1881,
accompanied by Edwin Norris, in the yacht Maude, a broken 4
pounder cannon cast iron ball was picked up on top of the
Cape, among the rocks, one of several others found there and
assumed to have been fired from some passing vessel, whose
people regarded all aboriginals as legitimate targets.
As the Fly record mentions the shooting of aboriginals
at Rockingham Bay, Cape Melville, and Cape Direction, it is
probable the Cape Cleveland people received some cannon
practice.
They quote the Cape Direction men as “tall and well
made, with high, square foreheads,” and the Cape Melville
blacks as “tall, well-limbed, upright men, with short curly,
hair.” There are still some of these types of men left in the
Cape York Peninsula.
The Fly visited Pandora’s Pass, where the Pandora was
wrecked on August 29, 1791, when Captain Edwards was returning
from Tahiti with some of the mutineers of the Bounty. There
were 38 men lost in that wreck.
*
When Bligh passed Torres Strait in 1792, in the
Providence, with breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies,
Flinders was one of his midshipmen.
Captain Portland was with them in the “Assistant.”
When Flinders was at Point Parker, in the Gulf of
Carpentaria, in 1841, he saw three blacks, who were 6ft 3ins.
He found and entered the Flinders River on July 23, and
the Albert on July 30, sighting the Plains of Promise on
August 4.
He mentions the terrible hurricane at Port Essington in
1839, when 12 men of H.M.S. Pelorus were drowned. He saw sweet
potatoes there twice the size of any he had ever seen in South
America.
*
In the year 1836, two interesting Quakers, named
Backhouse and Walker, came on a visit to Brisbane, which then
“consisted of the houses of the Commandant and other officers,
the military barracks, and the barracks for the men
prisoners.” Those two very observant, intellectual, educated
men, reached Sydney from London in the barque Science, on
September 3, 1831, so they had nearly five years in Australia.
They went to Moreton Island, and saw the blacks fishing with
porpoises, and were present at a corroboree at Amity Point.
They ate a purple-white beery from a bush on Moreton
Island, and said it was the “most agreeable native fruit
tasted in Australia.” It is the Myrtus tennifolia of the
botanist, and the “Midgin-gooranooran” of the old blacks.
They saw the women pounding the root, “bangwal,” and
roasting it in small cakes, which “tasted like a waxy potato.”
They wore reed necklaces and ornaments of melon shell, and
nautilus.
The single girls wore only a very small apron. The name
of that was “jaggijaggi,” but the Quakers recorded no
aboriginal names.
They quote a highly amusing experience in Sydney. A
Sydney Quaker merchant had received 402 gallons of rum and 116
of gin, from his London house instead of money, spirits then
being frequently used instead of coin in Sydney. The Quakers’
religion forbade him to have any dealings with spirits of any
kind so the whole of the rum and gin was taken out in a cutter
and emptied into the harbour. One of the casks slipped, picked
up a lot of salt water, and righted itself. The owner of the
cutter lying alongside took out a dipperful, tasted a sample,
and spat it out with the remark, “I call this real, brutal,
blinkin’ murder.” The two Quakers remarked, “Verily this is a
new thing under the sun!” That is about the only humorous
sentence in their book.
*
In the history of the old Brisbane gaol there is a
remarkable incident that ought to be dear to the heart of
Conan Doyle, and all spiritualists.
When Stevens, the botanist, was killed in 1866 near
Mooloolah by three blacks, one known to the whites as “Tommy
Skyring” was arrested and held for trial until he was anxious
to be hanged, as he could neither eat nor sleep. He had
actually given himself up to the police, and asked to be
hanged as the ghost of Stevens repeatedly came and looked over
his shoulder, until the fear of it became unbearable!
He actually died in gaol, worn out to a state of
emaciation, his death due to starvation and want of sleep.
Whatever mystery is in the tragedy, the plain fact remains a
certainty.
*
In my reference to the first Queensland editor, Arthur
Sydney Lyon, who died at Cleveland Point on October 2, 1861,
no mention was made by me that he not only started the Moreton
Bay “Courier” on June 20, 1846, but he also started the “Free
Press” in 1849, the “North Australian” in Ipswich on October
2, 1855, and the “D.D. Gazette” on June 11, 1858.
The “Free Press” was a squatters’ paper, and was for a
time edited by my uncle, Robert Meston, father of the present
Mrs. A. K. Cullen, of “Arddeudeuchar,” Warwick, and Mrs.,
Paterson, of Toowoomba.
He was at the time owner of Morven station, of New
England. No copy of the paper appears to be available.
Mrs. Paterson is now 93 years of age, and her brother,
Frank Meston, is 85 and still breaking in his own horses on
Rivertree station.
*
The Japanese earthquake recalls a fairly sever shock of
earthquake in Brisbane on December 14, 1861, and two others
since then. There was one in 1848.
How many people know that the French started a
settlement at Albany and abandoned it before Major Lockyer
arrived there with his gang of convicts?
*
When Captain J. Lort Stokes was out on our coast in the
Beagle from 1837 to 1843, he had a cook who had come through
an amazing experience. The cook and two Negroes were the sole
survivors on a small vessel that had capsized, and three men
being imprisoned in the hold, where they could have lived
until the pent air became too foul to breathe.
They managed to bore a hole in the bottom and thrust
out a stick with a handkerchief which floated in the breeze.
Fortunately this unique flag of distress was seen by a passing
vessel, which sent a boat and crew, who cut a hole big enough
for the cook and two Negroes to come through.
This happened more than once in the history of the
sea, and in the 1850s, on the Tweed River, in New South
Wales, a settler named Johnny Boyd, a timbergetter, was
walking along the beach with an axe over his shoulder when
he came to the hull of a vessel lying bottom upwards on the
sand. Hearing a knocking from inside he cut a hole large
enough to free a Frenchman, who was the sole survivor of the
wreck. He, too, like the cook of the Beagle, had plenty of
food, but it was a terrible dark cell to be locked in.
More than one pamphlet and a
number of amateur Press articles have been written from time
to time on the Nerang and Tweed districts, some of them being
like Walter Montgomery’s poetry, of which Macaulay said it
“gave no picture of anything in the heavens above, or the ear
beneath, or the waters under the earth.”
We shall proceed to ramble away down to the Tweed in
the days when the white man first occupied the site of
Brisbane, under somewhat unhappy circumstances. We shall start
from the south side, where a mob of wild blacks are camped,
men of the Coorpooroo-jaggin tribe, of South Brisbane. We have
mangled the euphonious “Coor-poo-roo,” with accent on the poo,
to what we call “Cooparoo,” which means nothing.
We pass the “Jeeparra” tribe at Eight Mile Plains, the
“Yeeroomopan” of Brown’s Plains, the “Warillcoomburri” of the
Logan, the Goonoorajalli of the Albert, the “Balloong-alli” of
the Coomera, and the “Talgalburra” of Nerang, all gone hence
into the Eternal Silences.
The Nerang blacks called the river “Been-goor-abee,”
their word “Neerang” being the name of the shovel-nosed shark.
In the “Wiradjerie” dialect of New South Wales it was the word
for “little.” Nerang was first inhabited by civilized man when
the cedar cutters went there in 1845, or the year after they
went to the Tweed.
My first visit there was when a youth in 1870, or 53
years ago. Bundall Plantation, owned by Mort. Holland, and
Miskin, was just formed, and “Benowa” was just in course of
formation by my brother-in-law, Robert Muir, who had with him
two of his brothers, Matthew and David. His first crushing
season was in that year, 1870, in a 4-horse mill, with a
battery of round pots, and draining boxes instead of
centrifugals.
Beyond Nerang there was no white man living along the
coast before reaching the Tweed Heads.
In 1871 Muir had a one roomed weather board
shingle-roofed house, erected on the north slope of Burleigh
Head, about 150 feet above sea level. That was the origin of
that headland known as “Burly,” from the first building ever
built on Burleigh Head, and many years passed before there was
another. The original name, rugged rocky burly front, and it
was spelled “Burly” when named by Roberts, the surveyor, in
the year he ran the boundary line along the top of the
Macpherson Range, the line that divides Queensland from New
South Wales.
“Roberts’s Plateau” bears his name today.
By whom, and on what authority was the name changed to
Burleigh? They might as well have called it “Mount Cecil,” the
old family name of Lord Burleigh.
By the blacks it was called “Jayling” and “Gumbelmoy,”
one the word for black, and the other the name for rock,
literally the “black rock,” the headland being chiefly black
basalt.
The Tweed blacks called a rock walloom, hence the name
Murwillumbah, correctly Murroo-walloom-ba, or “the face on the
rock,” from a remarkable outline of a human face on a rock in
that small hill on the east side of the town, thus murroo the
face, and walloom a rock, the terminal bah being an adverb of
place meaning “there,” so the whole name means a face on the
rock there, or “the place of the rock face.”
Tallebudjerie is a compound word of tallee, fish, and
budjerie, good. That word budjerie was brought here from the
old Sydney dialect by white men, and has gone all over
Australia.
The early blacks thought it was a white man’s word for
anything good, and so adopted it with that meaning.
When the
black pointed to the creek and said to the surveyor, “tallee
budjerie,” he merely meant “good fish,” literally “good
fishing there,” and he was right, for in the early days it
swarmed with bream, whiting, gar, flathead, and mullet, with
splendid oysters along all the rocks, and in the bed of the
creek where there was no sand.
In 1870, or 53 years ago, the blacks gave me
“Talgalgan” as the name of the creek, that being also their name for
Lord’s Creek, at Southport, in each case being from “tal,” the
stomach, meaning a creek, waist deep at low tide.
Tallebudjerie was always a safe creek to cross, there
being no quicksand for which the next creek was always
notorious, especially at the mouth. That creek is Currumbin,
with strong accent on “um,” the word being the old blacks’
name of the quicksand.
One man, Jack Williams, lost his life at the mouth of
Currumbin. He and his horse went down into the quicksand as if
the whole earth swallowed them, and both came up on the bar,
drowned.
The student of history will recall that Persian general
who is said to have lost ten thousand men in the quicksands of
Lake Sarbonius.
Matthew Muir had a very narrow escape at Currumbin, his
horse going down in the quicksand, and being washed out to the
bar, where he got a footing in shallow water. Muir was washed
out of the saddle, but luckily got hold of the tail of the
horse, which brought him safely ashore. As he was unable to
swim a stroke, that tail saved his life.
On the advice of the blacks, Robert Muir and myself, on
our way to the Clarence in 1870, crossed in the bend of the
creek half a mile above the mouth, where the bottom is firm,
and that was where the coaches and buggies crossed in after
years.
There was no thought of Southport in those early days,
and all that coast, from Nerang to the Tweed, was just as in
the year when Cook passed along. Those isolated rocks,
standing out on the beach, just beyond Currumbin, the blacks
called “Gillama-beljin,” the g hard, as in all my aboriginal
words.
On reaching Cape Byron, 45 miles farther south, the
blacks gave me the same word for the isolated rocks off the
Cape, the meaning in each case, being in the same dialect,
equivalent to our word “orphans,” and meaning rocks without
any father or mother. Cape Byron was itself “Gurimmbie.”
At the Tweed Heads, in 1870, the only resident was
Pilot Macgregor, a fine old sea captain, until in the end of
that year there came the first Customs officer, a little man,
with an immense beard and long moustache, and quite satisfied
that he was capable of running the Universe if ever the
Creator desired a holiday.
He stopped Muir, and demanded to see the contents of
his valise, so as to be sure he had no dutiable goods, and I
rode quickly on towards Terranora Creek.
He called loudly to me to come back, until Muir warned
him that I was deaf, and more or less daft, and would be as
likely to shoot him as not, so, he allowed me to go in peace.
That, then, wild, rocky, romantic headland, which Cook
called Point Danger, has lost much of its ancient glory. The
blacks called it “Booningba,” from booning, the animal we call
the porcupine, and bah, the usual adverbial affix denoting
place, or “the place of the porcupine.”
It was so named from a porcupine once found there, the
largest the blacks had ever known.
The scene beheld there today bears a melancholy
contrast to that of 1870. That old headland, with its once
lawn like spaces at the base, its clumps of beautiful trees,
covered with base to apex with glorious trees, bushes,
flowering plants, and creepers, celestial and terrestrial
orchids, ferns, and arum lilies, bordering the river on one
side and the ocean on the other, down on to the old grey
rocks, where-
The
trees sloped downwards to the edge and stood
With
their green faces fixed upon the flood.
And the receding tide left deep sea green rock pools
full of splendid fish that could be speared from the edge or
caught with a line.
There are still the eternal glorious surf, the vast
ocean, and the white beaches, the grand peak of Mt. Warning,
“Walloombin,” the majestic Macpherson Range, and the highest
peak the blacks called “Tooragoon” (the dead woman), from an
aboriginal woman who died there suddenly, long ago, from heart
disease.
And you look out on that rough rocky, lonely island
Oxley called “Turtle Island,” known to the blacks as
“Joong-urra-narrian,” because ‘Joong-urra,” the pelican,
danced on those rocks and corroboreed.
And in fancy you see Oxley going up the Tweed in his
whaleboat in 1823, to be followed in 1828 by Captain Rous, of
the “Rainbow,” the first warship in Moreton Bay. He and a crew
left the ship in a whaleboat, went south along Moreton Bay
until he came to where Southport is, and first saw that
Stradbroke was an island. He had a copy of Oxley’s chart
showing the Tweed River, so he went out over the Southport
bar, and steered direct for Point Danger in the distance,
entered the Tweed and must have gone up to where Murwillumbah
is today. Then he returned to the Rainbow, named Stradbroke
Island, and sailed for Sydney, discovering and naming the
Clarence and Richmond on the way down.
Just behind Burleigh is a very deep lagoon no blacks
would ever swim in, for it was the home of the “Bunyip,” and
certainly when Davy Muir and myself were camped near it one
night, we were kept very much awake by diabolical sounds which
might have been made by some old bear, or two old bears,
“boorabee,” having a fight.
Cudgen Creek has its name from the red clay with which
the blacks painted themselves. The old blacks told me there
was once a dark cave in the face of Point Danger, where the
sea, “Toomgun,” made a terrific noise in heavy weather. They
called that cave “Moy-nogumbo,” or the “Black Dog,” and say it
was shattered by a flash of lightning.
Away up the Tweed near Murwillumbah, is “Murdering
Creek,” the “Kirrim Kirrin” of the blacks, where two of them,
“Cararr” and “Murrin,” of the Tal-gye-gan tribe, killed two
sawyers named Phemy and Collins.
In 1871 there was an ugly tragedy on the Nerangbar,
when Billy Harpur, the half-caste, one of Muir’s carpenters,
a Brisbane saddler, and a Brisbane black went out to cross
the bar, to go to the Tweed, in Police Magistrate Rawling’s
boat. No trace of one of them was ever found again, for the
sharks had eaten the lot. Old Ned Harpur would not believe
that Billy was drowned until all hope was lost, for Billy
was an athlete and splendid swimmer, but what availed all
that against the shark?
BLACK MAN TO WHITE SETTLEMENT
IN THE JUNGLE TIMES
WILD MEN’S DOMAIN
BEFORE OXLEY CAME
We look far back into other years, to the days when the
shore of what is now Queensland was untrodden by the feet of
white man, when wild in woods the naked savage ran, before
sailors from England, or Dutch or French or dark Iberius, had
loomed with their white-winged ships on the blue horizon of
the vast Pacific. The whole great Australian continent yet lay
as it had lain for measureless ages, far beyond the range of
the knowledge of civilized man.
And through all these ages seemingly long in Time, but
next to nothing in Eternity, the great Australian continent
slumbered peacefully, the shores washed by the surrounding
oceans, its bosom covered by primeval forests in which the
birds sang, and the wild winds played Aeolian melodies as they
do today, and shall continue to sing and play while trees and
birds remain.
Then arises the question, to which we shall probably
never have an answer – was the Aboriginal here in the days of
Egyptian, Assyrian, and Grecian civilizations, or was he here
thousands of years before these ancient civilizations ever
came into existence?
Was the aboriginal throwing his woomera spear, and
boomerang in the days of the
Flying Mede – his shaftless
broken bow,
The fiery Greek – his red
pursuing spear?
Or far beyond those Medsian and Grecian warriors, beyond
all annals of recorded civilisations, Busiris may have been
marshalling his Memphian cavalry, and the first Pharaoh
driving his brazen war chariots, when the aboriginals were
netting dugong in Moreton Bay, singing corroborees on the
shores of Stradbroke, or hunting wallabies, on the Enoggera
Ranges.
The later Gerard Krofft, for many years chief scientist
and director of the Sydney Museum, said he got a fossil human
tooth from the Wellington caves, evidently contemporaneous
with the Diprotodon.
If the aboriginal was here with the Diprotodon then he
was here many a thousand years before the appearance of any
civilisations recorded in human history.
And when his time of final departure has come, and it
is not far off, all the memorials of his existence will be the
spears and shields, woomeras, nullas, boomerangs, and dilly
bags in our museums, and when they have decayed in the natural
course of time, the last lone surviving relics of the vanished
race will be the stone tomahawks.
And that aboriginal race which we have displaced by the
sole aid of the brutal law of the strongest, in reality,
represents, with infinite pathos and awful significance, the
fatal and inexorable and humiliating mutability of all human
existence.
They have no storied urns or animated busts, no marble
temples, no Pantheon or Coliseums, no wondrous halls of
Karnak, no temples of Isis or Jupiter, no Pyramids of Cheops,
or Cyphrones, or Mycerinus, but they have outlived all the
ancient architectural races, although their camps were mostly
constructed with “roof of air and walls of wind,” and their
dead bodies went back into mother earth, and vanished in
oblivion.
And now we shall, with the fairy aid of fancy, sketch a
picture of the Brisbane River and Moreton Bay, before the
white man appeared upon the sylvan scene.
There is no need to draw upon the reports of Oxley or
Lockyer, or any other early writers.
The Brisbane River presented almost exactly the same
appearance as every other river on the East Coast, from the
Hunter River, to the Pascoe River, in the Cape York Peninsula.
Where Brisbane stands today, was covered mostly by
scrub, very thick on the site of the Botanic Gardens, where
the tulip trees, “Maginnchin,” gave the aboriginal name to the
Brisbane River. All the footage of South Brisbane was thick
scrub, through which flowed three or four small creeks,
draining the swamps at the back, and all the northern slopes
of Highgate Hill. In the recent sewerage excavations in South
Brisbane, the workmen had too good reason to know the tracks
of those dirty little creeks of black mangrove mud.
In North Brisbane the largest creek started about the
old Grammar School, ran down and formed a waterhole, partly,
on the site of the new Town Hall, and ran thence down Adelaide
Street, and turned thence across Queen Street, and into the
river at the present Creek Street ferry. It was a dirty,
muddy, mangrove creek, crossing Queen Street, with an overhead
footbridge when I first visited Brisbane, in 1870. In that
creek, a brother of Tom Petrie, a splendid young fellow, was
drowned, and also one of John Petrie’s children.
Where the fig tree stands today, at the corner of Creek
and Elizabeth Streets, there was a waterhole where the boys
used to “boogie,” which is a pure aboriginal word for bathing.
A small creek ran down Albert Street into the river at the
Alice Street ferry, through a most unlovely mangrove swamp
known to all the early settlers as “Frogs’ Hollow.”
There were patches of scrub in all the ravines of
Spring Hill, and thick forest and undergrowth covered the
rest. Victoria Park was open forest, and the creek there was a
favourite camping ground of the blacks. Thick forest and
undergrowth, and small patches of scrub, covered all Fortitude
Valley and down to Breakfast Creek, the “Yuoggera” of the
blacks, where there was a splendid scrub covering all the area
at the mouth of the creek on the south side down to the edge
of the water at the point the blacks called “Garranbinbilla,”
the name of the vine interlacing the framework of their camps.
Fraser, the botanist, in 1828, when he came from Sydney
to fix the site of our Botanic Gardens, said of Breakfast
Creek: this place is noted for its gigantic timber and the
variety of its plants. There he got the first specimen of the
bean tree, the Moreton Bay chestnut, Castanospernum Australis,
and he also found a native cemetery, represented by hollow
logs filled with the bones of blacks of all sizes.
THE WILD LIFE
Here and there the blacks crossing the river or fishing
in bark canoes, gondol, made from broad sheets of stringy
bark, jeelgann. Active athletes climb trees with the vine and
the stone tomahawk, in search of “coopee” the possum, and
“cooroy” and “Boorabee,” the native bear.
In the forest a band of hunters are in pursuit of
“gnoorooin” the emu, and “gooraman” the kangaroo. In an open
pocket of the forest a band of boys are practicing with small
spears and nullas, at whirling discs of bark.
Young men are throwing the return boomerang, and a
group of old men are seated in the shade, discussing the deeds
of their early days, and watching the boomerang throwing with
critical, eyes. A band of fishermen with the heart shaped
towrow nets, are closing in a circle , on a shoal of mullet,
on the sand beach of Mooroo-Mooroolbin, where the seawall
stands today. Groups of women are weaving striped baskets from
the pink and green swamp rushes, “Yekkabin,” or making reed
necklaces,calgirrpin, while the young girls are bathing in
merry bands in the river. Everywhere, joyous, wild, free life,
man and beast, and bird and tree, in primeval innocence. Man
himself in the midst of peace and plenty, free from any sort
of toil, and radiant with the physical health and vigour which
make the mere daily life a perennial source of joy.
We shall step into a canoe, “coondoo,” and “gondol,”
and paddle down the river. On both sides is the magnificent
primeval forest, untouched by the hand of man. Tall, dark,
majestic kauri pines tower above the other vegetation.
Splendid staghorn and elkhorn ferns cling to the stems and
branches of many trees. Glorious orchids are flowering on the
trees and rocks. The air is heavy with the sensuous odour of
many flowers. Flocks of gorgeously plumaged and noisy parrots,
“beearr,” revel among the bloom of the forest wattles, or the
blossoms of the beantrees. Groups of solemn pelicans,
“joong-wira,” stand on the sandbanks, or fish in crescent
lines.
Ducks rise before us in hundreds, and noble swans,
“neerung,” rise from the water, and leave a four line track
with feet and pinions on the surface. The mangroves bend with
the weight of countless blue plumaged, red billed, porphyrio.
Very beautiful is that river border of dwarf and giant bright
and dark green mangroves, the guardians of the banks. Black
cockatoos, “cararra,” with their strong beaks, tear open the
dead wood for the white grubs, and great flocks of white
cockatoos, “kyarra,” whiten the tree tops, or pass overhead to
some feeding ground. Great black eagles, “boodarr,” circle
overhead, and a swift sparrow hawk, with amazing speed, comes
with a rush from a tree top, and strikes a black duck, “narr,”
dead into the river, severing the jugular vein.
In the dark scrub, the turkey, “wahgoon,” watches for
her young one’s birth from the womb of the mounded nest; and
the speckled wonga, “goolooin,” repeats his monotonous “coo,
coo, coo,” from some umbrageous bower, where his mate sits
coyly beside him, and probably goes to sleep. Grey old bears,
“Cooroy,” crouch in the forks of trees, and thousands of
flying foxes, “geerammon,” hang pendulous from a hundred
trees. A wild man stealthily climbs a tree and stabs some of
them with a 16ft three pronged spear. The wild women dive in
the lagoons for lily roots, “jimboor,” dig yams, “lahn,” in
the scrub, or pull the edible fern roots, “bangwal,” from the
swamps.
At Coonoolpin, now Lytton, two small pathways,
“coolgan” and “tumbarr,” down to the river, and on the beach
is a tall powerful black, with a long spear, “candi,” and a
kangaroo net, “meerboon,” and beside him a tall woman, whose
neck is encircled by an elaborate reed necklace, “kieerbin.”
Four men are hauling the fish net, “moondeen,” capturing a lot
of mullet, “andaccal.” An old man is seated on the ground,
with two dry sticks and some timber, creating fire, “tahloo,”
and “geera,” while five or six other men are singing an old
song and keeping time with two boomerangs, “bargann.”
We reach the mouth of the river, the north head of
which was called Boorennba, from boovenn, the whiting, and
before us are the Andaccah Islands, of the old blacks, in a
time to come, the “Fishermen’s Islands” of Matthew Flinders.
We go across to the island of Noogoon, the St. Helena
of today, a beautiful island covered by dense, luxuriant
jungle, with an encircling broad belt of dark green mangroves.
Why, oh, why, was that splendid natural botanic garden ever
desecrated by the axe? The eastern point was Decamillo, the
name of the dewfish, and the west was Coojung, the groper.
In the early days, the first botanical collector on
Noogoon got six specimens of new plants never seen since.
Two aboriginals killed three white men there in 1854.
In January, 1868, the first superintendent, John
Macdonald, started to fell the first 10 acres to receive some
plants from the Brisbane Botanic Gardens.
Away eastward were the long blue outlines, the low
hills, and white sand dunes of Minjerribah and Guvorgannpin,
the Stradbroke and Moreton Islands of today, inhabited then by
healthy, happy athletic races, now no more.
We land at Goompee, the Dunwich of today, and see a
crowd of wild, fish eating aboriginals of the Coonool-cabalcha
tribe, speaking Coobennpil. They lived on fish, turtle,
“milbeer,” dugong, “yung-an,” crabs, “weenyam,” oysters,
“keenying-urra,” and fern root, “bangwal.” They had also
opossums, wallabies, and kangaroos.
We go north to Guoorgampin, the Moreton Bay of today,
and see the Booroogoomeerie tribe conjointly fishing with the
porpoise, “yulu,” in shoals of mullet, catching them in their
hundreds. Their picturesque island stretched away north for 25
miles to Boogaramin-calleem, Cape Moreton, with magnificent
sand dunes and a whole chain of beautiful lakes, one mile in
length, and covered with wild fowl.
Now we return to the valley in what is now Victoria
Park, and listen to a corroboree of 600 wild men and women,
assembled there from the river to the Cabulture, and the
shores of the bay. And we stand on the summit of
“Woomboonboroo,” our Spring Hill, and see afar off the
towering summits of the Main Range, the great rock crest of
Lindesay, and the peaks of Barney and Flinders.
Today the ebb tide, “careeba,” and the flood tide,
“yoon-goorpa,” flow in the old times, but we look on another
scene! The old wild races and the glorious jungles have gone
forever, and we fondly imagine our own race is going to
dwell here for all time! Be warned by the year when “the
blood of Semiramus sank in the earth, and 1500 years of
Empire ended like a shepherd’s tale!