Cows Can’t Eat Cedar

CHAPTER 1 – 1842

The schooner Sally buried her bows in the heaving white mass which, a moment before, had been a great green wave leaning over her stern. She shook herself steady and, for a horrid moment, Mack saw sand beneath the shallow water, sand which would break her back if she struck it. Even now, at high tide, the Richmond River bar could not be more than four feet deep. He glanced behind and for once was glad to see another green wall of water rushing after them. As it took the little ship she went forward with a whoosh and Mack saw deep green water flowing each side again. Now he felt free to look round at the land this menacing bar protected.

“Come up and see the river,” he called to his mother and sister below in the cabin.

The ship was still tossing in the white water of breaking surf but close under the high sand-hills the stream ran deep and, as the Sally crept along pulled, now that the hills had cut off the breeze, by winch and anchor, they could see the great black pine trees growing almost to the edge of the narrow beach. The tops of some huts were just showing as Mack’s mother came on deck, carrying Rollo, Susan holding cautiously to her skirts.

“Come on, Sissy, don’t go on being frightened when the danger’s over,” jeered Mack.

“That’s all very well for you,” blazed Susan, her red curls bobbing with anger. “You were allowed on deck to see what was going on – we had to stay in the cabin and that’s much more frightening.”

“Are you two going to waste time quarrelling?” said Mrs. Thomas firmly. “Here we are, the second ship to cross into this river and you just stare at each other and fight! Look! There’s the settlement and that hut at the end near the water must be ours because Dad said it was the nearest to the beach. Oh! There he is coming down the slope behind us with the dogs – he must have been on the headland watching all the time.”

As the ship inched along the narrow twisting channel between the shore and the sand-bar which stretched from one headland to the other, the little party of men scrambled down the steep sand-hill to the beach and ran along the sand, easily overtaking the schooner. Mack’s father ran ahead to a dinghy drawn up on the sand. Soon he was alongside, climbing up the rope ladder. Captain Steel, able to relax after the anxiety of bringing the schooner over an unknown and treacherous bar, enjoyed the commotion the three children made, hugging their father, laughing and shouting.

“A person might think you’d been away three years instead of three months,” he said, as the din subsided.

“Seems a bit like three years, anyway,” said Mr. Thomas. “The work I’ve done. Anyway, everything is ready for them; I have even got some ground prepared for planting and made rush mats to cover the clay floor. Do you know I had to carry the clay for nearly two miles. Nothing but sand in this place.”

The Sally rounded a little point of high land that jutted into the river and came into the main stream, a broad stretch of still water nearly a quarter of a mile wide, in which the schooner could anchor in perfect safety.

The Thomas family was the first ashore and, while the parents went to the hut to decide where to put their goods as these were unloaded, the children ran along the beach, exploring, picking up shells and jumping on the piles of seaweed that had been washed above high-tide level. The two dogs Rex, their collie, and Toby, a retriever Dad had found on the track when he had come overland from the Clarence River three months earlier, danced excitedly about them; Rex overjoyed to have his family reunited and Toby doubtful about these new people but willing to like them if Rex did.

Ever since Mack could remember, his father had talked of going north to the new river to make his fortune cedar-cutting, as Grandpa had done in the early days on the Clarence, the ‘Big River’ of pioneer days that had been such a wonderland of cedar to settlers pushing north from Newcastle. Mack thought, sometimes, that Grandpa and Dad did not really like each other very much, and lately Dad had been talking about how good it would be to set out on their own. When Grandpa had made enough money, cedar-cutting, he had taken up land near Lawrence, the little town on the Clarence. Now he thought of nothing but cows and wanted Dad to stay and help with the work on the cattle-station where the land was cleared and pasture growing.

“You’re mad to want to start all over again, I tell you,” Mack heard him say one day. “There’s no money to be made out of timber these days, and cows can’t eat cedar. You’ve got to have grass growing before you can get a proper start.”

Mack was glad they had come. He had never tired of hearing Grandpa tell about the old days when he was one of the first to cut cedar on the Clarence. Now he and Dad were going to do the same things and he wondered, as he watched the men unloading the Sally, if he would have adventures like Grandpa. Still, times were easier now – there were many modern things that Grandpa did not have to help him. Better and quicker transport for one thing. Where had Rollo got to? Mack came out of his day-dream with a start. He jumped from his pile of seaweed, yelling for Rollo as the little boy and Susan pounced on him from behind, with arms full of wet sea-cabbage.

“Caught you, caught you,” Rollo shouted, hurling wet weed at Mack. Then he fell over the excited Rex and went down in a smother of dog and seaweed.

A call from their father broke up the battle and the three children raced for the hut, Rollo pounding along on legs that simply would not keep up with the rest of him. Mr. Thomas picked him up and tossed him high on to his shoulder, and all four went to the hut to have their first meal in their new home. After more than a week of ship’s food it was good to eat the great roasted schnapper, cooked in a coat of leaves and clay, as the blacks had taught their grandfather many years ago; and some pink spongy fruits called lilly pillys that grew on a near-by tree. Roasted yams took the place of bread. Dad said some of the settlers refused to eat the yams or any of the native food, but he encouraged the blacks to bring him everything they ate themselves. He bought it all, trading knives, wire and axes for it; and found the knowledge of what was good to eat in the bush was a useful standby when provisions ran short.

The hut their father had built was made of slabs cut from trees growing close to the shore. The roof was partly shingled and partly covered with large slabs of stringy-bark. Dad liked the shingles better and said that the first thing he was going to teach Mack and Sue was how to cut shingles.

“But when are we going to cut cedar?” protested Mack.

“Not till your Mother has a comfortable place to live and we have some small crops planted. They tell me you can plant maize at almost any time of the year and it will crop in four months, so it will be as well to put some in at once.”

Sue asked about the thin cane that bound all the joints in the hut. Mr. Thomas told them the building did not have a single nail in it. The joints were slotted together and bound with cane. This plant, he explained, was a curious type of climbing palm-tree which had dreadful thorns on it. It climbed all through the bush, sometimes growing to an inch thick in the lower stems. It caught on to anything that brushed against it and the thorns sank in. The settlers called it the ‘Wait-awhile palm’.

“While I was felling the big teak that made most of this hut,” he told the children, “that silly dog goes and gets his tail caught in it and, when the tree falls, up in the air goes Rex, pulled up by a vine that crossed the branch of a standing tree! He got all tangled up in the branches and we had the deuce of a job to get him down. That’s what happened to the plume of his tail. If ever I saw a dog laugh it was that Toby, standing there with his mouth wide open, tongue hanging halfway to his knees, watching Rex strung up by his tail, thirty feet in the air, and yelling his head off.”

By the time the meal was finished, the family’s goods had been unloaded and were piled up on the beach. Mack and Sue helped unpack the boxes, which were used to make cupboards, while the five barrels were placed where they could catch rain from the hut roof. There was a good spring near-by but, as Mack said, “Why carry water if it will just fall out of the sky where you want it?”

Dad had built bunks of saplings and the useful cane, on which they put the feather mattresses Grandma had made for each of them. Rollo, tired by the excitement climbed into his bed as soon as it was made and fell asleep, so Mother said Mack and Sue could go with their father to shoot a bush turkey for tea.

They had to keep on the track made by the timber-cutters, for the bush, once you left the sandy belt and pine forest, was so thick, Sue wondered how even the wild creatures could penetrate it. The trees were huge and each carried a mass of vines, orchids, staghorns and ferns. Birds were heard in thousands, though it was hard to see them in the tree-tops where they lived. Evil things grew in the deep leaf-mould that hid the earth – leeches, snakes, sand-flies, and mosquitoes in tormenting clouds. There were trees with leaves that stung like nettles if you brushed against them. Their father told them that a type of lily, the Cunjevoi, which was often to be found at the foot of the stinging tree, was an antidote for its poison. If you rubbed the crushed leaves of the lily on the burn left by the stinging tree the pain ceased almost at once.

Presently he showed them, a little way off the track, a big mound of leaves and sticks. The dogs looked eagerly towards it and Mr. Thomas signalled to the children to stand still. He crept forward a few yards and raised his gun. Bang! There was a wild flurry of wings and Toby darted into the bush, returning a few minutes later with a big black bird held in his mouth.

“Ha! A fine plump turkey hen,” said Mr. Thomas. “That was her nest,” he added, pointing to the mound. “If you scrape away the leaves at the top you might find some eggs.” Mack squeezed his way through the undergrowth to the nest mound and found three large reddish-brown eggs, bigger than duck eggs.

“Good boy,” said his father. “That will give us breakfast. They are bound to be fresh, for the birds usually lay five or six and then scratch more leaves over them and go away, leaving the eggs to be hatched by the heat of the decaying leaves. They seem to use the same nest several times, for I’ve seen mounds six feet high.”

They returned to the hut proudly carrying their prizes, collecting some wild cherries and lilly pilly fruits on the way. Even Rex helped provision the larder by catching a big lizard which he carried home himself to eat at leisure.

That night, as the sun was setting behind the ridge, the family feasted in fine style with Captain Steel and their neighbours, Tom and Peter Chelsea, cedar-cutters who had helped all day with unloading and setting up the new home. It was a great event for them to eat crisp scones fresh from a camp-oven, for the settlement had run out of flour some time before and a diet of fish and meat soon palled without bread to go with it.

Later, listening to the surf, as he lay in bed, Mack felt that his life had really begun that day. “Tomorrow …” he murmured to himself – but he was asleep before he had decided what to do with tomorrow and all the fine exciting tomorrows to come.

CHAPTER 2 – 1842

A month later, when some horsemen rode in, having travelled from the Clarence, bringing letters from Grandma, Mack and Sue could hardly believe there had ever been any other way of living than the one they were engrossed in now. Grandma’s letter, full of fret and anxiety as to how they were faring, seemed like a letter from another world.

Their mother read parts of it to them:

… No doubt [wrote Grandma] you will remember the Ogilvie boys who called in here a couple of years ago. Well, they returned the other day with bag and baggage, to settle further up the river. They came overland with an ox-cart. It must have been a terrible journey. They told us they had to swim dozens of creeks and rivers, taking all day to cross each one. Once, when one of the bullocks nearly drowned, they were five days getting over a creek not fifty feet wide. For days at a time they plodded through swamps and then, when they reached the hilly country, the gullies were so steep they had to haul the cart up by pulleys and ropes fastened to the trees, driving the bullocks down-hill to drag the cart up. I did not really understand how they did it but that’s how Fred Ogilvie told me it was done. I cannot think why they did not come by sea. Some of the bigger schooners starting to run from Sydney to the river are almost comfortable and quite fast. If only some way could be found to make the crossing of the river-mouth safe, the journey would be quite an easy one.

They’ll never get a land route that is practicable. The country is far too rough. Dad and Mr. Edward Ogilvie were arguing about it the other night. Mr. Ogilvie thinks that, in fifty years, there will be a great highway running up the coast, with bridges and causeways over the creeks and swamps. I think this is all nonsense but, of course, it was not for me to say so because the Ogilvies are real gentlemen: their father sailed under Nelson and now has a very fine property on the Hunter River, near Newcastle. I can’t understand why the boys want to come up here with all this hardship when they have a settled place already made for them. But then, I can’t understand why you, dear Mary, insisted on going off and leaving your good home here, You young folk have very strange ideas.

Anyway, Mr. Ogilvie told us that he met a party of surveyors planning out the town of Grafton not many miles from here. It will be right on the river and is to be laid out with wide streets planted with trees on each side. Goodness me – after all the trouble we have been to to clear the wretched trees off the land – now they are talking of planting them! I suppose it is to be sure your great grandsons have something to use their axes on!…..

Mother laughed as she stopped reading and, leaving the birds she had been plucking, went off to write a letter for the returning party to take back to her parents.

Mack and Sue drew some pictures on tea-tree bark which had been cut from swamp trees. Smooth and white on the inside, the bark was easy to draw on.

“I’m glad the blacks showed us how to use this bark,” said Sue, as she watched her mother filling every inch of space on her writing-paper. “Wouldn’t it be hard to draw if we had to squash up our pictures to save paper?”

Rollo, too, was inspired to draw and took some of Mack’s yellow stone and a piece of bark. This yellow stone was a very good find. The children had come across an outcrop of coloured clayey rock one day which made a fine addition to the black charcoal pictures they had been drawing. They also used a sort of ink made from the sap of various vines.

They had to hurry with their drawing for the horsemen wanted to start back to the Clarence that day. There was very little feed for stock in the scrub so they had to carry fodder for the double journey and could not afford to waste time.

The men told Mrs. Thomas that they had found some short cuts on the way over which would greatly ease the trip. One of them said they had only travelled ninety miles from Iluka, at the mouth of the Clarence, to the Richmond. They were marking a track along which they hoped to bring a team of bullocks and a waggon.

Now that the cedar-cutting was well started on the Richmond and the easy trees near the river-banks were almost cut out, there was need for bullocks to drag the logs to the creeks or river to be floated down to the boats. Feed for the cattle was the main problem and a party was at work five miles inland, clearing and fencing the first paddock ever seen on the Richmond.

When the Thomases had waved farewell to the visitors as they rowed across to the south bank of the river, where they had left their horses, they all set to work again on their various jobs. Mrs. Thomas was preparing food to take on their trip next day; Mack, with his razor-sharp tomahawk, was working on the everlasting task of making shingles; Sue was weaving a sun-hat from the soft rushes that grew in the swamp, and Rollo was patiently rubbing a round disk of cedar which was to be a breadboard for his mother. He loved the soft feel of the wood and, when he grew up, this love of cedar took expression in beautiful cedar furniture which, a hundred years later, remained as a monument to his love of the trees he had cut down in his lifetime.

While his hands made shingles, Mack passed the time thinking about the trip planned for the next day. They were going up North Creek, a long reach of the river running north-west from the main stream, to meet Mr. Thomas who was away with a party cutting cedar at the head of the creek. He had been gone nearly a week, as had all the ten men of the settlement, leaving Mack, old Peter and two sick men to look after Mrs. Thomas and the children.

Mrs. Thomas, as she cooked soft food for Peter – who had no teeth – and cared for the two sick men, knew it was she who was doing the looking after, but she did not say so, allowing Mack the full satisfaction of feeling himself to be the strongest person in the camp.

He and Peter were to row the boat and Sue was to do the steering. One of the sick men, now almost better, had offered to mind Rollo, so Mrs. Thomas was going for a day out – the first since she had landed. The boat was to meet the cutters about six miles up North Creek and take on board all their camping gear, leaving them free to walk down the narrow track along the river-bank.

Peter, who was one of the first men to settle in Ballina, as the settlement at the mouth of the Richmond was called, was very mysterious about something he was to show them. Beyond admitting that it didn’t smell very nice and that you couldn’t eat it, he would give no clue as to what it was and Mack and Sue were bursting with curiosity.

Mack finished off the stack of shingles and went to help his mother. They liked to finish eating and have everything washed and tidy by dark, as oil for lamps was expensive and, besides, the days were long enough for a fellow to get pretty tired by dark if he got up at daybreak.

They were up with the first light next morning. Just as the sun rose, they set out. Mrs. Thomas was made comfortable with Sue in the stern, sitting on feather cushions and with a sunshade to keep off the glare. Mack and Peter, side by side, pulled at the oars and Rex, in the bow, was waving his tail and yelping now and then to show he was ready to do his share of the work.

Some blacks, walking along the narrow track near the river, paused to stare at the boat and, recognizing Mrs. Thomas, to call and wave a greeting.

Though blacks were very troublesome in some districts, the North Coast tribes were friendly to anyone who treated them well. Mrs. Thomas always did all she could to be their friend and they came to respect her in a way that proved very useful at times when food was short or a message had to be sent through flooded country.

About three miles up the creek Peter rowed into a small inlet, almost a tunnel because the trees met overhead, and waved to them to be very quiet. They rowed for about a hundred yards before they came to a widening of the stream where it made a tiny lake in the depth of the swamp. Here was the surprise.

Growing at the head of the lake was a mighty fig-tree whose branches extended fifty feet from the trunk, their sturdy aerial roots hanging like coarse whiskers into the water. Seated along the branches in solemn rows, their enormous beaks busy with their morning toilet, were hundreds of black and white pelicans.

These amazing birds were quite a common sight along the river. Huge and clumsy on the ground, they were wonderfully graceful as they balanced on their seven-foot wings over the water. At any time, flying in formation or swimming in groups as they hunted fish, they fascinated the children but now, in the hundreds in this roosting-tree, they were a sight to remember forever.

The whole party sat gazing and the birds went on with their preening, taking no notice of their visitors. At last, when the hordes of sand-flies and mosquitoes became too much to borne, they rowed back down the tunnel and out into the stream again.

Old Peter said there were many such trees dotted about the bush, one particularly large one being further up the river where a landing-stage had been built. The place was called Pelican Tree by the blacks, but he had heard that a man had selected land there to build a ship-yard and a proper wharf and was going to change the name to that of Coraki, the native word.

As they rowed along Peter told them about the oyster-shell dumps further up the creek, where the blacks held a yearly festival. These were not the local tribes but blacks from inland who came down every year to eat oysters and hold a corroboree. The heaps of oyster shells were twenty feet high, Peter said, and extended for miles along the bank. Blacks must have been holding this annual festival for hundreds of years to account for so many oysters. Another yearly event was the catching of a type of salmon which visited the shores for about three weeks each year. The blacks gathered along the coast and waited for the schools of fish to come into the river-mouth, then they fell on them, scooping them out of the water with baskets, trapping them in creeks, even grabbing them by the tails and tossing them ashore to the lubras, who cleaned and dried them in the sun for use in the winter when food was scarce.

Before he knew of this custom, Peter said, he had a great scare one day when he came on a group of weird beings walking silently through the bush. They were completely covered with a brown, evil-smelling, prickly covering, only their feet showing that a human being walked there.

“I didn’t wait,” said Peter, laughing, “I lit out for the nearest tree I could climb. One of the figures began to talk and point at me. When he did this, I saw that it was a man loaded down with the dried bodies of fish, tied in long strings and looped all over his arms and shoulders. I got down from my tree but the abos can’t have liked the look of me either, for they set off at a lumbering trot, their fish swinging and rattling round them, and disappeared into the bush. All they left behind was a most powerful smell!”

By midday the party had reached the landing-stage built by the cedar-getters near the entrance of another stream into North Creek. They landed, thankful to stretch their legs, and had lunch while they waited for the men. A great pack of cedar logs, held in the creek by a heavy chain across its mouth, gave evidence of the work the men had done. These logs, each with an eyelet driven into one end and a chain passing through to hold them together, were marked by the brand of the man or team to whom they belonged and would lie here until a ship arrived to carry them to Sydney. Then they would be released and floated downstream to be loaded, either in the river or, if the bar was too rough for the boat to pass, to be floated out and loaded at sea – a very dangerous undertaking. The light cedar floated in the water and Mack and Sue had fun climbing on the logs and trying to roll them round with their feet as the timber-men did.

Just as they were beginning to tire of this game, Rex leapt ashore and began to bound along the dim bush track, barking at the top of his voice. Mack heard the distant answering bark and, shouting “That’s Toby,” set off after Rex as hard as he could run. Soon he could hear the shouts of the men and met them where the track turned inland to avoid a swamp.

The men crowded round Mack asking for news, and he was proud to be able to give them some, for, in their isolated settlement, very little happened from week to week that could be called real news. What papers and journals the schooners brought were usually eighteen months to two years old. So Mack was delighted to be able to tell about the party of horsemen who had come in the day before and how they hoped to bring the first team of bullocks into the district in about three weeks. This was good news to men who had been dragging and rolling logs by hand to the creek-banks.

“Now we can chop down old Beautiful,” said one of the men. This was a remarkable cedar-tree Mr. Thomas had found, too far from any stream to be cut down. It was head and shoulders above the rest of the scrub – a huge tree containing about twice as much timber as the average tree. Because of its great age its boughs were laden with orchids and staghorns and Mr. Thomas had promised to save some for Mrs. Thomas’s garden when the tree was eventually felled.

After the men had rested and eaten, all their gear was loaded into the boat and two of the men offered to row so that Mack might walk back with his father. One of the other men, who had hurt his leg, went as a passenger with Peter to steer, and the rest of the party set off to walk.

It was the first time Mrs. Thomas had been far in the scrub and they all teased her because she kept loading them up with plants she wanted to grow in her garden. Mr. Thomas said he would always make sure to bring the bullock-team with him when he took her for a stroll in the bush in future.

They reached home late in the evening, without anything in the way of adventure except that Rex and Toby killed a Death Adder. These horrible snakes were very plentiful round the camp and in the scrub, Mr. Thomas told them. He had six skins curing to make into a belt for Mack.

“What about me?” demanded Sue.

“I’ve got something else for you, greedy,” said her father. “The blacks came into camp one night and I gave them some damper. How they loved it! I guarantee there wasn’t a crumb wasted. They gave me a present of a perfectly-made chain, carved from a single piece of cedar, each link perfect. There is even a swivel link carved at the end. It’s a lovely piece of work and will make a fine necklace for you.”

They were all glad to get home and settle to their usual way of life, the days drifting past uneventfully but full of activity.

Five weeks later these placid days were stirred up again by the arrival of the bullock-team.

It was a great day. Everyone who could row a boat came to the south bank and walked inland to the hill-top which had been cleared for the paddock. Grass was growing lush in the ashes of the burnt scrub and the thin, tired beasts were feeding busily when Mack and Sue climbed on to the post-and-rail fence to look at them. The coming of these twenty-two bullocks marked the beginning of an era that was to tear down the mighty forest and lay the foundation of a thriving dairying industry.

Later the whole party of drovers swelled the size of the little settlement as they all sat round a big fire and ate damper and salt beef from the supplies the men had brought.

The greatest thrill of the day for Rollo was the crate of bantam fowls Grandpa had sent them. The little birds had worked their passage, the men told Rollo, by laying eggs every day on the long trip from the Clarence.

For Mrs. Thomas there was a cow which had plodded the ninety miles of rough bush track, tied to the tail of the waggon. Mr. Thomas was not very pleased by these additions. “How are we going to feed all these creatures?” he asked. “There’s very little fodder grass and we cannot grow enough maize for ourselves, let alone a flock of fowls.” Rollo pointed to the bantam rooster poking his head through the bars of his cage to peck at a fish-head. “They like fish,” he remarked. Everyone laughed because Rollo hated fish and only ate it when there was nothing else. He proved right, however, for the bantams did well in spite of having very little maize. To Mrs. Thomas their eggs were a boon beyond price.

CHAPTER 3 – 1853

With the coming of the bullock-team, life seemed to settle into a pattern which sent the months rolling quietly by. More and more cedar-cutters came over from the Clarence where the timber was almost cut out. Some, like Mack’s grandfather, stayed to farm the cleared acres, but most of the cedar-cutters were lone men, rough and adventurous. Not for them the placid life of the dairy-farmer. They set up their camps where the cedar was thick and moved on when it was felled. They had to buy a licence to cut down the timber and were forbidden, by the terms of this permit, to cultivate the land. So they moved through the bush like a scourge, tearing down the trees, killing the lovely birds and spending what they earned on the only pleasure they knew – rum. Even when food was scarce there always seemed to be rum and it gave these men almost the only relief from the hard, barren life they lived in the trackless swampy forests. (It was said that a cedar-getter could always be recognized because of his pale, sickly appearance, for in the gloom of the forests he rarely saw the sun.) Timber buyers, shopkeepers and agents alike all robbed the cedar-getters and they, in turn, robbed the land. But, from so much that was bad, emerged the good, brought about by the tracks they cut in the scrub along which followed the people who were to make the land prosper. Small farms and settlements sprang up along the rivers in the wake of the cedar-getters, their tracks being the only pathway for supplies.

When Admiral Rous discovered the river in 1832 he named it Deptford and, though the river was finally called Richmond after the Duke of Richmond, the settlement was called Deptford for some years. The native name for the area was Bulleena, meaning ‘place of many oysters’. After the infamous massacre at the blacks’ camp, when a party of police from Brisbane mistook the camp for one where a murderer was said to be hiding and shot all the natives in it, the blacks referred to the area as Ballina, which means ‘blood flowing from wounds’, and this name gradually came to be used by the white settlers, instead of the English name of Deptford. That is why Ballina became the official name when the town began to take shape. A ship-building yard and a hotel were followed by a police station and, as more and more settlers moved in, the point of land jutting into the river-mouth became quite crowded, the population spreading over North Creek to where the present town of Ballina stands.

The Thomases moved their hut to the ridge over-looking North Creek and, beneath a huge pine, they built the biggest ‘house’ in the settlement. It had two rooms and a verandah facing the creek. The walls were made of pine slabs which Sue, Mack and Rollo plastered on the inside with clay and decorated with drawings in red and yellow stone. The roof was shingled and a large chimney was built at one end of the house from flat stones carried up from the foreshore. Here again they used clay and shells to decorate the wall.

Not far from this house was a spring beside which the children found a sailor’s tarred hat, a flint stone and a plug of tobacco half-covered by a huge fallen tree-trunk. A relic, their father thought, of some exploring party, led perhaps by Flinders or Cook, which had come there for water many years before.

They dug a new channel for the spring and lined it with flat stones, bringing the tiny stream close to the house and garden. Theirs was probably the first garden on the North Coast to enjoy the benefits of irrigation.

Here they lived for four years, the happy uneventful lives of pioneers, watching the settlement grow. The most outstanding event in their lives at that time was at Christmas 1853 when a Sports Day was held. It was the first such meeting ever held in the district. People rowed as far as seventy miles to attend and all sorts of races were contested by young and old. There were even enough saddle-horses to allow the arrangement of a few horse events but, mainly, there were foot-races, wrestling matches and a grand tug-of-war between two teams of cedar-getters, so evenly matched that it seemed they would go on pulling for ever. However, a small dog ended the contest and nearly started a brawl, by racing across the field and biting the large round end of the mighty ‘anchor’-man, causing his collapse and victory for the rival team. Spectators who had been betting heavily on the match did not see the funny side and for a while things looked ugly, but the contest was declared a draw and the day ended with laughter.

Not long after this excitement, news came that a pilot had been appointed to guide ships over the bar. Captain Easton was well known on the rivers as owner of the vessel Margaret and everyone in Ballina was delighted to hear that he was appointed. The Thomases were particularly pleased because his wife and children would be living at East Ballina.

To children who had lived so long without playmates the idea of having three friends of their own age was most exciting. Only Rollo, who was so much younger than the other two, was unhappy because Mrs. Easton didn’t have a little boy his age.

“Well, never mind,” said his mother, “I’ll tell you a secret. I’m going to have a baby soon and I’ll need you to help me look after and play with it.” Rollo was comforted, but Mr. Thomas, contemplating the arrival of the new baby with no doctor or nurse to help, frowned and looked worried.

A few days later they heard that the Shaw family, who had been living in the village of Woodburn, further up the river (where the first Sports Day had been held) was moving to Ballina. Mrs. Shaw was known throughout the district for her skill in nursing and many cedar-getters owed their lives to her. At this news Mrs. Thomas felt able to relax a little. Only a week after the Shaw family had settled in, the new baby arrived and Mrs. Shaw’s help was needed.

Rollo, when he first saw his brother Charlie, thought he didn’t look much use as a playmate; in fact Lassie’s puppies seemed more interesting, but as the baby grew Rollo became his protector and admirer and nothing the bigger children could suggest would take him from the baby’s side.

Captain Easton’s coming made an immediate difference to the shipping of cedar. Up to that time nearly all loading had been done outside the bar where the sea was always rough, with swirling currents and cross-waves which pushed the rafts of logs about like matchwood. Already one man had been killed by falling between the logs of a broken raft. Sometimes half a shipment would be lost by being swept away before it could be loaded.

Captain Easton established a look-out station on the headland and a system of signals between himself, the look-out and the captain of each ship so that the vessels could be guided along the clearest channel. If there was no wind, he rowed out in a whale-boat and towed the ships to safety. At the best this was a long and dangerous operation which could only be done in clear weather and at high tide, but it did mean that the logs could be loaded in the calm water of the river. A lot of produce was now being grown on the newly cleared land, made richer by the ashes left after the burning of the scrub. Cattle were thriving on the patches of native grass growing up the river and thus tallow – made by boiling-down fat cattle – and corn were supplementing cedar as exports from the district. The main problem was to get it to the markets at Newcastle or Sydney before it went bad.

Since the cedar-cutters had used up all the timber near the river-mouth, they were working their way further and further up-stream so that logs had sometimes to be floated forty or fifty miles from where they were rolled into the river, down to the mouth for loading. This took both time and skill and the professional rafter came into being. These men cut no timber themselves but were paid for their services with a percentage of the logs they took down-stream. They spent their lives floating rafts of logs down-river with the tides, tying up to the bank when the tide was flowing in and drifting down with the outgoing tide. Negotiating bends with these great rafts of logs called for a lot of skill. It was very dangerous work at times and men who became skilled at it were much sought after.

These rafters lived on the rafts, laying sheets of stringy-bark on the logs and building a bark or sail-cloth shelter. Many of them carried a crate of fowls to vary the monotony of the fish they caught. One man even had his wife and children and a cow living on the rafts he piloted. It was a common sight to see the rafts floating along the stream with a line of washing waving in the breeze and a fire burning in a big iron pot. When they delivered the timber to the depot at the river-mouth and received a credit note for their share of the selling price, the rafters unmoored their boats which had been towed behind and rowed back the fifty or sixty miles up-river for another raft.

There was a glamour about the life which attracted Charlie, who spent a lot of time watching up-river for the first sight of a raft of logs coming down. As soon as it was close enough he would swim out and ride down to the depot with the rafter – telling him the news and asking about adventures on the trip down. Though the actual work was probably very dull and uneventful, the rafters obliged Charlie’s eager interest by telling him wild yarns of war-like blacks and ferocious snakes. Most of them quite untrue or at the best simple happenings added to from their imaginations.

Charlie was determined to be a rafter when he grew up and he and Rollo often spent an afternoon at the depot, playing at the exciting game of rafters, rolling the logs with their feet and poling the tethered rafts out into the stream as far as their ropes would allow.

One day, when the river was flowing fast after heavy rain, they poled the raft out, and out, and out, until with a shout Rollo realized the raft was not tethered at all and they were in mid-stream, sailing fast towards the pounding breakers on the bar.

The boys stood staring at the fast water all round them. It was impossible to swim, for the current was racing a good six miles an hour towards the sea; impossible to shout over the fast-widening distance to the settlement, impossible to stay with the great logs that would soon be pounded to pieces on the bar. There was only one chance – that was to stay on the raft until the current took it near a sand-bank where the water would be shallow enough for them to stand and then jump off and hope to stay there until they were missed at the settlement and someone came to look for them.

By the time Rollo had explained his plan to Charlie they were almost to the river-mouth and the surge of the surf was heaving the forty-foot raft about as if it was a piece of board. Rollo picked up a piece of rope and tied a loop in each end.

“Put this round your waist, Sonno,” he said, trying to sound carefree. “Then you won’t be able to beat me to the driest bank.” He put the other loop round his own waist just as the raft tipped violently, throwing Charlie heavily. Both lads had to lie down and cling to the ropes binding the logs.

Suddenly the raft hit a bank of sand with a pounding bang that jarred the ropes from the front, causing the logs to splay out and crash together with a force that would have crushed the two unwilling passengers to pulp. They scrambled to their feet and ran along one log as it lay temporarily motionless in the backwash of a wave. Charlie jumped off on to the sand-bank but Rollo fell and the big log surged over him. Charlie staggered back, pulled by the rope that joined them, and, turning, managed to pull it free of the log as Rollo swam from beneath it. Luckily, a fresh wave pushed the log away and Rollo was able to scramble to the comparative safety of the submerged bank as the huge tangled mass of heaving logs swept past and away from them.

The shallowest part of the bank was about two feet deep at the best, deepening to nearly waist-high when a surge of water came up from the surf. Clinging together the boys were just able to keep their footing, but it was hard work and Rollo looked anxiously towards the distant settlement in the hope of seeing a boat rowing towards them. There was nothing to see but water, even the houses on the bank seemed impossibly small. It was fully half a mile to the nearest land and, with the tide setting strongly out to sea, swimming would be foolhardy. At low tide perhaps the bank would be out of water altogether but that was a good two hours away and Rollo doubted if they could stay on their feet as long as that. He looked to see how his brother was taking it and was amazed to find he was gazing out to sea.

“It’s awful to think of all that cedar going to waste,” remarked Charlie, as calmly as if they were safe on dry land.

“It’s awful to think of Mum’s sons going to feed fishes, too,” snapped Rollo.

Charlie stared at him. “Haven’t you seen the ship?” he asked. “They’ll pick us up, won’t they?”

Rollo thought for a moment that the danger had sent his young brother mad, and then he saw it – the white sails of a schooner outside the bar! In the very last place he would have thought to look for rescue.

They watched the look-out on the headland signalling to the schooner and knew that soon the pilot-boat would row down the river. Even so, it seemed a long time before the welcome black wedge came in sight round the bend of the river, and both boys had hardly enough strength to swim the few yards out to the boat when it came near the sandbank. It took only a few minutes to row them back to the settlement, but it was a long, long time before either boy wanted to play rafters again.

CHAPTER 4

Mack and the Easton twins had been over the headland to watch the New Zealand men washing for gold at Black Head. He was one of a party of prospectors which had arrived a month earlier to wash for gold by a new method and the boys were very interested. The New Zealander explained that the grains of gold were coated with a black mineral which had to be removed before you could see the gold. This was done by passing the ore over a mercury-coated plate which separated the heavy metal from the black mineral. He told them, with a laugh, how gladly dishonest men sold them the ‘tailings’ (the sand left after the gold had been washed out of it by ordinary methods), pretending it was unwashed sand, and how amazed they were when the New Zealanders extracted more gold from the tailings than the original miners had in the first washing.

They were all so engrossed that they didn’t notice the huge storm climbing the sky, until a roll of thunder and a flash of forked lightning made them all spring to their feet.

“That’s going to be a big storm,” said the miner, gathering his gear in a hurry.

The three lads set off along the steep track over the headland anxious to get back to the settlement before the rain started. Ted Easton, who was in the lead, paused for a breather at the top of the ridge. His shout brought the other two up the last few yards at a run. “Look!” he cried, pointing out to sea. “That must be the Eclipse.”

“She’s in for trouble,” said Mack, “she won’t be able to cross the bar for hours yet – tide’s too low.” He glanced at the coming storm again, then called up to the look-out man to know if he wanted any message taken to the pilot.

“No, Mack, nothing, except to tell him of yon ship if he hasn’t already seen it. One of you boys can stay here with me, though, to run for extra gear if we need it.”

Ted, the best runner of the three, offered to stay with Joe at the look-out while Mack and Henry ran down the sand-hills and along the narrow beach that followed the curve of the bay.

Sure enough, Captain Easton had seen the sails of the brig before the boys reached his house and was busy laying out ropes, pulleys and life-jackets, ready for trouble. Everything seemed set to cause the wreck of the vessel: the storm, the tide and the time of day. Already huge black clouds were cutting off the daylight and the storm appeared to be stalking the brig like a great black beast.

The Eclipse sailed on as fast as wind and sails could take her, the captain hoping to reach the river before dark; but the wind was whipping up a swirl of water on the bar, which had silted up badly during a recent flood. With each run-back of water the wet back of a sand-bank glinted in the clear green twilight.

Everywhere in the settlement families were busily making ready for the storm. Mack arrived home in time to help Rollo drive the ducklings into their hollow log home, and gave Sue and his mother a lift with the heavy shutters that kept the verandah and window-opening sheltered. Then he collected the big red signal flag and climbed the tall pine-tree near the house to signal the cedar-cutters in their camp ten miles away to come home as fast as they could. As an afterthought he climbed up a second time to tie the storm-lantern high in the tree in case it was too dark for them to notice the flag. As he climbed down he remembered how often he had wished for the arrival of a ship so that he might set the signal flag, but now he wished the crisis had not been such a grave one. The plan for setting the flag or lantern had been made to call the men home when the boat came in and he knew they would come happily, not suspecting that danger was threatening the long-overdue vessel just as she was arriving with much-needed supplies.

When everything was secure at home, he went down to join the group on the shore. By then everything that could be done to prepare for the possible wreck, had been done. The little vessel herself was now visible only during lightning flashes and, as the first spatter of rain hit the sand near him, Captain Easton lit the huge pile of dry wood that had been gathered opposite the least dangerous part of the channel. He wished there was some way he could get word to the captain of the ship to warn him to put out to sea again, away from the treacherous sand-banks until the storm had passed, but he knew that even signals from the look-out, if they could be seen, would be too late. The vessel was certain to strike the bar and all they could do was await her coming.

Rain poured from the murky sky, its noise mingling with the roar of the waves and the howling of the wind. The little group of anxious people, drenched by the downpour, stood gazing into the darkness, straining to see the ship.

It seemed such a long time that they were almost beginning to hope she had stood away off-shore, when the rain slackened for an instant and there she was, right in the turmoil of the surf, near the north headland, standing almost on end as the undertow dragged her backwards, against the wind. As she hit the bank, a coughing snap told of her mainmast breaking and the crash and flapping of the trailing gear made a soggy undertone to the noise of the storm. Like a dog with a rabbit in its teeth the wicked surf shattered the little ship in a matter of minutes.

Mack grabbed the life-line that had been assigned to him while a large silent cedar-getter (his shore helper) picked up the coil of heavy rope and together they ran up the beach towards the wreck, followed by others, each carrying out his appointed task.

Mack heard his father call as he ran – something about lighting a fire – then he was in the surf, diving under the oncoming waves, finding a slippery foothold on the rocky ridges that crossed the bay, then swimming again, straining to see in the lightning flashes as his head broke water. A large black object came tearing at him in the white teeth of a wave and he dived right to the sand to avoid it. As he surfaced again something slashed at him as it passed and he realized it was a pig, having its first experience of surfing. He looked back for a second, wondering if it could reach the shore and saw that a fire had been lit on the beach, giving him welcome assurance that he was swimming in the right direction.

Now he saw that he was nearly level with the headland and almost at the end of his rope. Good swimmer though he was he felt very tired and knew that he must soon return to the shore. He began to wish he had gone back to help the pig – at least that would be better than going in empty-handed. He could just make out the shattered vessel, driven right on to the rocks at North Head, her masts gone and the sails a heaving, tearing mass over her broken side. She was too far out for him to reach but, as he thought he could see people clambering along the surf-scourged rocks, he untied his rope and swam ashore again. He and his mate, the cedar-getter, carrying the sodden rope between them, ran up the beach to the rocks and were just in time to help two exhausted men from the surf.

The cedar-getter, a mighty arm round each of the sailors, set off towards the fire where several women had used their coats and shawls to make a shelter for the survivors and were helping three other men from the wreck who had already reached the beach.

Mack stood for a moment getting his breath and then set off at a jog along the beach to where a flash of lightning had shown a group of men dragging a dinghy towards the water. His father and three others had just launched the boat as Mack came up and he lent a hand to run her into the surf. Judging their moment, the men shot her over the first waves and reached the comparative calm beyond the broken water. Here they were close to the vessel and able to see several sailors clinging to the prow, which was all that showed above the swirling sea.

Rain was now pelting down so hard that it seemed to flatten the waves on the lee side of the vessel and, under Mr. Thomas’s direction, the boat was manoeuvred close enough for the men on board the Eclipse to hear their rescuers’ shouts.

“Jump!” roared Mack, and like marionettes on a string, three men jumped overboard and swam towards the dinghy. As their reaching hands got a grip on the gunwales they were pulled into the boat and the men at the oars began to row, but a mighty wave leapt at them and in a second they were all in the water, the dinghy, upside down, flying for the shore without them. The big wave swept them all towards the shore and Mack, who was used to swimming in the surf, made his way to the beach quite easily. Two of the men from the Eclipse struggled on to the sand near him. Looking round for the rest of the boat’s crew, he saw one of his men coming in towing a nearly unconscious sailor through the water by holding his beard, and he ran back into the waves to help pull him to shore. As they tramped back up the beach he thought everyone was accounted for, but when they reached the fire his father was not there.

“Where’s Dad?” Mack called as they approached. Nobody answered. Everyone looked at everyone else and then, with one accord, rescued and rescuers alike, left the fire to search for him. It was Mack himself who found him at long last, thrown high on the rocks near the wreck, wedged between two boulders; unconscious, but living. He shouted for help and they carried his father to the fire. Soon, to their great relief, he revived and they took him home. All night Mrs. Shaw and his wife worked to make him more comfortable. None of the crew of the Eclipse had been badly hurt though most of them had minor injuries, but Mr. Thomas had broken a leg and his back had been badly hurt when he had hit the rocks.

When daylight came it was discovered that one man had been drowned, a passenger who had been the first to jump overboard and was thought to have been safe in one of the huts. His body lay on the beach among the pathetic litter of broken goods and drowned animals. Of the little vessel only the keel remained jammed into the rocks where the angry sea had hurled her.

All that morning every able man was down on the beach salvaging precious stores which had floated ashore as the ship broke up. Bags of flour were taken indoors and their contents spread out on sheets of canvas to dry. As the boat had been very much overdue, the loss of most of her cargo was a dreadful blow to the settlement as everyone depended on her for provisions, as well as clothes and tools.

Up on the ridge the Thomas household moved in silent misery. Rollo went about his usual jobs, looking after the livestock; Sue consoled Charlie, who was frightened by the unaccustomed seriousness of his family; Mack, down on the beach helping with the salvage, came up the hill every half hour or so to see if there was any news. Tired though she was, Mrs. Shaw stayed with Mrs. Thomas, and her calm presence made them all feel better.

As the day moved on, Mr. Thomas gradually improved. The numbness only began to go out of his legs and back after some days but it was nearly a week before he could move his legs. It was four long months before he could walk at all.

In the meantime Mack decided that he should take his father’s place with the cutting gang. Mr. Thomas opposed this idea at first but, as the weeks wore on, he realized that he would never be able to pull a cross-cut saw or swing an axe again, and he gave in. Mack went proudly to the camp at North Creek to do a man’s work at sixteen. The men were good to him and he liked the work, so he was disappointed when his father suggested he get work on a cattle station further up the river.

“You know, son,” said Mr. Thomas, “cedar won’t last much longer – it’s nearly all cut out along the river-banks in the few years we’ve been here. I think cattle-station management would be a better thing for you to know about. There’s boat-building, of course, but with these new steam-driven craft turning out so well it looks as though the cow will be the mainstay of this district before long.”

“I hate cows,” growled Mack. “Why can’t we start a saw-mill? People are always going to build houses, even if only to put the wretched cows in.”

“A fat lot of use I’d be at that,” said his father, bitterly, stretching out his shrivelled and almost useless leg. “Of course, you could tie me to the lower half of the saw like young Chilcot did when he didn’t have a partner for his pit-saw. He used a bit of iron – but I’d weigh about the same, I should think.”

Mack sat silent, ashamed that he had been so tactless. The mention of Tommy Chilcot, though, made him remember his fine saddle-horse, and a bright idea came.

“Dad! You can ride a horse, in spite of your leg, can’t you?”

“Why, yes,” said Mr. Thomas slowly, “at least I rode out to the headland last week on that old crowbait of Mullins! Why?

“Well, Dad, if you can ride, you can tend cattle. Why don’t you buy a cattle station?”

There was a long pause, so long that Mack thought he had offended his father again. Then Mr. Thomas looked up and to Mack’s boundless relief he saw the old vigorous look that had been missing from his father’s face for so long.

“Mack, you’ve solved our problem. I’ll have the best darn cattle station in the North Coast. Not these wild, scrawny scrub cattle, but real beef cattle like Grandpa’s. And we’ll grow milk and beef, not just fats for tallow. Not just yet though, I don’t know enough – there’s a lot to learn. You start your saw-mill for the time being. Rollo and I are going to be dairy-farmers.”

From that moment Mr. Thomas began to recover faster; riding helped build up the muscles in his injured back and leg and when he began to work for a Mr. Hayward, who owned a big cattle holding up-river, he never – or so his family teased him – stopped thinking about the lovely red cows he was going to buy when he got his grant of land.

Mack and three other men became partners in a pit-saw and only went to the forest for enough trees to keep their pit busy. The pit-saw was the only way of cutting timber in those days and each plank of sawn timber represented a lot of work. The pit-saw consisted of a deep pit with a frame-work of logs built above it. On these was wedged the log to be sawn and, with a very long cross-cut saw held vertically by one man standing on the log and another in the pit, the logs were cut in much the same way as a circular saw cuts them today, only at a much slower rate. There were times when, standing in the pit with sawdust in his eyes, nose and mouth, Mack envied his father out in the sunshine on a horse. However, they were getting good money for their sawn timbers from settlers who were moving into the district all the time, and each pound he could earn brought his father’s cherished dream of a dairy herd a little nearer.

One day, when they were out cutting down a huge tree for some special ship-building timber, Mack had a curious adventure. He paused for rest from chopping and thought he could hear a baby crying! At first his mate said it must be an aboriginal tribe passing, for nobody lived in the tall timber, but the crying went on and on, so Mack went to investigate. Climbing over a little ridge near-by, he came upon a small clearing with a rough shelter in the middle of it and all the usual signs of a cedar-getters camp. Near the hut, tied by a length of rope, was a baby boy, looking more dirty and woe-begone than Mack had ever imagined a baby could be.

When the child saw Mack, he staggered the length of is tether and held up his arms. Mack strode forward and untied the rope and picked the baby up, realizing that with his blue eyes and almost white hair he was no native child. He and his mate, Tom, gave the boy a drink and sat down to boil the billy and see who came along. The little baby curled up on Mack’s knee, holding his hand with both claw-like little paws, and went to sleep, so that Mack and his partner decided to give up work for the rest of the afternoon.

When it was almost dark they heard a voice calling, “Jimmy! Jimmy!” The little boy woke up immediately, scrambled down from Mack’s lap and toddled across the clearing towards a man approaching along the dim bush-track.

Mack and Tom went along, too, curious and still angry at the idea of any decent person leaving a baby in such a manner.

“Good-day,” said the man, his voice rather muffled by the child, who was hugging him round the neck. “Been nurse-maidin’? Wish you’d take it on permanently.”

Over a mug of tea and some grilled fish he told them the story of Jimmy. “You see, his Ma wanted me to go back to the city, but I wouldn’t do that, so she ups and goes off on the boat while I was away cuttin’ timber. So I clears off with Jimmy, thinkin’ I could look after ‘im meself. But it’s no good. He’s lookin’ right poorly; don’t get the proper food, I reckon. I dunno what to do.”

Mack frowned, remembering how he had taught Rollo to walk and seeing Charlie at the same age as Jimmy was now, fat as one of Lassie’s pups, his hair shining, golden with health, happy and chuckling all the time.

“I’ll take him home to Mum,” he offered. “She’ll look after him until you can manage better.”

The man looked at Mack for a long while in silence. “Would she? When you tell her all what I just told you?”

“Yes, of course,” said Mack. “Come home with me and see for yourself.”

“No,” the man answered, almost to himself, “no, I won’t do that. I’d rather I just went off tomorrow, like every day, and didn’t see Jimmy no more. Being with me won’t ever be any good for ‘im. The best I can do to make it up to ‘im is to let someone like your mother bring ‘im up properly.”

Early as they woke next morning, Mack and Tom found the boy tied to the side of the tent as before, his father already gone. They never saw him again, nor did they even learn his name.

“Poor cow,” said Tom, as they packed for the trip home. “Whatever he did that makes him have to hide, I reckon a man should never be punished so that he’s ashamed to face his own kid. This business of not letting the cedar-cutters build homes or plant gardens, is cruel in a lot of ways. The sooner this Free Selection Act they keep talking about, comes in, the better. That bloke could make a go of it if he could marry and settle down on his own bit of land. As it is, one day a tree’ll fall on him, way out in the scrub somewhere, and no one will ever know.”

Mack washed Jimmy’s pathetic clothes and gave him a wash, too, much to his disgust, and they set off for the settlement, Jimmy riding on Mack’s shoulders for most of the way, his tiny weight adding very little to that of the pack and axe he carried.

Sue and Mrs. Thomas met them part of the way along the track near home.

“Got any plants for me?” called Mrs. Thomas, as she always did when she met them after a stay in the scrub; for it was understood that Mack collected any rare orchids or ferns he found in the tops of the trees he felled.

“Yes,” shouted Mack, “a very rare one to find in the bush.” He held up the boy for her to see and cut short their prattle of questions by telling, as they walked along, the story of Jimmy who rode ahead of the little party astride Sue’s shoulders, looking already twice the boy he had seemed when alone in the gloomy frightening scrub.

From the first, Mrs. Thomas never doubted that his place was with them, and after a few weeks of milk, eggs, and loving care from Sue who called him ‘her baby’, Jimmy settled into the family as if he had been born to it. All memory of the days he had spent tied up alone in the bush with a piece of fat bacon as his sole food, soon faded away. Only Mack remembered his first sight of Jimmy, dirty and red-faced, with tears running down his thin cheeks and making a wet patch of the front of his rough canvas coat.