Cows Can’t Eat Cedar – Part Two

CHAPTER 5 – 1860

It was Sue’s birthday – she wasn’t specially excited about this because until the mail arrived there would be no parcels, nor even much in the way of a cake because the boat was overdue, too, and provisions were short. Having lived eighteen of her twenty-three years in the settlement, Sue was used to the uncertainty of supplies. The main thing she missed was something fresh to read – every word of print that came, whether it was wrapped round a packet or on the packing-cases, she read. Her books and magazines were read and re-read until she knew them off by heart. She had found a way to make even the best-known story interesting again, and this sunny morning, as she rested  from husking corn, she had her favourite book on her knees.

Mack’s long shadow fell across the book as she turned a page. “What on earth are you doing?” he asked, looking at the book on her lap.

“Reading,” said Sue, putting her book away and picking up a corn-cob from the great barrel full beside her.

“Yes, I see that; but you’ve got the book upside down.” Mack looked puzzled.

“Well, it’s different that way,” said Sue. “I wish to goodness the boat would come. How I’d love a new book that had never been read by anyone before me.”

Mack bent his long legs to squat like an aboriginal beside her, his dark head level with her shiny red curls. He began husking corn, holding the cob in his teeth because his left hand was still sore from being crushed with a log the week before.

“Wonder what Grandma will send you for your birthday?” murmured Mack. “My present should have given her an idea of what you’d like. I asked her to buy it for me from that big new shop in Grafton with the money from the sale of those stuffed birds I did for the surveyors who were here before Christmas.”

“Well, you can tell me what it is now it’s my birthday,” pleaded Sue.

“Oh, no I won’t! You must learn to be patient, little sister,” taunted Mack, ducking the cob she aimed at him. “Don’t waste food, either,” he added, retrieving the cob from the path and dropping it on the pile by the corn grinder. “Hey! What’s happening? Here comes the lazy Rollo himself, actually running!”

“The boat’s coming!” Rollo’s mighty voice covered the hundred yards between them in a joyous shout.

“Where?” cried Sue, jumping up with cobs and husks flying all round her. Holding her skirts high she flew down the slope, leaving Mack far behind.

She reached the landing-stage long before the boat, rowed by six oars, made its slow way across the current from the south side of the river. By the time it tied up most of the people of the settlement were crowding on to the landing-stage. Most of the women held baskets of produce or nervously unfolded letters of credit which had been issued by the captains of the cedar boats who, in most cases, acted as agent in selling the timber they carried to Sydney. With these they would buy the goods brought by the mail-boat – the only shop they knew.

The big whale-boat was partly decked in – making a fine show-case for the goods stored in the stern. Here were displayed cottons, needles, material; even a few laces and ornaments; china and cooking utensils, shoes, knives, tools – all the small items so hard to do without and so essential for comfort.

The Thomases joined with the throng, buying eagerly. Rollo bought Sue a necklace, the first she had ever owned except the carved cedar one her father had given her years ago. Mrs. Thomas was delighted to get some knitting-wool, the first she had ever had that was not home-spun; and Charlie bought her some knitting-needles or, rather, traded for them with a setting of duck eggs which the trader wanted to take to a lady up-river who, in turn, was selling him some chickens to take back to Woodburn.

Finally, everyone was satisfied and the boat’s load had changed its character as the men took their oars to row back up the river to the settlement of Coraki, where they would spend the night.

For Sue the best moment had arrived, for now the mail-bag would be opened and she would get her presents. She opened Mack’s first of all – it was a huge box – a real lady’s hat, unlike the bonnets and sun-hats she had worn all her life. Blue velvet it was and, to Sue, it was the most beautiful thing she had ever owned. Grandma had guessed rightly and her present was a blue frock to go with it, which fitted perfectly though Grandma hadn’t seen her for years. However, best of all, was the boxful of books from Grandpa which Sue carried to her cupboard to gloat over for weeks to come.

After tea came the best part of mail day when the whole family gathered round the smoky tallow lamp, lit specially for the occasion.

“This is interesting,” said Mr. Thomas, as he began to read from the closely-written pages of Grandpa’s letter –

Our Parliamentary representative, Clark Irving, seems to be proving himself useful in Sydney after all. There is talk that Sir John Robertson is going to bring an Act before the House called Free Selection Before Survey. Myself, I don’t quite understand the proper meaning of it, but Mr. Ogilvie tells me it will make it possible for people like ourselves to select any part of the land they hold under lease and by paying for it – so much an acre – and undertaking to develop it properly, they will own it in their own right! He isn’t very pleased about it, and no wonder, for his holding at Yulgilbar is, goodness knows, how many acres. I hear he has 20,000 sheep on it – not doing so well, either, I believe – and a couple of thousand head of cattle. However, there is nothing, as I see it, to stop him selecting, the same as the rest of us, to secure a fair part of his present holding and keeping out other selectors. Naturally, his pride is touched at the necessity of this move. He thinks he should be merely confirmed in what he is holding, not expected to re-claim it for himself. Certainly no one can say he isn’t developing it properly. A very fine Station it is. He’s very strict about the care of his stock, and men, too, and he gets on well with the blacks. They say he took the trouble to learn the language so that he can talk to them – of all things! What advantage he’d find in doing that I don’t know, but the fact is he isn’t troubled by cattle-spearing like many of the landholders up that way. The only thing he wouldn’t stand for is their way of dressing – or rather not dressing – called it immodest. He won’t let any black on to his property unless he has trousers and shirt. One day not long ago a party of blacks went to see him, all dressed up to the nines to please him, so they thought. They had been given some top-hats that had been wetted when a bullock-waggon overturned crossing the river, and put these on, along with gaudy red and yellow neckerchiefs and bright red shirts. Thought they look like kings, no doubt, but Mr. Ogilvie kicked them out of the yard when he saw them. They’d neglected to wear any trousers!

Well – on to more important news about him. He has brought a whole shipload of Germans back with him from his trip overseas, as well as (I should have put her first) a lady wife! Daughter of a Bishop they do say, very grand and proud. We haven’t seen her but everyone’s talking about her. The reason for the Germans is to build a grand house, fit for his lady. They being all stonemasons and carpenters! He tells me that he made the Grand Tour of Europe and is going to build a stone house on the Moorish design of a courtyard in the middle. He thinks it will be a more suitable type of house for this hot climate. The building is to be eighty feet by ninety, he told us, with dairies and cool rooms in the basement, reception rooms, a ball-room, dining-room and so on, on the ground floor and many bedrooms upstairs. He’s going to use the stone and timber from his own land and even burn his own lime, so that the house will be as much part of his property as the trees that grow on it.

There was a big party up at Yulgilbar the other day when some visiting big-wig was brought up to lay the foundation-stone for the house. In the meantime Mrs. Ogilvie is living in the stone hut, as he calls it, though it’s a mighty big ‘hut’ with four rooms in it, that he and his brother Fred built when they first selected there. It’s a sad shame Fred couldn’t have lived to see all this success. A great blow to Edward Ogilvie too – they were very close, even for brothers. They say he used to be quite a genial fellow when he and Fred first brought cattle and sheep up from his father’s station ‘Merton’ near the Hunter River, but he is a very stern severe man now. The hardships of that first overlanding trip, blazing a trail and then bringing the stock over it, would be enough to knock the laughter out of any man. They say that’s what really caused the early death of poor Fred, he never was as strong as his brother. It’s a pity, now that good times are coming to the Ogilvies, he isn’t here to share them. He certainly took his share of the hardships, by all accounts.

Coming back to this land-selection business, I suppose you’ll be taking advantage of it? If I were you I’d go and mark the land you want right away. There’ll be a bulldog rush when the Act is passed, and there seems to be no doubt it will be. The big land-owners have made too good a thing of land-grabbing and are spoiling the country. It’s time they realized there are a great many more people in this district than there were ten years ago, many of whom are not prepared to be servants of the big men. Not that they haven’t done a good job in the past, opening up the country after the timber-cutters had finished with it, but times move along and my opinion is that the day of the big runs, with lots of poor quality stock eating up the grass to be boiled down for tallow, and most of the meat and bone thrown away, will come to an end very soon. It’s being proved that sheep and wheat are no good in this part of the world and the only answer is beef cattle and dairy herds on small holdings. With these new steam-driven boats it may soon be possible to send meat to Sydney and Newcastle, for I’ve heard some of these boats have enough power to cross the bars into the rivers even with the wind right against them. This is a wonderful thing and, no doubt, it will be the making of the Northern Rivers districts, if they can only beat that problem of crossing the bars….

Mack’s attention wandered from the letter. Steam-driven boats, dairy cattle! Perhaps his father was right about cows being the hope of prosperity in the North Coast. The history of Ballina, he thought, will always be bound up with the mail-bag. Life ran smoothly, without incident, for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and then, suddenly, news like this would come in with the mail and a lot of changes were bound to follow. He wondered how this Land Act would alter his father’s plans.

CHAPTER 6 – 1860

Although Mr. Thomas had decided to become a cattleman, for a while nothing changed very much. Life settled into a smooth routine: Mack cut timber and ran his saw-mill, his father away from home all the week working on the cattle-station, his mother and Sue working continuously at the tremendous business of keeping the larder full and clothes for the whole family in repair. The trading-boat arrivals were still irregular and, the cost of the supplies they brought being so high, most of the things the family needed had to be made by hand. Cloth was very dear and such things as toys and hobbies were very few and far between except for what they made or contrived from things picked up on the beach. Wrecks along the coast were still tragically frequent and the beaches were a source of items washed up from them. However, from the first, their mother had made friends with the blacks and had learned a lot from them. She was a keen gardener and, with Rollo’s interest in livestock of all kinds, the Thomas family always managed to be more comfortable than many of their neighbours. It was, however, a full-time job, specially in summer when food went bad or at least got mouldy so quickly that every piece of meat must be cooked, smoked or salted as soon as it was brought in – even if it meant getting up in the middle of the night to cook a big catch of fish, or a calf that had been brought down by rowing-boat from one of the cattle-stations.

Merely selecting a piece of land was only the beginning of life in the heavy scrub country. Men, women and children alike had to be handy with what grew on it as well as in the use of what was brought from the towns.

In 1861 the Robertson Land Act was passed and the Thomases were very glad they had taken Grandpa’s advice and selected and marked their land. Set in the foothills, not far from the village of Woodburn, they had found the ideal situation. Circled with hills, protected from the worst of the winds, with a good frontage along the river, it had a little hill rising almost in its centre on which they planned to build their house. As soon as the formalities of selection were fulfilled, Mack and his father began to build the house they had dreamed about so long. Like many another district homes, most of the materials to build it came from the land itself. The stone was dug out for the foundations and chimney and the fine timber – teak, pine, black-bean, rosewood and silky-oak, as well as cedar – grew on their hundred-acre block.

A long spell of stormy weather had kept ships bar-bound and they were anchored in Mobbs Bay on the south side of the river – nine ships with no prospect of getting away until the weather cleared.

Many of the cedar-getters were running short of food and money, as they could not send their cedar away, so Mr. Thomas’s offer of work on his land was very welcome. Soon fourteen men had set up camp and were tearing into the thick scrub with axe and saw – stacking the usable logs for building, splitting the less valuable timber for post-and-rail fences and burning the trash in mighty fires that left a residue of ash which kept the soil fertile for thirty years to come. It was amazing even to Mack, who considered himself a good man with the axe and saw, how fast these men felled the mighty trees and cut away the tangle of growth to lay bare the rich, red soil under its foot-thick covering of dead leaves and humus.

In three months enough land had been cleared to support the small herd of cattle his father had bought and enough of the house was finished to allow the family to move from their home in Ballina.

When the time came to leave the home they had lived in and loved for nineteen years the family felt quite sad, in spite of the tremendous advantages to be had by moving on to their own land and into a house twice the size of the house in Ballina. Mrs. Thomas had supervised the moving of all her most cherished plants to the new plot of land Mack and Rollo had prepared for her and much of their equipment had already found its way to the selection, as it was needed for various jobs. However, when the day of moving finally came the whole settlement took part. The boat-builder was to lend them his new flat-bottomed barge which had just been completed. This would carry the whole family in one trip, and everyone turned up to lend a hand with the transporting of their possessions when the day arrived. Bags, crates and barrels were carried in what seemed an endless stream. Finally out came the Thomas family, each with his or her most cherished possession: Mrs. Thomas bearing the lovely orchid that had seven spikes of flower just about to burst into bloom, Sue struggling with a chest containing all her most prized books, and trying to help Jimmy who was staggering beneath the weight of a tiny calf, born with a crooked leg, which was his very own, and from which he refused to be parted for a moment.

Sauntering behind them, ‘helping’ with most unhelpful brotherly advice, came Rollo, plump and fair and peaceful, three pet pigeons perched on his straw hat. He was carrying with deceptive ease a barrel containing his mother’s prized china, which she would trust to no one else. Mack and Charlie came out last of all, having stayed to check that the house was left secure and that nothing had been overlooked. Mack, burdened down with various forgotten items, swung his long legs fast to catch up with the others, and Charlie, small and wiry, dark like his huge brother and strong for his nine years, carried a variety of fishing gear, most of it of his own making, for he was still crazy about the river and spent most of his spare time fishing from its bank.

As everything had to be carried three miles along a bush track to the clearing there was plenty of work for everyone to do. Mr. Thomas met them at the landing with his team of bullocks to take the heavier goods. Mrs. Thomas, Sue and the two younger boys set off with provisions to get a meal ready, leaving the men to do the main unloading.

The house seemed wonderfully spacious. Built of timber sawn in the pit Mack had built as near as possible to the site, it had a wide verandah right round the two main rooms and a smaller room, separated from the house by a passage, house the kitchen and larder. The walls of the house were of upright boards twenty inches wide and two inches thick. The roof was made of slabs of bark cut from the same great gum-trees. All the inside fittings were of cedar. Under the sheltering verandah, large window-openings had been left in the rooms and a fireplace had been built at the end of the living-room, as well as the one in the kitchen. Near-by, they had dug a deep well and Mack had built a cavity into the side of it near the top, where meat and butter could be kept cool and sweet.

Large sandstone boulders were plentiful on the land and one of the men, who had injured his shoulder so that he could not swing an axe for a while, used this so-called resting period to build a freestone wall, four feet high and two feet thick, right round the house to keep the garden safe from cows and marauding paddymelons and wallabies.

At sunset that evening the last group of men arrived with the final load and Mrs. Thomas was proud to sit at the head of a large cedar table that Rollo had built and polished for her, with ten guests as well as the family sitting round it enjoying her pigeon pies, huge juicy steaks grilled outside on a fire of honeysuckle-tree cones, a big dish of boiled corn-cobs and a special fruit-cake cooked by Sue and Jimmy, days before, to celebrate their first meal in the new house.

When Sue finally sank on to her new bed that night she felt there could be no greater luxury than a house with two fireplaces and so many rooms. She listened for a moment, missing the sound of the sea. Out of the soft silence came the low mooing of a cow – a much more useful sound than the sea, she thought, as she went to sleep.

CHAPTER 7

Once they were settled in their new home, Mr. Thomas decided to make a trip down to his father-in-law’s farm on the Clarence to bring back the herd of cattle Grandpa had been buying for him over the last year. This was a fine herd, some of them just having calved, and picked for their quality and sturdiness. Mr. Thomas was keen to have them on his own selection as soon as possible.

A lot of discussion went on in the family as to who was to go down with their father. Rollo and Jimmy were to have gone but Rollo had hurt his leg and couldn’t ride and Jimmy, who was not yet a very good rider, didn’t want to go without Rollo. Mack was to stay to look after things at home because there was a rather rough bunch of men working on the clearing. Mr. Thomas agreed that Rollo, still in his early twenties, was not old enough to be in control of them. Finally, it was decided that Charlie and Sue should go with their father and that the little black boy, who had come to live on the station a few months before and adored Sue, should be taken along to see that she was properly looked after.

They set off at low tide one morning, taking advantage of the current flowing up the river to help them with the long row to Woodburn, twenty miles away. It was a crowded boat – Jimmy and Rollo came to row the boat home again and, with their gear, there was very little freeboard. They all camped the night at Woodburn at the house of the storekeeper, where they farewelled Jimmy and Rollo before daylight next morning. Then they set out to walk through the scrub to the settlement of Lawrence, fifty miles away.

It would have been easier to walk along the beach from Evans Head, six miles from Woodburn, but they thought it best to go over the track on which the cattle were to travel on their return to see how much grazing was available. Sue always remembered that walk. They took it by easy stages, not covering more than fifteen miles a day. In the swampy parts, of course, they didn’t go fast at all, often covering only five miles a day. The boys made detours to try and find firmer ground for the cattle to travel on. Here the black boy was invaluable, showing them tracks and short cuts they never would have noticed.

Small streams they crossed by fallen logs or wading, often felling a tree to make a bridge over the wider creeks. To Sue, in her long skirts, crossing over these narrow, insecure tree-trunks was a terrifying experience.

On the seventh day of their trip they reached the Clarence, arriving at Grandpa’s station at midday the next day. Sue found it lovely to sit on a soft chair and eat food from a plate. They had really fared quite well on the trip but damper baked in the coals, and fried scones, with whatever meat the boys had shot that day, was soon monotonous eating. Sometimes bush turkey or pigeon made a change of diet and, one day, a beautiful great fish, trapped in a creek by Dilba, the black boy, made a memorable meal. Cooking had to be done in the frying-pan or over live coals, for they couldn’t carry much in the way of cooking utensils. Sue carried the billycan and cups, and the boys had carried blankets rolled in swags over their shoulders. Mr. Thomas carried only the rifle, for someone had to be alert and unhampered in case they met hostile blacks or came upon some bird or animal for the ‘pot’.

As well as his swag, Dilba carried the frying-pan, which he often balanced on his head like a hat, or stuck in his belt at the back so that it looked like an otter’s black tail. More often he held it in one hand and banged it with his walking-stick, delighting in the rhythmic noise. They all carried large clasp-knives, hung on their belts. This wonderful tool was called a ‘Dover’ because this was the trade-name printed on the blade. It was an essential part of pioneer dress at the time and was used for every imaginable purpose, from skinning cattle to taking out splinters. Usually razor-sharp, it often saved a life. The story was told in Grafton of a man whose dog set up an old-man kangaroo. Grandpa had written to them about the incident. ‘The ‘roo,’ he wrote, ‘made for the water, of course, and the dogs went in after it – which was just what he wanted – for he grabbed each dog as it came near and held it under till it drowned. Now, the owner of the dogs, a fiery little man with a big red beard, was mighty fond of his dogs and he wasn’t going to see them drown, so he plunged into the creek, too, yelling at the top of his voice. The noise he made should have frightened that ‘roo right out of the creek, but all it did was let go of the dog and grab Red by the beard and give him the same treatment. Luckily, Red had his hands free and managed to get hold of his Dover and open it under water. He stabbed that beast in the chest and belly twenty times before it let go, and he got his beard, or some of it, free and managed to struggle to the bank.’

During the week they spent on the station, Sue was glad to stay with Grandma and rest after the strenuous trip down. She and Grandma hurried through the chores each day and then sat on the verandah and sewed and gossiped. Mr. Thomas and the boys were busy all the time bringing in the cattle and examining each one to make sure they were sound and fit for the journey back to Ballina. Charlie went with his father to Grafton, where Mr. Thomas bought a bullock-waggon and loaded it with various stores and other things for the farm. Grandpa had already broken and trained six young oxen as a present for Charlie. Sue and her Grandma went with them on this trip and bought dress materials, trimmings, ribbons, pretty buttons and other feminine supplies. Sue had never shopped in a real shop before and she was amazed when she saw the quantity of stock on the shopkeeper’s shelves. She had never imagined material was made in more than dress lengths as the trading-boat men sold it and to see great stacks of muslins and cottons in rolls of fifty yards or more was a revelation. The ready-made clothes and hats fascinated her.

“Fancy selling all these lovely things,” she said to Grandma, as they edged between piles of sheeting and a hatstand displaying at least a dozen different hats. “I’d want to keep them all to myself.”

“Then you’d soon be out of business,” said Grandma, shortly. “Not that they don’t charge enough to make their fortunes out of one shipment. Fancy 8d. a yard for Indian Muslin! Why, it should not be more than 3d. at the most.”

“What about the shipments they buy in Sydney and then lose when a boat is wrecked and never see a penny for the whole lot?” put in Grandpa, who had just come over to the counter where their parcels were piled.

“Well, the wrecks aren’t our fault. Why should we have to pay for them?” snapped Grandma.

Sue interrupted Grandpa’s reply – she couldn’t bear to have her lovely day spoiled by argument. “Look what I’ve bought for Mack” She picked up a beautiful wide-brimmed felt hat of a type most of the big land-owning squatters wore. “Do you think he’ll wear it?” she left him showing the hat to Mr. Thomas and went across to the other side of the shop where such luxuries as vases, bracelets, small kerosene lamps to stand on a dressing-table, pretty belts and many other impractical goods made for ornament and not use, such as she had never imagined, were displayed on glass-fronted shelves. How she would love one of the show-cases for her books, she thought, and then smiled to herself at the absurdity of asking the shopkeeper to sell her one. Seeing her standing smiling, all alone, the shopkeeper’s wife came across to talk to her and, before she knew it, Sue found herself buying a beautiful coloured sunshade for her mother, never thinking that by doing so she was to save her own life.

None of her party seemed to think much of her ‘silly bauble’, as her father called it when she showed him what she had bought with the first money she had ever handled in her life. She carried it home carefully in her own hand, not trusting it to the bale of purchases packed in the back of the waggon. When she showed it to Dilba, however, she was satisfied, for he plainly thought it the loveliest thing he had ever seen, its green top and cherry-pink lining appealing to his sense of colour; and his awe when he saw the way it unfolded and stood up on its handle made Sue laugh, and quite restored her dampened enthusiasm.

When the time came to pack the waggon, the sunshade was in disfavour with the men again, for it wouldn’t fit into any of the boxes because of its long handle. Finally, Charlie tied it across the seat which spanned the front of the waggon and Sue was well pleased because she could look at it now and again to make sure it was unharmed.

They set out a day earlier than was intended because Grandpa was convinced that the long spell of dry weather was due to break. It would be well, he warned them, to keep ahead of the rain if possible. Grandpa, from his long experience, was very weather-wise and everyone took his advice on this vital subject.

The long journey began well into the morning although they were up at daybreak getting ready. By the time the bullocks had been fed and yoked and the unweaned calves tied to the tail or loaded into the waggon if they were too young to travel on foot, the sun was well up. Then Sue’s horse broke away and had to be brought in again, and one of the dogs decided to go rabbiting and did not come when Charlie whistled it. Dilba was sent to find it and he vanished. When the dog returned alone, the black boy couldn’t be found. By the time they were all ready everyone was hot and cross and mighty glad to get going. Although Sue was sad to leave her Grandma – whom she might not see again for many years – she was keen to get started on the long journey home to show her family all the exciting purchases.

It was a very fine cavalcade that started home-ward along the rough road. Now they were all riding and had two spare horses as well. Four tiny calves rode in the waggon, their anxious mothers crowding close to the wheels and mooing continuously, while six larger calves were tied to the tail of the waggon. It was Sue’s job to look after these, keeping them from fighting or tangling their ropes. She found she had by no means an easy task and her dream of riding in a lady-like manner, through the mud over which she had so recently plodded, was rudely broken in the first two hours of the journey.

Besides Sue’s calves there were eighty cows and a fine young bull, not yet ten months old but already conscious of his proud position of master of the herd. Their first day was the easiest of the long trip, for the animals were fresh and well fed and easy to keep moving. In spite of the late start they had covered twelve miles by sunset and camped at the junction of the track, which branched to the north.

Next day they started before full daylight, under grey skies. They had trouble making the cattle enter the jungle track, but at last the stragglers were rounded up and the little party rode slowly through the gloomy trees, watching the sky and hoping the rain would hold off. For three days it did, while the cattle moved steadily along the narrow track. Twice the bullock-waggon bogged and it took hours of hot, messy struggling to get the wheels moving again. The calves bawled incessantly until poor Sue began to imagine how pleasant it would be to think of a way to breed an animal that was voiceless. Then the rain started! At first it was only a greasy drizzle, then it hardened until by camping time it was steady, solid and permanent. They were all so tired they found it hard to remember the time when it hadn’t been raining and everything wet and cold.

Sue was relieved when, on her father’s decision, they stopped earlier than usual so that the boys might make the paddock for the cattle before dark. This meant felling saplings and tying them to trees in a rough circle. The cattle were then driven into the yard and poles were lashed across the opening. This evening, for the first time since they had left the home, the hungry beasts were given a ration of corn from the six bags they had brought with them. Even a handful for each beast used up half a bag and Sue could see her father was worried about the fate of some of the weaker beasts. She sneaked an extra handful for her calves, who were cold and shivering.

The next six days of the journey were miserable for man and beast alike. Rain fell steadily and the cattle grew thinner and more dejected as the days passed. Leeches, always a trouble in the swampy places, now became a menace and to Sue they came to stand as a symbol of all their discomforts. At first she had screamed when a leech fastened on to her and her father or Charlie had come to pull it off, but now she savagely attacked not only the many that found their way up her own legs but tore them off the poor calves, too.

It seemed more like six weeks than six days before they reached the Richmond but, on the day they came out of the scrub into the clearing of land near Woodburn, the sun shone and everything seemed to come right at once. Here Mr. Thomas arranged to paddock his cattle for a rest and took his weary little party to stay with the owner of the station for several days. The hot bath Mrs. Scotter made her in a huge wooden tub seemed the best thing that had ever happened to Sue, as she lay soaking her scratched and bitten legs and arms in the soothing clear water. She put on clean, dry clothes and sat on the verandah, warm and dry for the first time for a week. It was heaven. She showed Mrs. Scotter the beautiful sunshade which she had managed to keep dry and unharmed during the soggy journey. “It’s lovely,” said Mrs. Scotter. “You put it over your head and walk down to meet your father so that he sees you looking like a proper lady again.”

So, feeling rather like a great lady, in a frock she had bought in Grafton, her hair dry and curling after being wet and straggly for so long, the pink light from the sunshade glowing on her cheeks, Sue walked into the paddock to meet the men who had been checking over the cattle that day.

She was well away from trees and fences when she heard the thunder of hooves on the grass and turned to see their young bull, pursued by the Scotter’s massive animal, tearing across the paddock towards her. Tim, their bull calf, had become Sue’s pet on the trip. When he became thin and weak with the long walk on poor feed, Sue had taken him with her calves and looked after him, too. Now he was coming to her for protection from a monster which seemed determined to gore him to death.

Sue stood statue-still for a moment, terror paralysing her. Then the thought flashed across her mind that she might lose Tim after all the work she had done, and rage flowed into her, bringing strength. As Tim flashed by, ploughing up the turf with his sliding hooves, Sue lowered her sunshade in front of her like a shield.

“Go away, you beastly bully!” she shouted, charging towards the bull, which was so startled by the strange sight of a sunshade coming at him that he slid to a stop, gazed at it a moment and then turned and lumbered bewilderedly away.

Tim, close beside her, poked her with his nose, and Sue, trembling with reaction, was glad to lean against him.

Charlie and Mr. Thomas, who had seen the whole episode from the distance, soon came galloping up and Charlie leaned down to put his hands round her waist and lift her, sunshade and all, on to the front of his saddle. Only then did Sue realize that both he and her father were laughing as hard as they could.

The story of Sue’s bullfight lasted as long as the sunshade did and Mr. Thomas never again dared to criticize any purchase she made. “Never know, daughter,” he would say with his quizzical smile, if she asked his advice about buying anything. “Might turn out as useful as your pink sunshade!”

The following day they rounded up the cattle and drove them to a holding-yard near the river, ready for the swim across. Rollo and Jimmy arrived to take charge of them and, as soon as greetings were over, Charlie and his father gave a graphic description of Sue’s adventure, Charlie taking her sunshade and acting out the scene.

Charlie decided to stay with his brother and Jimmy to bring the cattle the last twenty miles of their journey, and Sue, Mr. Thomas and Dilba enjoyed a peaceful row down the river with most of the gear, leaving very little to be ferried across with the bullocks and waggon.

CHAPTER 8

Sue felt tired; the past month had been so filled with hard work and new experiences, she felt she hadn’t a spare moment to arrange her thoughts for too long. They had settled into their new home an planted a garden in the beautiful red soil. She had gone with her father to the Clarence for the cattle and then, to her chagrin, she had gone down with measles which she must have caught while she was in Grafton. She had noticed a red rash on her chest while she was staying with Mrs. Scotter and by the time she reached home it was all over her face. Mrs. Thomas took one look at her and said ‘Measles,” and put her to bed.

Mrs. Thomas was not much worried about Jimmy or Charlie catching the illness but she was very concerned lest the few remaining blacks in the district should do so, for to them it was a serious disease and often fatal.

She kept poor Sue shut up on the front verandah for two whole weeks, where she moped about, unable to do anything much because her eyes were too sore. She carded and spun sheep’s wool till she hated the sight of it and talked over the verandah rail to the miserable Dilba, who was likewise forbidden to leave the farm in case he had measles, too. However, he did not break out in spots and, finally, Mrs. Thomas pronounced them both free, much to their delight.

Mack was to row down to Ballina for a couple of days and suggested that now she was free, Sue might go with him. They set off at daylight next morning, in spite of the fact that it was very windy and rain-clouds were blowing from the east. By the time they reached Ballina it was pouring and Mack found it hard work to row the boat through the stream, although the tide was running out.

When they finally reached Ballina, Mack went straight to the saw-mill, for he was selling his share of it and wanted to finalize the business that day. Sue went up to visit Mrs. Shaw and was very glad, after the strenuous trip, to lie down and watch her heating, straining and storing in tallow kegs, a tub of wild honey she had bought from the blacks the day before. It had been brought in in a large hollow log and it was full of the ants and various other small creatures that had been living in the log before it was used for storing honey.

Presently, feeling rested, Sue got up to help and the two women worked busily at the task of pouring the honey into the kegs, talking busily also, exchanging news of their homes and families. They had finished with the honey and were preparing the midday meal when a youngster from one of the boatmen’s huts raced up the rise to the hut door.

“Come quickly, Mrs. Shaw, there’s a boat stuck on the bar – she’s breaking up fast. One of the men on her is injured. They want you to come and look after him.”

Before he had finished speaking, Mrs. Shaw had stoked and banked her fire, pulled the great sauce-pan into a cooler place so that the family stew wouldn’t burn, cleared the bunk by the fireplace and spread a sheet of canvas on it in preparation for the injured man, put on her cloak and an old sailor’s tarred hat, taken a black-japanned case containing her first-aid kit from a high shelf and was ready to set out for the beach. Hastily Sue pulled on her coat and the two women ran down the track behind the boy, who was anxious to miss none of the excitement and had already set off ahead of them. As soon as they were out of the pines they could see the small vessel, driven on to a sand-bank almost in the centre of the bay, with cross-currents and opposing surf tearing at her from all sides. She had missed the channel by a matter of feet and Sue could see Mack climbing on to her bows with a line by which the men on shore hoped to pull her into deep water as the tide rose.

On the seaweed that lay piled on the beach stood a group of people, watching helplessly the contortions of a man in great pain. Mrs. Shaw took charge at once. Someone told her that the man had been jerked overboard as the vessel struck, and had been washed back against the bows by the surf, not once but several times, before Mack and another man had swum out to help him. Now he seemed to be racked by cramps and his leg was horribly twisted, as if broken. Mrs. Shaw knew what to do for cramps, for the cedar-getters often suffered from them, and she soon had the twisted muscles straightened out.

Sue watched with admiration the speed and sureness of Mrs. Shaw’s hands and the deft way she lifted her patient, almost unaided, on to the pole-and-canvas stretcher on which he was to be carried to her hut. She ran ahead to prepare tea, rum and food for the rescuers, and for the next hour she was busy serving the wet, hungry people who came crowding into the tiny house as soon as they could be spared from the work on the beach. Mack came in last of all, white and exhausted, for, as the best swimmer in the district, he had come in for the hardest part of the rescue work. Mrs. Shaw, ignoring his half-hearted protests, put him in her own bed and told him to eat his stew and then sleep so that he would be of some use in the morning.

“This poor chap worries me,” she said to Sue, as she closed the inner door on Mack and went over to the injured man.

“He’ll be in bed for a month with those bruises and strains. I simply can’t keep him here. It just isn’t possible.”

Sue knew what it meant to the kindly woman to have to refuse shelter to a sick man and she knew, too, just how impossible it was for the Shaws to do without any of the space in their over-crowded hut.

“If he can stand the boat trip we might take him with us tomorrow. There’s plenty of room at home and I could look after him,” suggested Sue.

“He’d travel best right away,” said Mrs. Shaw, thoughtfully, “while he’s semi-conscious and stiffness hasn’t started.”

As she said this Mack came in, carrying his plate of stew. He had heard their conversation and had some advice to offer while he ate.

“Tide will be making about half-past six tonight. If we got away then we should be home by midnight. Do you think, Mrs. Shaw, that a couple of the boys could come to help with the rowing?”

“That’s a good idea, anyway,” she said, as Mack obediently returned to the inner room. “When everything’s ready to start, we’ll wake you up.”

One of the Shaw youngsters was sent down to the beach immediately to ask Captain Easton to spare two of his boatmen for the long row up-stream, and to ask young Robbie Shaw to come up at once. When a tall lad came into the kitchen, Mrs. Shaw had a packet of food wrapped in tarred canvas and a billy of tea ready.

“Robbie, will you take your canoe and go ahead to Mr. Thomas’s farm for us? The boys are to row this sick man up there when the tide turns and I want you to go ahead and tell Mrs. Thomas what’s happened. You can wait there and bring whoever goes up to help Mack with the rowing, home again. You should be able to reach there and be back at the landing by the time the boat arrives.” She turned to Sue. “Sue, will you go up with Robbie or wait and go in the boat?”

Sue was watching the injured man, still lying semi-conscious on the bunk, his face towards the fire. At that moment he opened his eyes and, seeing her for the first time, held out his hand and muttered, “Minnie, Minnie?” Without thinking, Sue put her hand in his and his fingers closely tightly round hers. “That’s better,” he murmured, and lay back. “You’re not Minnie,” he said suddenly.

“Hush now, Minnie’s not far away, “ said Mrs. Shaw in a firm voice. At this the man closed his eyes and lay still again, but he kept his hold on Sue’s fingers.

“Well, Sue, it seems that you’d better stay and go up in the boat,” said Mrs. Shaw, answering her own question.

Robbie was sent to his canoe with a message to Mrs. Thomas, written on a slate and wrapped in canvas to keep it dry.

By seven o’clock everyone was ready for the journey and Mrs. Shaw sent Sue to wake Mack.

“Does anyone know this chap’s name?” Mack asked, as they lifted the injured man, feather mattress and all, on to a stretcher. Captain Easton called from outside the hut that he was George Merton, an Englishman who had settled recently on the Tweed. He had been down to the Clarence buying cattle.

Four men carried the stretcher down to Mack’s boat and with great difficulty fitted it beneath the centre seat and covered the whole of the bow with a piece of canvas. Sue sat at the head of the stretcher under the canvas, holding the ends of the cover, trying to keep out the rain and yet let in a little air.

Later she was to remember that journey as the most uncomfortable she had ever undertaken. It was impossible to keep out the rain and the canvas strained in her hands and tore her nails. George Merton groaned and twisted, in spite of the fact that he was tied on to the stretcher and held down by the centre seat of the boat and the legs of the two men who sat amidships.

All Sue could do was to speak to him occasionally and to try to give him drinks of cold tea with rum and sugar in, from the bottle Mrs. Shaw had given her. The rain poured down and the wind blew, sometimes behind them, helping the rowers, or, as the river changed direction, it would pounce on them from the side, making the water slosh about in the boat, so that they were wet from underneath as well as from the sky.

At long last the rowers were glad to hear Sue say suddenly, “I can see the lights on the landing-stage,” Robbie had made good time in his canoe and Mr. Thomas, with five men, was there to meet them. A huge fire was burning under a bark lean-to and here the tired, wet rowers paused for ten minutes to warm themselves before setting out for the house. Four of her father’s men took the stretcher and insisted that Sue sit on it, too, for she was tired, stiff and bruised. Mr. Thomas, Mack and the fifth man stayed with the boatmen and Robbie by the fire, grilling steak and brewing hot rum and sugar to fill in the time till the tide turned and he would be able to start back for Ballina.

The miles to the house passed easily enough for Sue after the hardships of the boat trip and it seemed no time at all before she was tucked into bed, warm and comfortable again, with the happy knowledge that George Merton was also warmly in bed, if not exactly comfortable. Who is Minnie? she wondered as she fell asleep.

As the days passed, George Merton recovered from his accident and Sue discovered that Minnie was his twin sister, left in England nearly a year previously.

The Englishman also told her that he had been studying medicine but was forced to give it up and leave England. She gathered that he had been in some trouble over a student’s party, where a joke had turned to a tragedy, but what actually happened she never did understand. Life in England seemed so impossibly remote to her that what happened there had the unreality of a fairy tale. Grandpa’s stories about his boyhood in Yorkshire, and a very out-of-date paper or magazine occasionally brought by a schooner, were all she had to give her any picture of the world outside the Rivers District.

Sue was more interested in hearing about George’s present life on a small holding at a place called Tumbulgum on the Tweed River sixty miles to the north.

They all encouraged him to talk about his farm and were amazed to realize that George knew nothing about farming and had never even visited a farm in England, having spent most of his life in the city of London.

His remark that he had plenty of books on farming and was depending on them seemed very strange to the Thomases, who had learned all they knew from practical experience. Sue thought it must be a pretty desolate life for the young man, with only three blacks and an old Irishman name Pat, whom he had hired to help him. Pat and two of the blacks were at present overlanding the cattle and George was worried that they might arrive at the farm before he was able to be there to meet them.

Though he showed promise of being the oddest farmer in the district, George’s medical knowledge had already proved a boon for there was no doctor within hundreds of miles. He made them all laugh at a tale of his first encounter with a furious cow. It appeared that he had been able to save the life of a little boy not long after he landed and, in gratitude, the boy’s parents sent him a young cow, about to have her first calf. The calf was born and Pat milked the mother without trouble. A couple of weeks later, Pat being away, George had to milk the cow himself. Like all first attempts at the difficult business of milking, George’s efforts were not very successful – the cow broke out of the bail and ran over to where her calf was tied.

“So, of course, I tried to shoo the calf away from stealing our breakfast milk,” said George, as he told the story by the fire one evening. “Then Judy, the cow, got angry with me for some reason or other, and lowered her horns and bellowed in a most unladylike manner. I decided on stern measures and picked up the calf to put it in the kitchen. At this, the silly creature started to struggle, kicking me in the middle, so I let her drop. She raced across the yard towards the house and her tether got caught in the pump-handle by the door and I thought ‘good, now I can get on with the milking’. However, Judy had dropped all pretence of being a gentle heifer and came charging up the yard with the obvious intention of putting an end to me. The ungrateful beast! She would have, too, only that luckily I did a bit of running at Oxford and I beat her to the fence! However, when I was safely through the fence, I realized that a stalemate had developed, for Judy was standing breathing fire in front of the only door to my house and I, in my nightshirt, was in no fit shape to go for help. As soon as I ventured to cross the yard, saying soothing words to Judy, she went for me again and we re-ran our race to the fence. Luckily, I won again and had time, too, to snatch up a nice solid pick-axe as I ran. When she went back to her wretched calf, who was determined to leave us no milk for breakfast, I decided to end Judy’s unworthy life by driving the point of my weapon into her thick skull. I marched up the yard a third time and Judy charged again, but this time I stood my ground, though I swear she had grown to the size of an elephant in the meantime. Alas, I missed with my first swing and her horn caught in my nightshirt, tearing half of it off. At that, the wicked cow went careering away with my shirt-tails held aloft on her horns. At first I thought she was laughing at me, but, as she turned to renew her charge, I heard other feet pounding up behind me and there was Pat, who grabbed her by the horns and flipped her on to the ground, and sitting on her head continued to roar with laughter – tears pouring down his cheeks. A very callous, unfeeling fellow at the best of times, is Pat. All he could say was, ‘Heaven pity the poor beast, for how could she ever catch a man that can run like a greyhound.’”

Though Sue laughed with the rest, she couldn’t help a feeling that George was in dire need of someone like his sister Minnie to look after him. A feeling that, it became evident, he shared, as the time grew near for him to go back to the farm.

None of the family was at all surprised when Mr. Thomas announced one evening at dinner that a travelling minister was due in Casino the following week and that the whole family were going to row the ninety miles up-river to the little inland township so that Sue and George might be married, for Sue was going with George to the Tweed to teach him how to run a farm without annoying the cows.

CHAPTER 9

The journey to Casino took five days, rowing when the tide was running up the river and tying up to the bank when it was running out. Further up, where the tides did not affect the flow, it was just hard slogging, rowing against the current.

To Jimmy and Charlie, the town of Casino, with its shops and hotel, was an exciting place, though Sue maddened them by saying it was not as big as Grafton. They called at the new telegraph office and found it fascinating, watching the sending of morse signals. Here, too, they actually received a telegram from Grandpa, sent through the air all the way from Grafton. This seemed a great marvel, for the horsemen had only taken a letter a week earlier telling him about Sue’s marriage, and here was a reply, only ten days later!

Sue and George were married the day after they arrived at Casino. There were twenty other couples who had travelled from all over the district to be married by the minister, who had come from Grafton on his three-monthly visit, and everyone in the town came to watch the ceremony. The hitching-rail outside the little slab church was crowded with saddle-horses and two bullock-teams, their waggons ready loaded for the slow journey back to their farms, blocked the dusty main street.

When the last of the marriages was over the whole population of Casino (or so it seemed to Sue) gathered in the big paddock behind the church, where a bullock had been roasting all the morning. To the sound of a violin played by a rough old Irishman, who was, in business hours, the town’s best blacksmith, they ate roast beef and the provisions cooked by the townspeople and laid out on a huge slab table decked with flowers. Later the young people danced to the violin, but Sue and George were anxious to begin the journey to the Tweed and left in the early afternoon to ride across country, almost due north, following the cedar-getters tracks to the settlement of Nimbin, where they picked up the South Arm track, which followed this tributary of the Tweed River through the Nightcap Mountains and so down into the Tweed Valley. Compared with the Richmond and its bigger sister the Clarence River, the Tweed is a very short stream, flowing only about fifty miles before dividing like a hen’s foot into North, Middle and South Arms, which rise in the McPherson Ranges about thirty miles further on. However, the enormous watershed makes the Tweed a very wide and, at times, turbulent stream, as Sue found out.

After the excursion to Casino the Thomas family settled down again. Everyone missed Sue, finding it hard to get used to the empty place at the table and her bed on the verandah always trim and tidy instead of buried, as they were accustomed to seeing it, beneath the litter of whatever work she had in hand at the time. For Mrs. Thomas, especially, Sue’s going left a great emptiness, for there was no other woman nearer than the settlements of Ballina and Woodburn and, when the fastest way of travelling is by rowing-boat, no one just ‘drops in’ for a chat from a distance of ten or twelve miles.

It was nearly five weeks before a letter arrived on one of the little schooners, trading along the coast. The whole family stopped work and gathered round Mrs. Thomas as she read the letter aloud:

Dearest Family [wrote Sue] – We have arrived at last, but what a journey! The only thing I found to be glad about was that I didn’t have nine calves to look after as I did on the trip from Grafton. The first two days were easy enough, though the thick, gloomy trees crowding about made us depressed. There is still plenty of cedar in the scrub here; Mack would never be able to get through, he’d keep stopping to put his mark on the trees! There are more birds up this way, too, as there have been so few people working here yet. George says it will not be long before this part is as thickly populated as it is further south, for the soil is very rich.

The pony Rollo bought me for a wedding present is a perfect darling and George’s new horse has turned out a beauty. Well, we rode along in fine style until we came to the swamps and then it was very like the country between Woodburn and Grafton: wet, steamy, full of leeches and mosquitoes! You couldn’t imagine such huge monsters. Our poor pack-horse has a very short tail and was terribly troubled with stinging flies and mosquitoes. Dear George rigged him up with a false tail of ‘black-boy’ switches. The first time the horse swished with his fine green tail, he thought someone was lashing him and set off at a gallop straight into a bog and there he stuck! George tried to pull him out alone. He wouldn’t hear of my helping, but finally I had to take off my cloak and tuck up my skirts and wade in and give a hand. We all looked like black fellows by the time we extricated the poor horse and most of our tucker was ruined by ants because, when George finally took off the pack-saddle and carried it to firm ground while we helped the horse, he put it right on an ants’ nest. They riddled everything and taste horrid.

We were all so worn out by the time Nugget was freed that George cut saplings and made a platform for us to camp on for the night. He lit a smudge fire right underneath it to keep off the insects and I spent most of the night weeping from the smoke which was thick and acrid because all the wood is wet in these swamps. The poor horses had a wretched night, too; they kept sinking into the mud and had to pull out one hoof after the other with a loud sucking plop, every half-hour or so. We started off very early next day!

The next night we spent at a camp of cedar-getters. One of them insisted that we use his tent there. We slept in a real bed made of bullock-hide stretched on to saplings, which was lovely after sleeping on the ground for several nights.

The scramble up the track over the Nightcap Range was exciting and it was heavenly to breathe clean crisp air and look out over the country from the summit of the track. Great blue mountains stretched behind us and the darker blue of the scrub spread out before us with an odd peak rising from the scrub all by itself that George told me is called Mount Warning because Captain Cook, when he sailed up the coast and nearly ran onto Fingal Reef, noted on his map that mariners should be warned to put further out to sea when they were due east of the peak. Certainly it is easy to identify, for it stands five hundred feet above the surrounding hills, like a giant’s warning finger.

Once we made the South Arm track, the going was quite easy, except for fording hundreds of little creeks. I have never seen such country for small watercourses. We reached the Tweed in three days. My, it’s a wide river! George says it’s not very deep but it is much wider than the Richmond. I thought how calm and placid it looked, but when I said so, George laughed and said, ‘Just wait till it rains.’

Sure enough, as if he had ordered it, the rain came down that night, not very heavy at our camp, but we could see it was teeming on the ranges. Next day the sky was blue again, and I said, ‘Well, George, your river still looks very placid.’ Just you wait,’ he said ominously, bustling about saddling the horses and packing up. He seemed in a great hurry to be off, so I was very surprised when we had climbed to the top of one of the funny little knolls that crop up along the river-bank, to see him begin to unsaddle and make camp. Of course, I asked why and felt like screaming when he only muttered, ‘You’ll see soon enough.’ I didn’t have long to wait, though. We had hardly got the fire going when I heard a funny rumbling noise which seemed to come from up-river – looking up I saw a great brown wall of water surging down the river. I saw then why George had been so worried that morning and why he had camped on top of this hill. The river height must have risen four feet in as many minutes and our little hillock became an island. It was terrifying. However, by next morning the flood had subsided and we were able to go on with our journey, but the mud and debris left behind by the water made it a most unpleasant three days.

The farm, when we reached it, was a most pleasant surprise. I had imagine it hemmed in by hills like ours, only much smaller. Well, it is much smaller, but the house is perched on one of the little hills I mentioned and looks out over a huge expanse of river. The house itself is tiny and not at all comfortable, but I am attending to that and George and old Pat are busy cutting timber to build another room and a kitchen for me. There is a pump on the well near the door, which is a boon, and plenty of stone to build a fireplace and chimney. Another unexpected pleasure is that I can see two other houses from the front door (or back door; there is only one, anyway). One of the visible houses is only a headquarter camp for some cedar-cutters and not lived in very much but the other house is on a farm across the river and has a family living in it. They are the people who gave George his ‘beloved’ Judy!

The cows George bought in Grafton arrived the week before we arrived and poor Pat was quite bewildered to find no one here. However, we explained all that had happened and George is well pleased with the condition of the cattle. We now have a cock and five hens which George’s friends in Murwillumbah (the settlement further up the river) gave us for a wedding present. I have built them a little yard of saplings so that they are kept away from my new garden. Their ‘home’ is a huge hollow tree and the rooster flies up on the high roots each morning and crows his head off.

There is talk of planting sugar-cane in this valley. A botanist named Michael Guilfoyle, living at a place called Cugden, nearer the sea and about ten miles away, has a series of plots in his garden. He is very keen about it, George says, and with his (George’s) dislike of cows in general (and one cow in particular!) sugar-cane makes a strong appeal to him. Indeed, he is very interested in trying any new crop in order to develop agriculture in this district.

We heard today that a schooner had come into port at the mouth of the river so I am spending the day writing to you and waiting for the boat which may bring me news of you all, and my boxes of possessions. There is a great deal needed here to make a home of this hut, but I shall have plenty of time and when you decide to make the journey to visit me I promise you will find every modern aid to comfort that I can contrive!

CHAPTER 10 – 1866

The rains began early in 1866. Heavy tropical downpours began shortly after Christmas and kept on, and on. The steamy heat of the few fine days did nothing to dry up the general wetness and the creeks and rivers were soon above their normal height. The settlers began to fear a big flood. They had experienced some floods since the first people came to live in the river areas nearly thirty years before but these had done little damage because the early homesteads had a few cattle and very little in the way of planted crops. The humpies built by the cedar-getters were easily replaced and their scanty stocks of provisions could be quickly carried above flood-level. The clearing of the debris in the creeks, done by the timber men while getting their logs out, allowed the water to flow more quickly and the bar at the mouth of the river had been scoured out to a depth of eight or nine feet at high tide by the swift rush of water; so that the early pioneers regarded floods as a help rather than a menace. However, with the coming of the farmers who planted crops on the rich river-flats and whose best pasture lay along the river-banks, floods began to be regarded as a danger. The rush of water could, in a few hours, tear away the work of months and even years and it was with a worried eye that the farmers along the rivers in 1866 watched the sodden creek-banks and listened to the persistent patter of rain all night on their bark or shingle roofs.

A cloud-burst at the end of January brought a greater rush of water hurtling down the river, carrying with it many of the precious cattle, brought with such toil from the south, flattening maize crops and tearing rafts of cedar apart like driftwood. For three days, practically every farmer in the district was flood bound on his farm and, at Ballina itself, the boatmen’s houses were washed out to sea with the first rush of water.

Mr. Thomas, Mack and Rollo, who had worked the night before the flood driving their stock up into the hills, spent their time rowing a ferry service for their neighbour’s cattle which had been caught on a knoll in the middle of a great lake which had been formed by a breakthrough of water into a small gully. Each frightened, bellowing cow had to be caught, thrown and tied by the two young men while Mr. Thomas held the boat steady against a small tree, half submerged in the flood. Then the beast had to be hauled by a rope and pulley strung on to one of the branches of the same tree and lowered into the boat. The beasts were mainly yearlings and easy to handle but, by the time the whole twenty had been moved, the men were ready to drop.

On the third day the rain stopped and the water began to recede. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief although some of the gloomier spirits said that there would certainly be a drought now, with no more rain for months and months.

They were wrong. A fortnight later, when everything was nearly dry for the first time for six weeks and mud had been cleared off the paths, down came the rain again bringing a second flood, worse than the first, which tore through the country destroying anything that had been missed by the last flood. So little rain had fallen to cause this flood, that many settlers were caught unprepared. At Weston’s farm five bags of flour standing on the roof of a shed to dry were swept away when the shed collapsed into the water. Loss of flour was a dreadful blow at any time, but now that the maize crop was ruined the loss of all that flour meant starvation. The poor Westons packed up what few belongings they had saved from the floods and as soon as the river was navigable again they rowed up-stream to Casino to begin all over again the slow business of working at timber getting until enough money had been saved to apply for another land grant and stock it with cattle and the necessities of life.

After this second flood everyone thought “Now we must have some fine weather.” And, as the waters receded, the task of cleaning up began once more. This time the district had exactly four weeks of fine weather, during which crops were replanted, hungry cattle began to eat the watery new-grown grass, fences were replaced, huts were rebuilt and people began to take up their normal way of life.

Then another big storm heralded fresh downpours and up went the river. In less than a day water began to flow over already sodden pastures. Rushing at newly built fences and huts it hurled great logs and dead cattle at them to break them down again, and covered everything with a sludge of stinking mud. Bloated cattle (drowned in the previous floods) now came floating down the river with a grotesque appearance of liveliness, to burst with horrible results when they hit the side of a house or cannoned into a jam of logs. Boats torn from their moorings raced down-river to cross the bar in useless triumph.

This time the settlers stood idle and watched – they had so little left to save and it seemed hopeless to struggle against such forces of nature. After this third disaster many people left the district and went inland to where the newly established overland route from Grafton to Casino made it easy to get supplies and where work could be had easily to earn money to buy them with.

The Thomases suffered less than most of their neighbours because their home was on the hilly ground and they had worked hard to clear the highland as well as the lush pasture-growing river-flats. The patch Rollo called his “Golden acre’, which was near the river and on which he tried out every known type of vegetable, became a stinking swamp and he couldn’t bear to go near it. He and Mack went up into the hills and felled timber against the time when it would be possible to raft it down to the saw-mill. They also helped with the food problem by shooting some of the many wallabies, paddy-melons and bush turkeys that had taken refuge from the floods in the hills.

Rollo, always soft-hearted where creatures were concerned, hated to take advantage of these refugees.

“I wish we could just go out and slaughter a vealer,” he remarked to Mack one day as the two men crossed a gully in search of game. “This business of shooting wild things is pretty rotten.” Mack eyed Rollo’s great size quizzically. “Since there are no vealers to spare, you’d better get busy on gum-leaves then, if we’re not to kill game. I’ll chop you down a couple of forest giants.”

Rollo grinned. He was used to his tall thin brother making good-natured jibes at his size. Rollo was big all over – including his heart, as his mother used to say fondly when he performed some special little service for her.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “Kindness to animals doesn’t make sense when the boat is five months overdue and the floods have taken all our reserves. All the same, these creatures are almost tame and I hope to heaven we don’t have to go on killing them much longer, even if they do eat my crops just as they sprout. Still, Mum, wonderful cook as she is, must have something to put in the pot.”

Now that the river, main thoroughfare for the district, was not navigable they were more isolated than they had been when they first arrived on the Richmond. Even the land route between Grafton and Woodburn was flooded and, for three months, after the Westons left, the Thomases saw no one at all nor had any word from the outside world. They were all worried about Sue and her family, for the Merton’s farm was right on the river although the house was out of flood reach. A great deal of their land would have been inundated and the crops ruined, even if the cattle had not been swept away. No news came through, for the rain kept on and on. In June two more floods undid in a night the repair work that had gone on. Then there was a spell of three months’ fine weather and the land began to recover. At last a boat from the north brought letters from Sue and took away some of the waiting timber that had been lying on the river-bank for six months. The following day two vessels from Sydney brought vitally needed food-stuffs. Oh, the joy of fresh-baked bread made from wheaten flour after months of nothing but meat and maize-meal that was green with mould! And the delight of having oil for the lamps, and some new clothes. Rollo had been wearing a pair of trousers so patched that they threatened to burst every time he moved. As soon as he boarded the schooner when he and Mack reached Ballina to get their supplies, he tore open a packing-case containing their order of clothing and raced below to change into the pair of new trousers he unpacked. Much to the amazement of the watching sailors he did a free happy dance of relief at being able to move with unrestricted freedom.

Sue’s letter was a great relief to them, though something of an anti-climax after all they had been through and all the worrying they had done about how she was faring. George, she told them, had some knowledge of weather and guessed that they were in for a wet year. With the first flood he had moved all their stock up into the hills and built a hut to which he had taken all his family and livestock. There they had been living a very dull and primitive life but in perfect safety while the floods raged harmlessly, to them, down the river half a mile away. Their two daughters, Bee and Mattie, were thriving, Sue wrote, and so were she and George – their only hardship being the complete isolation.

With the coming of spring people felt their troubles were over. Mack and Charlie came home from the saw-mill, where they had been working to get enough money to go south to buy more cattle. They helped Rollo plough and plant a crop of maize and potatoes in his drained and restored ‘golden acre’. Then they put in a month clearing new paddocks ready for the new stock. They were preparing to leave for the Clarence when the rain began again. During the next three weeks it rained continuously: the river flooded, subsided, flooded, and then rose higher with a flood on top of a flood. By November the whole district was in despair. Not only were the crops ruined again but there was no seed left for replanting and no means of getting away to buy fresh seed. Many farmers had no money left to buy seed with if they could get it, nor anything left to sell.

Everyone was in the same plight and there seemed to be no solution to the problem. There was nothing to do but sit and wait, and possibly stay sitting until they starved. The soggy air, the mould on all their belongings, the stink of decayed matter and the everlasting spread of brown, still water lying on the flats, unmoving and stagnant, souring the soil and killing the grass, caused the settlers to feel the full weight of hopelessness. If the settlement had been thrown back to 1840 by the first floods, this disaster put it back to primeval times.

At last the rain eased off and the water began to recede. Men were able to row on the river again and to meet and talk about what could be done. There was little enough to do until supplies arrived and no sailing-ship could cross the bar as yet.

Then one day a strange sound came throbbing up the creeks and waterways, news quickly spread that a paddle-steamer had actually steamed over the impassable bar and was coming slowly up the river, loaded with supplies. At every hastily built landing-stage the community living round it came to life as the steamer unloaded supplies of seed, tools, provisions: everything needed to begin work again. Horses were rounded up from the hills and as the earth dried up it was ploughed and planted, the sun shone, the grass began to grow, cattle fattened and the terrible year passed into memory.

CHAPTER 11 – 1872

During the next six years the district recovered amazingly fast from the setback of the flood year. Roads were opened up, mail-runs established and coaches began to run along the highlands. As the timber was cut out, more and more men turned to growing crops which when harvested could be sent to Sydney and Melbourne by the paddle-steamers, which slowly but surely were driving the little sailing-schooners off the sea. A lighthouse (the second to be built along the coast other than those at Sydney, the first had been built at Clarence Heads not long before) was completed in 1866 and made a big difference to the safety of ships entering the river. A droguing service was started at Ballina with great flat-bottomed punts which worked with the tides to carry supplies up the river and bring back produce.

When the State of Queensland was proclaimed in 1859 a census was taken of the population in the reduced State of New South Wales. The number of people in the Northern Rivers District rose by 500 from the year of this census to 1868 and the area then became qualified to have a representative in parliament. This was a good step forward, for it meant that the needs of the district could now be voiced in official channels. When a police station was established at Ballina, the settlement began to consider itself a town.

As the country grew more settled and there was less to explore, man’s spirit of adventure turned to the trying of different crops. Sue wrote about the botanist, Michael Guilfoyle, and the wonderful work he was doing, collecting plants from all over the world and trying them in his garden. There was hardly a captain from overseas who did not collect plants for Mr. Guilfoyle, wrote Sue. As he proved each plant a success or failure in the North Coast climate, he advised the farmers and gave them seeds or cuttings to try out in larger plots. Sue, in turn, sent seeds and cuttings to her father and he tried them in the Richmond Valley, passing the successful ones on to his neighbours. Coffee, sugar-cane, bananas, pineapples, flax, jute, ginger, sweet potatoes and many other plants were tried out in plots in Rollo’s ‘golden acre’ and Mrs. Thomas’s larder, from being almost bare, became stocked in time with all types of luxury foods.

Many of these experimental crops failed, however, while some proved just a useful sideline, but two crops gave promise of being real winners: these were bananas and sugar-cane. Mr. Thomas believed that these would, one day, oust the beef-cattle industry from the district and he began to plant acres of bananas on the hill-sides and to clear his swampy flats to put in sugar-cane, long before any other farmer in the district. He thought, too, that one day dairy cattle would be the mainstay of the district, but at present, transport problems were so great that most farmers laughed at his dream of a great dairy herd with a local factory to process the milk. Indeed, it was to be more than twenty years before this dream came true.

Mack and Rollo spent Christmas 1872 with their grandparents on the Clarence, leaving Mr. Thomas with Charlie and Jimmy to clear and fence more land to feed the cattle they were to bring back. They planned to bring not just beef cattle this time, but prime stock and an imported bull to set up a stud-breeding centre to improve the standard of beasts all over their district.

Splitting posts in the scrub one day, Jimmy confided to Charlie that he was restless.

“It must seem ungrateful of me, Charlie, but I want to get away from here. You and I have spent most of our lives on this hundred acres of scrubland. I know Mum has given us a good schooling, but I feel ignorant about the world, just the same.”

Charlie paused, while he sharpened his axe.

“I agree with you, Jim, and what’s more, I think Dad does, too, for he asked me the other day if I would like to go and work for Captain Fenwick and see a bit more life on one of his boats. When Mack and Rollo get back I think we could both be spared and, if you feel the same way I do, I’m game to try it for a time, anyway.”

Having agreed on this plan, Charlie and Jim went to see Captain Fenwick in his hut on the river-bank, behind the Police Station. The Captain stared silently at the young men for what seemed a long time. He was a big man and, even sitting in the doorway of his hut, he seemed to meet them eye to eye as they stood in the evening sunshine; Charlie, so tall and dark, shyly hoping for approval, while little Jimmy, his snowy-topped head held high, his blue eyes sparkling with determination to be thought a man in spite of his lack of inches, stuck out his chest and waited for the Captain to approve him.

“Why pick on me?” Captain Fenwick rumbled finally. “I can’t pay you good wages till I see how many people are going to use the tugboat service I hope to start. Why not go up to the saw-mill and take a sure job or go to work on one of the drogues?”

“They aren’t using steam-driven boats and I want to work on one,” said Jim, in his abrupt way. “This steam business interests me. I want to know more about it.”

“All you’ll learn about steam-engines is that they take a powerful lot of wood, which has to be chopped and carried,” snorted the Captain. “Still, if you want to find out the hard way that you don’t just sit on deck and let the boilers push you along, as some seem to think, I’ll put you both on. But mind, you’ll both have to work and don’t forget that. There’s enough goons sitting on their hams waiting for me to come to grief with my silly modern ideas, without my losing money on smart young chaps who think they’re on to a soft job.”

The Captain went inside and pulled on his boots. “Come on, I’ll show you the Alchymist,” he said, as he came out. He took them all over his sturdy little tug, moored, with fires banked, ready to move immediately the signal at the lighthouse announced the arrival of a schooner to be towed over the bar. Neary-by was the rival tugboat, Mr. Yeager’s Athletic, also ready to set out at a moment’s notice.

The wreck of seven vessels the previous year had made the need for a tug so urgent that both Captain Fenwick and Mr. Yeager had begun one almost simultaneously and the rivalry between them was one of the main topics of settlement gossip.

Jim and Charlie heard a great deal about it and the wonders of steam-driven vessels from Captain Fenwick that afternoon and, though Charlie returned to work on the farm a few years later, Jim was won over to ships and shipping that first afternoon and did not leave their service for thirty years, until he, and the rest of the crew, were drowned when the Protector overturned crossing the bar in 1901. Four years later Captain Fenwick himself died as a result of the wreck of one of his vessels on the bar.

Captain Fenwick, with his tugboat service, was to prove a moving force in the development of shipping, the life-line of the district at a time when settlers were moving in all the time and the roads were mere boggy tracks.

It was fitting that he made his fortune from such a worth-while business and built a beautiful stone mansion for his wife and fine family. The house is standing to this day, the centre-piece, the magnificent cedar staircase, a memorial to the lovely trees that were felled to build it. The stone of which the house was built was quarried from the outcrop of rock which had been the landing-ground for the first settlers fifty years before and the cedar and teak grew within five miles of their final resting-place.

This house became the rendezvous for all the sailors who came to the river and many interesting yarns must have been told in its lofty rooms.

Not long after the tugboat service was established another modern scheme was started on the river when Mr. James Webster began a Ballina to Lismore steamship service, taking passengers the seventy miles to Lismore in one day. To a district accustomed to rowing-boat speed this was an incredibly short time for the distance. Mrs. Thomas, who was always interested in anything new, was one of the first to make the trip. The little vessel picked her up at their own landing-stage not long after dawn and she enjoyed being able to sit comfortably on deck and watch the scenery unfold in the early light. The immense trees that lined the bank for most of the way made the river seem to close almost overhead and Mrs. Thomas welcomed the blackened breaks where settlers were razing the jungle to make room for food crops. One of the passengers told her that when the first sailing-ships ventured up the river, towed with tedious slowness by the ship’s life-boats, there were places where the trees were so close together overhead that a man had to climb up the masts and cut the twining creepers from their branches to prevent them tangling with the rigging.

The first stop the steamship made was at the boat-building village of Coraki. This was becoming quite a little town, Mrs. Thomas noticed, with its enormous boat-building shed and saw-mill dominating the landscape and supporting most of the families who lived and worked near it.

One of the women who boarded the boat, pointed with pride to the fine new school-house and church. Both such buildings were rare luxuries in a district where food and survival were more important than anything else.

Several more calls were made at small settlements along the river. Here and there the ship passed an abandoned clearing where secondary growth was running riot and the passengers could see such domestic plants as beans and passionfruit growing and fruiting unattended.
It was late in the afternoon when they arrived in Lismore, the thriving little town that was bidding fair to rival the much older Casino for size and prosperity. There were several blacksmith and saddlers’ shops, hotels, boarding-houses, drapers’ shops, general stores; and even a bank. Mrs. Thomas gratified a long-nurtured ambition by going to the dress-maker’s shop with a twenty-yard dress-length of muslin she had just bought and leaving it to be made for her. The thought of owning such a magnificent gown made her feel elated and she did the more sober part of her shopping with a light heart. She spent the night with the Westons, who were now firmly established in a small business of their own, having given up farming after the disastrous floods of 1866. Next day she did some last-minute shopping and was last on board the little vessel before it sailed. She felt more tired than she would have after a full day on the farm, but then, she reflected, she was used to farm work and this was her first shopping spree for thirty-five years.