After the exploration by Capt. Rous and his party on the H.M.S. Rainbow in 1828, exploration and European settlement of the area was idle until 1840 when the first cedar cutting parties from the Clarence Valley arrived. Steve King, Tommy Chilcott and other sawyers arrived by sea in the ‘Sally’, while Joe Maguire and his party arrived overland. The first settlement was at Shaws Bay, East Ballina and was just a row of primitive houses on the waterfront. The huts were made of slab construction with bark or shingle roof and earthen floor. Many of the timber cutters were itinerant, however a few stayed on and settled establishing the town of Ballina and its surrounding district.
In 1841 Joe Eyles opened his pub, the ‘Sawyers Arms’ which was little more than a log cabin. Pearson Simpson and Tommy Service arrived in 1842 and made camp at North Head. William Yabsley and his family came by bullock dray from the Clarence River and he began building a ketch ‘Pelican’. Snow and Essery arrived and are said to have built the first sawpit. Within a short time, there were at least six sawpits in the area. The cedar camps spread quickly up the river, up North Creek, Teven creek, Duck Creek, Tintenbar, Pearces Creek, and upstream to Gundurimba and Lismore station. There were no roads, only a few tracks. Most transport took place on the river and creeks.
Daily Mirror, Monday, December 29, 1969 Pg. 26

Early one morning in 1849 the flood swollen Terania Creek, just above the tiny settlement of Lismore in Northern NSW, was the scene of a dramatic struggle between man and nature. For hours on end a handful of cedar-cutters tried to control a heaving bucking mass of timber being swept headlong down river.
Suddenly the logs in the van became wedged between two rocks. In an instant hundreds of tons of cedar were packed tight for several hundred yards upstream. Unless something was done quickly the logs would be severely damaged as they cannoned into one another under the force of the water pressure building up behind. The next moment men on the creek bank leaped on to the bucking logs and working furiously with axes and hand spikes, trying to clear the blockage.
Once a man working towards the convulsing mass of logs slipped and was immediately sucked under. But a minute later he reappeared after swimming nearly 100 yards under water to surface in front of the block. It was all over as quickly as it started and once again the long knot of logs bulged out to resume their furious progress downstream. The operation of ‘running out’ the cedar, as it was called, was a task that called for exceptional skill, strength and courage. And the cedar-cutters of the Richmond River, according to various overseas authorities, had no superiors at their trade, even the world-renowned lumber men of the north American backwoods.
TOUGHEST
Neither could they be matched in the gusto with which they celebrated their feats afterwards. For more than 30 years until the late 1870s the cedar industry coloured the whole character of life on the Richmond giving it the reputation of being the roughest, toughest river in Australia. It all began in 1842 when a group of cedar-cutting farmers from the Clarence tramped northwards to discover rich falls of cedar in the region of modern Coraki.
For years logging had been going on all the way down the coast as far as Ulladulla. Indeed the industry was almost as old as the colony itself. Yet there was no river valley to compare with the Richmond in the quantity and quality of its red cedar. In particular there was the big scrub, mile upon mile of cedar, teak, and sandalwood, draped in vines and creepers stretching from Bulloona (Ballina) to the recently occupied cattle station of Lismore, 20 miles inland.

Soon hundreds of pairs of sawyers were on their way from the quickly worked out forests of the Macleay, the Bellinger and the Nambucca to camp permanently on the Richmond. By 1845 two-thirds of the colony’s exports of cedar came from there. The sawyers were a race apart. Mostly former convicts who had either served their time or escaped from penal settlements like Morten Bay, they lived alone deep in the heart of the north coast cedar brushes. Almost their only contact with civilisation was when the schooners of the timber fleet arrived to load their cedar and bring them supplies.
Then it was after months of staggering toil of ceaseless chopping and sawing out of sight of the sun in the Big Scrub, that the cutters would come in to the nearest settlement for a spree. And they were monumental sprees for a cedar getter’s cheque in the days when a single tree might be worth $150 was enough to cover at least two weeks of solid rum-drinking.

The real pioneers of the Richmond River
district, these men worked for months out of
sight of the sun in the Big Scrub then retired
to the nearest settlement for
monumental sprees.
All night the sinewy, pale-faced sawyers and their lubra mistresses drank and sang round the rum keg. All day they lay on the ground dead drunk, recovering just in time for the following night’s orgy. Rarely did the drinkers bother to tap the keg. The quickest way to get at the contents was to smash a hole in the side with an axe and use a bucket to catch the rum as it gushed out. Casualties tended to be higher during those two weeks of hectic celebration than during the months of dangerous cutting. Men wandered into the river and drowned or even loosed of guns at all and sundry, sometimes with fatal results.
Yet nearby squatters who scoffed at the cedar cutters for their reckless way of life tended to forget how their work was opening up the Richmond at unprecedented speed, making their land jump in value. Teetering on shaky spring boards high above the ground, pairs of sawyers could keep going for hours on end until the giant was sent crashing. Then the log would be cross-cut into lengths and the lengths squared with an axe and branded with the owners’ mark.
Later they would be formed into a raft and floated down the Richmond on an ebb-tide to Woodburn of Ballina. By the early 1850s most of the more accessible cedar up and down river from Coraki had been cut out and the sawyers were searching for new grounds.
History of cedar cutting.
Gradually though as they moved away from the main river and far up its many tributaries and creeks, they had to devise some new method of getting the cedar to the deep water. Thus the technique was developed of dragging the logs to the nearest cliff-side down which they would go hurtling end-on, smashing scores of other tress in their path, before coming to rest on the bank of the creek below.

THE FLOOD
There they were stacked and the sawyers went off to work elsewhere until the next flood swept up the stack and carried it downstream. When the first heavy rains began to fall sawyers everywhere abandoned whatever they were doing and started on the long tramp up into the hills. If they arrived in time, they would try to travel down the creek with the cedar, either keeping close watch upon their logs from the shore or riding them midstream. Running out the cedar was perilous work when the flood came down with a roar and overhanging limbs snatched at the riders in their whirlwind course. Many noted sawyers were drowned after being knocked unconscious by a limb or losing their balance on the slippery, tossing logs and finally being sucked under.
Finally at some convenient junction downstream heavy ship’s cables slung from bank to bank caught the logs when they arrived. Only in a really major flood would some of the timber escape and be carried out to sea. Now the sawyers drafted out the logs marked with their own brand and passed them under the boom ready to be made up into rafts.
Meanwhile Ballina at the mouth of the Richmond was acquiring some importance. At Ballina the rafters tied up their rafts after the nine-day journey from Lismore or Casino and the great logs were hoisted by derrick into the waiting schooners. In the late 1850s when a raft of cedar might fetch up to $3000 and dealers were being attracted from all over the colony, Ballina really began to boom and the schooners in the trade grew larger.
One effect of the cutters moving so far upstream had been to clear the creeks of various snags and impediments, to improve the flow of water in the main river channel and deepen the bar. But it did not improve the cutter’s manners. At a dozen waterfront shanties sawyers and seamen drank themselves blind, then staggered outside to fight it out. One of the best brawlers on the river at this time was Red Jack the Hopper who, although he had only one leg, would take on anyone as long as he had a post to lean against. For not even the growth of the townships and the establishment of a police station at Ballina in 1859 could change the ways of the river.

….
Although the cedar had disappeared there were plenty of valuable hard woods to exploit. And selectors following the tracks of the cedar-cutters were finding the rich, deep soils once buried inaccessibly within the Big Scrub country for the best possible land for sugar and dairying.
In 1877 no fewer than 269 vessels, large and small steamed up the river to Lismore or were towed behind tugs, to carry off hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of local produce for the Sydney market. By then the tough cedar-cutters who had made all this possible had been practically forgotten.
It dawned one day upon a party of cedar-getters that in their camp in the scrub, where the sun so seldom penetrated, they ought really to be able to tell the time of day, so they pooled in for a clock, and two of the number went down to Ballina and bought it. This co-operative venture was a failure, for though the two delegates, whose expenses came out of the general funds, had got instruction how to wind the clock, yet when the shareholders met in the evening to view it they found that not one of their number knew how to tell the time.

Red Cedar EARLY DAYS ON THE RICHMOND.
(Written by “W.M.” for the “R.R. Herald.”) Richmond River Herald and Northern Districts Advertiser, Tuesday 27 August 1935 Courtesy of TROVE
Looking at a photo the other day of a fine red cedar log recently secured at Lillian Rock, it occurred to me that very little is known to-day of the vast amount of this wonderful timber which was marketed from the Richmond River in years gone by— to the value of many thou-sands of pounds — or the hardships endured by those who brought it to market. About the early 50’s of last century, the trees were found in scrubs along the river bank, and the logs, after being ‘squared,’ were rolled into the water, then collected in rafts, and taken by tides to meet the sailing vessels, which carried them to Sydney. ‘Squaring’ was done by axe work, making four straight sides, which were not joined, leaving the log in the form of an octagon.

“Working the tides” meant allowing the raft to go on while the tide flowed in the right direction, and tying up to the bank when it turned, to await the next turn. Later, the workers were forced to leave the river banks in search of further supplies, and bullock teams were used in hauling from the scrubs. At one period the cedar-getters sawed the logs into large flitches by digging a pit at each tree and using a pit-saw. The outside slabs were left to waste. Many early settlers built their houses entirely from these slabs; and the tracks used for hauling and the depressions which had formed saw-pits, were to be found long afterwards by selectors, at intervals all through the Big Scrub. When supplies near deep water became scarce, men went further afield and rolled the logs into the creeks which feed the river, there to await floods, to float them to deep water. This work was done chiefly by all owners in a given area working together, each marking his logs with a distinguishing brand. In one instance, the writer’s father was placed in charge of three teams of bullocks, hauling cedar logs to the creeks above Wyangarie. Their harvest was one thousand logs; and these, with those of other owners, were floated by floods to Casino, where a strong cable was fixed across the river to impound all logs. The owners here took charge of their timber. This process was also carried out on the North Arm, and the impounding cables were above Lismore. The writer has helped to collect logs at Boatharbor when a boy. After reaching tide water, the logs were hauled from the water, at suitable places, to be cleaned up for market. This consisted of “squaring” and sawing the ends which had been bruised by bumping trees or rocks in the rush of the flood water. But it must be pointed out that many logs would be blocked and left behind and, after a big flood, owners would organise working parties to patrol the creeks, and place those logs in the beds of the creeks to await the next flood.