AUSTRALIA
Gold Coast Timber Men
The First Timber Men
The separation of Queensland from New South Wales in December 1859 at first meant very little to life on what is today the Tweed Valley and the Gold Coast. Many of the first timber-getters sent into the valley of the Tallebudgera and the Nerang had been attached to main camps on the Tweed, and shifted camps regularly. Logs were cut close to water-course in the hope that heavy rains would carry the timber down to lower reaches of the streams or even out to sea to be deposited on the beaches. Edmund Harbour, for instance, ranged throughout the area and was reputed to have a camp and a saw pit at Burleigh Head at one point in time. Others included William Duncan, Benjamin Cockerill, William Bozier, Robert Veivers, and Frederick Fowler.
In 1929, an obituary article for Mrs Henry Smith (previously Mrs Robert Vievers) recalled the lonely life of a young timber-getter's wife. Aged 19, and one of the very few white women in the district, Mrs Veivers -
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'was frequently left alone for weeks at a time while her husband was absent after timber, her only companion being a faithful dog. Local blacks, often reinforced by others from over the border, roamed the district and held corroborees, but never interfered with the lonely women. the b lacks, however, were not the only source of danger. 'After some time at Boobigan, camp was shifted to various places, including Talgi, Worongary, Mudgeeraba and Burleigh Heads, and at the latter place, their first child Grace - later Mrs Isaac Andrews - was born. |
Grace Veivers is registered as having been born on 23 August 1862.
William Bozier's daughter, Elizabeth, (later Mrs. Frederick fowler) recalled in 1924, how she had lived in a slab hut with her parents in 1864 close to Burleigh beach, and she recalled a corroboree near the beach 'with hundreds of aborigines taking part. Mrs. William Duncan, whilst living at Burleigh in 1858, lost her 12 month old daughter, Sarah, whilst her husband was away looking for cedar. The grave was dug by some Tallebudgera timber-getters, and the child was laid to rest with the assistance of two local Aboriginal women, just behind the present Burleigh Heads Library, in Park Avenue.
Times quickly changed for these lonely pioneer women, as in the mid-1860s, a comparatively large settler population came to the Nerang, many unemployed cotton operatives from Lancashire brought to Queensland as part of a visionary scheme to transform the colony into a 'cotton colony'. this had failed by 1867, but most of the immigrants stayed, trying their had at maize and sugar growing, and some even joining the timber-getters. Much of the land they acquired had been resumed from the properties of W. D. White. His letters reveal his growing awareness that a new age of closer settlement was dawning. Indeed in June 1864 he attempted to dispose of Dungogie run at an auction in Ipswich. the rent at the date was 30 pounds per annum, and the station was offered with '800 had of superior well-bred quiet cattle'. Improvements consisted of 'huts, stockyards, &c, all that are requisite for working the heard, and of a good and substantial character'. The sale was unsuccessful, and the land was opened for selection under the terms of the new Queensland legislation in 1869. The area was known as 'Talabudgera' or 'Tullabuggera' by 1868 when several listings under this page-name appear in the first edition of the Queensland post office directory.
Leopold Franz Landsberg's map of the new Colony of Queensland, published in 1860, suggests that by that date Surveyor Dixon's titles for the southern rivers were reverting to Aboriginal - or local timber-getters' interpretation of Aboriginal - names. The map details 'R. Perry or Tallabadgery Ck', and 'Burly Head', a change from Dixon's spelling of 'Burley Head'. By 1870, River Perry appears to have been dropped, even in official documents.
Permanent Settlement
With the opening of land on the Tallebudgera to free selection in 1869, the area experienced an influx of settlers, most of whom were Australian-born, and from New South Wales, attracted by the superior advantages of the Queensland land legislation. A number had been previous tenants of Samuel William Gray, a prominent Kiama landowner, who came to the Tweed in 1862 and who himself took up large land holdings across the border in the late 1860s. They brought with them valuable dairying experience.
The original name of the tiny settlement which emerged on the Tallebudgera Creek was 'Maberry' and in developed astride the rough horse track which, in 1869, saw the first weekly horse mail service commence between Nerang and Kynumboon, on the Tweed.
Supplies to this lonely spot were carried by dray some twelve miles from a wharf near the confluence of Little Tallebudgera Creek and the Nerang. this was a rough coastal road first blazed by timber getters such as Harper and Duncan who had separated saw-pits at Burleigh Heads. timber floated down the Tallebudgera and the Currumbin was hauled to these pits, sawn into lengths and then carted by bullock teams to 'Harper's Wharf' at what is today Surfers Paradise.
By 1871 the Queensland census listed some 39 persons resident at 'Tallebuggera Creek' and in 1874 the Post office directory listing gave the following residents:
| John Andrews | Thomas Guinea |
| Samuel Andrews | John Johnson |
| Thomas Burke | Edward Moss |
| Andrew Burke | William Simpson |
| James Dolan | Simon Skaw |
| William Dolan | Stephen Tobin |
| Andrew Dwyer | John Wilkinson |
| John J. Dwyer | Patrick Flynn |
Possibly the most dynamic of these early pioneers was Stephen Tobin, one of the Kiama settlers. At a date when roads were virtually non-existent, and the closest surveyed town, Nerang, consisted of little but a police camp, Tobin was lobbying the government regarding the need for a school, improved roads, and for a navigation survey of Tallebudgera Creek.
The latter was carried out by Commander Heath, Brisbane's Port Master, in 1871, with the conclusion that the creek was unacceptable as a navigable stream. Reference was made to a raft of cedar logs having been successfully rafted down the creek and towed to Brisbane, but a second attempt had failed, with the raft breaking up, and the logs being scattered around Burleigh Head.
The first known photographs of Burleigh heads, taken by the travelling photographer, William Boag, in 1871, are evidence to the fact that the beach was littered with logs at that time.
In 1871, at a time when local Aborigines were being employed by settlers such as Tobin to help clear their land for a shilling a day and rations, a final tribal 'fight' took place on the flat at the back of Burleigh, near the Bluff. According to a later anecdote, 'opposing forces came from as far north as Maryborough, and as far south as the Bellengen River. Prior to that culmination of the disturbance, corroborees were held, at which as many as 600 aboriginals attended. ... One warrior was killed and several wounded.
Ironically, this event occurred the same year as the Queensland Government declared a town reserve at 'Burleigh Heads' and dispatched Surveyor G. I. Pratten to prepare this potential 'watering place' for public auction. this decision is, indeed, one of the grand mysteries of Gold Coast history; why was a marine resort decided upon at such a totally isolated spot, quite inaccessible by any road worthy of the name and flanked by a pioneer farming district still clearing its way out of the dense bush? Most interestingly, the spelling of 'Burley Head' now became the more respectable 'Burleigh head'. Land development again played havoc with an historical place name, leading to confusion that the mighty Jellurgul had gained its English name from a member of the Cecil family (the Baron Burleigh). Obviously, many locals preferred 'Burley', as this spelling persisted in local usage until at least 1885.
Four years later, Pratten was to survey the township of Southport, which, indeed, was to prove a real estate success within a decade. In Burleigh's case, a property 'boom' was almost half a century away.
On 2 July 1872, an auction sale of 65 town allotments at the 'Town of Burleigh' took place at the Land Office, Beenleigh. Prime blocks faced The terrace, which ran down the northern flank of Big Burleigh towards the intersection of Tweed and Ocean streets. On Pratten's 1871 survey map the faint words 'To The Wharf' points in the direction of the track to Harper's Wharf to the north, whilst the words 'From Brisbane' follows the track of West Burleigh Road, which must have been little more than a rough bridle rack at that date.
Perhaps the prime block of this sale was Allotment no 7 of section 3, essentially the land fronting the Terrace at the corner of Julia Street. This one acre allotment sold to Charles William Cox, sugar planter of Pimpama for the modest sum of 2 pounds. Cox acquired several other blocks at this and subsequent sales, whilst a number of prominent Brisbane and Logan citizens made successful bids at the auction. Noticeably absent were any of the pioneer settlers of the Tallebudgera Valley, struggling at that date to get their first successful crops of maize to market.
Tallebudgera was, however, to prosper comparatively whilst Burleigh remained little more than a pipe-dream for many years to come. Indeed, by 1873 Tobin had opened an 'accommodation house' -
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'Travellers on their way South can get accommodation at Mr. Tobin 's house. He has about 400 acres of land, 30 of which were under corn last season; but as he had been clearing fresh ground, he expects to have a crop of 80 acres next year. |
Burleigh Head was described at the same time as set to become 'the fashionable watering place of southern Queensland' -
'At the Head, there are several of what are commonly but incorrectly, called breadfruit trees (Pandanus pedicalatus), and the sands are backed by the foliage of forest lands or saltwater swamps. although several of the town allotments have been purchased, no house, however, has yet been erected.
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'The neighbouring sands afford an oippo9rtunity for a gallop, after high tide, over ground that is hard enough to ring to the sound of a horse's hoof, but yet so soft as not to inure its unshod feet.' |
Indeed, the first Tallebudgera horse races had been organized in 1873, at a time when growing prosperity allowed for a more appreciative approach to the Queensland landscape to develop. In 1874 a journalist waxed lyrically over 'sand as whit4e as the driven snow' -
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'Some few chains back from the beach is a magnificent amphitheatre of hills, while beneath are grassy slopes, with permanent water on the flat. Close by is the resting place of some poor worn-out son of toil, and friendly hands have raised a palisade that marks his resting-place. ...Sandgate and Cleveland are in the shade when Burleigh Head is mentioned as a watering-place. future sanitorium of Queensland, when will enterprise open up thy charms, and make thee easy of access to the dust-corroded, toll-worn denizens of Brisbane and the inland towns?' |
The road to Queensland's 'future sanitorium' was, in 1874, only marked by blazed trees.
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