A Cardwell Memoir

A story of Cardwell by a direct descendant of 1860s settlers who built a new society on the shores of Rockingham Bay where an ancient Aboriginal culture existed wholly

within the embrace of nature.

Sandy Hubinger

the Calophyllum

Shore

III

Contents

Dedication VAcknowledgements VIForeword VIIIPrologue XI

Introduction 1Chapter 1: Early Encounters 7Chapter 2: The Kennedy Adventure 35Chapter 3: New Arrivals 45Chapter 4: Crossing the Range 67Chapter 5: A Local Government 77Chapter 6: Days of Hope 87Chapter 7: Lost at Sea 111Chapter 8: Valley Life 129Chapter 9: A Man of Science 151Chapter 10: Independence 159Chapter 11: Good tucker 183Chapter 12: Delivering the Mail 191Chapter 13: Australia Fair 201Chapter 14: A Grand House 209Chapter 15: Making Tracks 219Chapter 16: Dark Times 225Chapter 17: Boom and Bust 237Chapter 18: The Great Depression 251Chapter 19: At War Again 263Chapter 20: Birthday Bash 269Chapter 21: Double Century 277Chapter 22: Point of Contention 285Epilogue 291

Bibliography 293Index 297

VIII

Foreword

Sandy Hubinger’s Cardwell memoir is a work that is likely to engage readers on several levels. As a document of record, it provides something of a timetable of arrivals and departures, an account of the movement of people to and through Cardwell since its earliest days. It offers a matter-of-fact account of coastal shipping movements, the deployment of mounted police units, the endeavours of workmen who slashed trails through near impassable terrain and the toils of teachers and railway workers and telegraph linesmen sent north to the new frontiers of an emerging Australia. It tells, too, of aspects of the unequal nature of the interaction between indigenous Australians and the incomers. At the core of that interaction was land and its ownership. Then, as now, the acquisition of real estate was the abiding pre-occupation of many.

The material success of these incomers was at times only possible through the removal of indigenous Australians – and this was not confined to the North - from some of their traditional lands and the effective banishment of some to Government-run reserves and “places of protection.”

Thus, for researchers and historians, this Cardwell memoir will be a valuable primary source of information. Similarly, the memoir will help inform today’s school pupils in the North of the lives and times of great grandparents and the inventiveness and perseverance of the generations that somehow survived the trials of life before e-mail and iPods and online banking and cable television

For those within the Cardwell community – particularly those whose families were in the vanguard of European settlement in the late 1800s and, later, in the first years of the 20th century – Sandy’s writings will provide a link with family members and family friends from another time and another world. Indeed, this was another world – a world where there was a sense, among white Australians, of an obligation to “tame” and “civilise” an unfamiliar landscape and its people.

IX

In reading this memoir, the reader will be struck by the directness, the uncomplicated tone, of the language used by the writer. At times, the language will stab, perhaps even offend, 21st Century ears. It is the language of “natives” and “tribes” and “common sense” and some “natural order” and an aversion to “hand-outs.” But this was, after all, the language of a man, and a generation, born before The Great War of 1914-1918 in the years when Britannia ruled the waves, the Tsar ruled Russia and when being of European stock was regarded as having won first prize in the lottery of life. With that first prize came an unquestioned right to dominion not only over the beasts of the field but also over the people on whose lands the beasts grazed.

For many of Sandy Hubinger’s generation, there was an unquestioning and profoundly sincere belief that the incomers were pioneering, hard-working types of sound character and Christian virtue. Most, in all probability, were. Not for them any “ivory tower” debates on indigenous entitlements or the environmental implications of land clearing and close settlement. Thus, the author’s writings must be seen against the backdrop of the sincerely-held beliefs of the times. They are best read in the context of the observation of British writer Lesley Poles Hartley who suggested in 1953: “The past is a different country. They do things differently there.”

Read with Hartley’s words in mind, Sandy Hubinger’s memoir of Cardwell will inform, rekindle memories for many and conjure up, in most, a sense of marvel at the challenges met and matched by those who settled on The Calophyllum Shore.

Alan Murray, Historian and Author, July, 2010

1

Introduction

When a Government Landing Party raised the Union Jack on the shores of Rockingham Bay on a rainy Friday in the summer of 1864, the official emissaries

were proclaiming the new northern frontier of Australian white civilisation. They would name the subsequent frontier settlement Cardwell. Although graziers were pushing up through the inland, Queensland’s most northern declared settlement at the time of Cardwell’s birth was Bowen, then known as Port Denison. A small government outpost, Somerset, on the tip of Cape York was set up in the same year but the permanent settlement of Darwin would not occur for another four years. Queensland was an infant: only five years earlier Rockingham Bay was part of the British Colony of New South Wales.

Queensland’s first Governor, Sir George Ferguson Bowen undertook a cruise to Cape York in 1862 and made a survey of Rockingham Bay as a site for a port, describing it as having all the attributes of so many of the outstanding beauty spots of the world. Early sailing ships on marine surveys, on the infamous black-birding runs1 and with merchant cargoes, sought shelter in the lee of the many islands that encircle the bay which had been given its name, Rockingham, by Lieutenant James Cook when he had sailed past 93 years earlier, describing the region favourably. However, it was the 1864 Landing Party under George Elphinstone Dalrymple, at the request of Governor Bowen, that planted the seed for modern civilisation that would sprout the hardy plant that is Cardwell.

It’s ironic perhaps that a small official Landing Party of some 20 people should proclaim its intentions with such public pomp and display - planting the British flag, reading a formal proclamation and firing a salute with guns, a rocket and blue light2. The existing population on this new frontier were representatives of a vast and ancient tribal culture who had lived for centuries within the cloak of the natural environment. The only obvious signs of a resident Aboriginal society were the occasional sighting of a few of its people, columns of smoke rising above tree-tops, and some passing canoes3.

The white settlers brought with them the concept of the built environment. They cleared land, erected tents and lived their initial days around campfires. The first huts

1   Recruitment of  virtual slave labour from black races in the Pacific.2   Journal of  James Morrill.3   Journal of  James Morrill.

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and cottages were soon built, followed quickly by a few public and private buildings and general stores along the sandy ridge fronting the ocean.

Fresh water was available in the beach sands, then as now. Ten horses and a dozen sheep, two goats and some fowls for produce, along with some dogs were brought ashore by the landing party4. Town streets were surveyed and, within months, a track leading south-west over the range had been cleared, linking Rockingham Bay to the elevated Valley of Lagoons cattle station. On May 21, four months after its birth, the settlement was proclaimed by government as a formal port of entry and clearance. Initially, the place that became Cardwell was Port Hinchinbrook.

Hardy men, with no less hardy wives and their families were arriving in search of a new life and prosperity, children at times making up one-third of the new community. It was a dynamic beginning. Prospectors and adventurers, scientists and farmers, government officials and shopkeepers were all drawn to this exotic outpost on the edge of the British Empire. The era of mechanisation was transforming society and creating upheaval across England and northern Europe. New settlements like Port Hinchinbrook offered both escape and hope.

The early residents journeyed to the Cardwell district from Europe, from America and from Jamaica in sailing ships on expeditions of untold hardship. In so many cases, spur-of-the-moment decisions saw the newcomers journey from all the corners of the earth. Some ran away for adventure. One disgruntled Scotsman, Thomas Caird, is said to have thrown a spanner at his uncle, walked out of his job at his uncle’s ship building works and accepted an invitation to join the crew of a vessel bound for America, and eventually Australia, leaving his homeland forever. Some, prisoners of France, seizing an opportunity, travelled 1,600 km by whaleboat from the penal settlement of French New Caledonia but were eventually sent back to prison. Others were seamen who jumped ship before their scheduled departure from Australia.

Having set foot in Australia, it seems all felt safe in the wilds of Rockingham Bay in the new outpost of white settlement over 300 km from its nearest neighbour, Bowen, the mother-town of the north. From Cardwell, branches of settlement spread to the north, south and west. Yet while many of these settlements prospered, Cardwell would struggle, generally speaking, for more than a century for its very existence.

In its first years, Cardwell was a multicultural society having within its fold Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Germans, Spaniards, Italians and according to locals, a lone Black incomer, Ben Brown. It was the base from which new exploration

4   Letter of  Arthur Jervoise Scott to Governor Bowen 08.02.1864.

3

Introduction

was undertaken and from which the new settlements of Ingham, Georgetown, Cooktown, Geraldton (Innisfail) and Cairns were established. At a time when all far northern roads led to Cardwell, and the decade-old State of Queensland was struggling for funds, Cardwell was the community through which early gold diggers seeking prosperity travelled from 1869 to the Etheridge and Gilbert Ranges gold fields. The fields lay 160 miles (260 km) ‘as the crow flies’ virtually due west of Cardwell. Ethridge gold was shipped out of Cardwell from 1871 to 1875.

Many of the huts and cottages of the first white settlers were erected within the precincts of the present railway property along the ridge on which the main northern rail line runs beside Bowen Street. They generally extended from Winchester to Liverpool Streets. Private homes were erected within part of the Government Reserve (Town Section 42) in the area of the earlier school playgrounds facing Bowen and Clitheroe Streets at the southern end of town.

Historians of early Cardwell did not report any great influx of permanent residents, nor did they speak too highly of Cardwell’s buildings before the 1900s. George Dalrymple, who had led the first Landing Party at Rockingham Bay on January 22, 1864, recorded 25 huts and 50 inhabitants on a subsequent visit in August 18645. Dalrymple, with a survey party, had just returned to the settlement from surveying and clearing a road suitable for bullock-dray traffic across the ranges to the Valley of Lagoons sheep and cattle station 90 miles (150 km) to the south west. By the end of the next year the population was still around 50, according to a record by sugar planter, John E. Davidson.

The Port Denison Times, in a report of April 11, 1866, written the previous month, recorded a population of 35, including 11 children, but a report 12 months earlier in 1865 suggests a volatile population profile, with 100-200 residents in the town. This brief 1865 increase in population might have been mainly a result of Dalrymple’s glowing enthusiasm for the area of the settlement as set out in his August, 1864, Report to Queensland Governor, Sir George Ferguson Bowen. In his remarks accompanying Dalrymple’s report read at The Royal Geographical Society in London on November 27, 1865, Governor Bowen said that many confidently forecast that Cardwell would “one day become the capital of the new colony” envisaged in northern Queensland. However the reality, at least within the experience of possible new settlers appears not to have measured up to Dalrymple’s enthusiasm. Police Magistrate Roger Beckworth Leefe in May 1866 recorded: “When I was absent exploring and another party were

5   Report to Governor Bowen 01.08.1864.

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The ‘Manse’ one of Cardwell’s earliest homes photographed around 1897.(J. C. Hubinger Collection.)

The Presbyterian link implied by its name is unknown, but it became the home of Rosina and Thomas Caird who married in Cardwell in December 1866. Caird was in Cardwell from March 1864 and perhaps arrived with the first landing party. He had a blacksmith shop at this site. The Caird family moved to their farm ‘Glenorchy Plains’ west of Ellerbeck, so their second daughter, Ethel, could live here when she married John Hubinger in 1892. Ethel is on the verandah facing the camera and the children are believed to be the two eldest of her eventual 12, Herbert born 1894 and John Jnr born 1896. This home was located east of the creek that is now Roma Street, near the current Fire Station where, around 1900, almost 25 years before the railway arrived, townspeople had built an ant-bed tennis court to provide community sport and recreation.

5

Introduction

away overland there were only eleven men left in the town.”6

Charles Eden, Police Magistrate (1868-1870), recorded the existence of about a dozen houses in 1870 and a population of 27, including children. In 1872, Captain Moresby7 of HMS Basilisk described Cardwell as a row of tiny houses running parallel to the beach. The only early report of any great number of people was given by Police Magistrate Eden, who recorded that before his time 1868-70 there had been 300 inhabitants. If correct, this had to have been within a 12 month period before March 1866. In 1883, Norwegian anthropologist Carl Lumholtz reported about 100 inhabitants.

Despite their problems and struggle for an existence, the early Cardwell people had great faith in the town’s future. According to School Inspector R. Ewart, in the early 1870s the Government had decided: “to extend the jetty some hundreds of yards further, build a Customs House and do something on a new road to the Etheridge.” The government did extend the jetty, it also built a Customs House but whilst a new track was made to the Etheridge it was not improved to the standard of a road.

Cardwell’s future, from the outset, lay in the provision of a serviceable jetty and a good access road to the inland, a road for which many early Cardwell residents argued without success. Today, in the twenty-first century, we have what remains of an access road across the range, the Kirrima Range Road, which was used for over 50 years until falling into serious and dangerous disrepair. This road was capable of being developed to tap the resources of the inland, mainly timber and livestock but more recently tourism. Even now Cardwell’s voting power is so slight that its citizens have been unable to have the dirt and gravel link to Blencoe Falls and beyond, upgraded to the standard of a bitumen surface which covers most of the road between Gunnawarra Station and Mt Garnet. Worse, the road ascending Kirrima Range from the coast is now so neglected it is officially closed to vehicles.

To restore Kirrima Range Road and complete the missing link perhaps we need another Percy Pease. Queensland’s Deputy Premier in the 1930s, Pease, without any prior announcement had machinery and plant delivered to the site to start the job of constructing a road over Kirrima Range. It was a decision with personal political risks. The people of Innisfail who then held 70% of the voting power in the Electorate of Herbert could easily have overturned his decision. They didn’t, but chose to ensure that the Kennedy Range Road remained only a road, and did not become a highway

6   COL/A79/1469/1866 QSA.7   Claimed New Guinea for Britain in 1873 & named Port Moresby after his father, Admiral Fairfax Moresby.

The Calophyllum Shore

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to rival Innisfail’s access to the inland via the Palmerston Highway.

To the north and south of Cardwell, approximately 50 km in either direction, there were to be found the sugar farms without which north Queensland would amount to little. Only within the final 3-4 years of the twentieth century did commercial sugar growing expand into the vicinity of Cardwell.

Over its most recent 40 years, historic Cardwell has had much to celebrate. The Cardwell of today is a bright new plant, hopefully destined to bloom and eventually take its rightful place sharing fully in the future growth of far north Queensland.

Harry W. Johns, the local school teacher from 1898 to 1900 left us a sketch showing the location of each of the 25 buildings in Cardwell in 1900. Of these and other buildings erected before the Great War of 1914-1918, few remain standing a century later. Thus Cardwell although old in years bears a deceptive appearance of newness, with so few buildings as testimony to a past of nearly 150 years. Throughout its history the township has drawn into its fold people from all directions, in so many cases people in the twilight of their lives who, having intended to pass through, paused a while and eventually resolved to stay and shelter in the peace and beauty of the Calophyllum shore.

7

Chapter 1

Early Encounters

For thousands of years before white settlement Aboriginal people occupied this continent. Whether they conquered another people or just took over vacant land

may never be known. In the mountains and scrubs around Cardwell they gathered wild bananas, yams and ginger, and trapped the wild turkey, scrub hen, cassowary, golden bower-bird and other wildlife. The boongary (tree climbing kangaroo), wallaby, bandicoot and reptiles such as the carpet snake, the iguana and rock python were also on their menu. Their diet included wild cherry, wild raspberry, pandanus fruit, white apple and Burdekin Plum as well as green ants and a large fleshy ground-grub like a witchetty grub for which the local name is jumbun. Given the abundance of supply, there is a fortune awaiting the person who can market green ant as food for the masses.

The Aboriginal people avoided all berries which the birds would not eat. However, the scourge of the cattleman, the poisonous zamia plant (gajirrah) which causes rickets and sometimes death in cattle was also a food source. The kernels of the nuts from this plant were made into a kind of flour by pounding and then placing the powdered substance in a dillybag in running streams for one to two days to rid the zamia of its poison. Their waxed dillybag held their supply of honey, and the trees where the bees stored honey were specially marked by the local claimants to stop rival tribesmen from robbing their hives.

Earliest Records in District

Possibly the earliest documented evidence of indigenous people within the area of Cardwell was of an Aboriginal track recorded in the day-by-day Journal of the Edmund Kennedy Expedition to Cape York in 1848.8 The evidence of such a track was preserved for posterity on August 17, 1866, by the Kennedy expedition’s surveyor Emmanuel Roberts9, the track no doubt having been used by the locals from the beginning of their occupation of this region.

Sub-Inspector Charles J. Blakeney, resident officer in charge of the Native Mounted

8  Kennedy’s Journal, Fragment BB (Mitchell Library).9  Mapping and Survey, K124:15.

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Police10 at Attie Creek in 1864-65, in a letter delivered to the police magistrate Richard B. Leefe stated that: “The Natives only use that portion of the country (along Meunga Creek) as a passage down from the Ranges to the sea on fishing excursions.”11 He was referring to the track which led from the headwaters of Meunga Creek towards Rockingham Bay, skirted the northern point of Ellerbeck Hill about 4 km north of Cardwell, crossed what is now the Bruce Highway between Meunga and Sunbeam Creeks and continued on to the beachfront.12 An offshoot of this track on the ocean side of the Bruce Highway led through Lily

Creek Pocket - an area about 1 km seaward from the Lily Creek highway bridge - to Munga Creek13 (a little creek now named Wreck Creek) and to a broon, a fighting ground,14 off the north bank of Wreck Creek near the bulgroos15.16 Whether the spring that quenched the thirsts of so many people in that broon area still gushes forth its precious fresh waters is unknown, but if so, it hides its presence within the long grass. The broon clearing, very conspicuous many years ago is now indistinguishable from the surrounding bush.

At Ellerbeck Hill just north of the township, another offshoot of the Aboriginal network of tracks led to the range at the back of Cardwell, to connect with another track from where it continued to what became Rosevale Station on the upper reaches of Gowrie Creek, a tributary of the Herbert River. Rosevale Station was taken up by Frank Hives in 1890 and is now the Abergowrie College cattle run west of Ingham. The route of this track is unknown. These local tracks joined with others along the length of the ranges, providing very short routes of travel to all corners of the traditional owners’ area, and lookout points from which to keep check on intruders.

Senior Constable Thomas G. Jamieson described an instance of the effectiveness of these range tracks. Riding on horseback from the upper reaches of the Murray

10  Often comprised indigenous males recruited from other parts of Queensland.11  COL/A64/352/1865, QSA.12  See map inside front cover.13  Willie Murray (Aboriginal warrior).14 Broon or brun. Also see map inside front cover.15  An area of reeds fed by a fresh water spring in marshes, as described by Willie Murray.16  Bailey, F. Manson, Queensland Flora, 1902: Eleocharis sphacelata or ‘bulkuru’ to Tully River Aborigines.

Boggy Camp Creek cave paintings.(Fiddes Skardon Collection.)