|
Barron Field wrote about his excursion to the Shoalhaven, undertaken in 1823, and his account was published in The London Magazine, July to December 1824, Vol. X, Taylor and Hessey, Pall Mall, 1824:
“JOURNAL OF AN EXCURSION TO THE FIVE ISLANDS AND
SHOAL HAVEN, ON THE COAST OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
“Saturday, Oct. 18th, 1823.- Rode from the neighbourhood of Liverpool through the district of Airds (in which are a small church and court-room of Campbell Town) to Appin, to breakfast; and thence to Illawarra, or the Five Islands, to dinner, a distance of sixty miles south of Port Jackson. The range of the Blue Mountains, which divides the east coast from the western interior of New South Wales, terminating with the cliffs of the Five Island coast and Shoal Haven, the road from Appin presents the same rocky, sterile country, as the Blue Mountain pass, and the same flora, with the additions of the doryanthes excelsa, or gigantic lily, and the crinum australe: on the Five Island beach is also found granite, as at Cox’s River. Passed the source of the Nepean River, forming a small cataract, under which the stream hides itself in a picturesque glen; and indeed it afterwards finds a subterraneous passage through the sandy rocks to the Cow Pastures. The descent from this range of mountains to the sea-shore is very precipitous, grand, and even tropically luxuriant in point of vegetation. Here may be seen, for the first time in this colony, the cabbage palm (corypha australis) towering above all the trees of the forest, to the height sometimes of a nundred feet, with its bunches of leaves only at the top, flabelliform, peltate, round, and fan-like. These trees once also characterized the neighbourhood of Post Jackson; but they have long been exhausted, the spungy trunks having been used for splitting into hut-logs, and the large leaves for thatch; for thus simply were even the officers of the first fleet, the Romuluses of the colony, lodged. The absence of these trees has taken away much from the tropical character of Sydney, which can only be restored by the garden-cultivation of them, together with the banana and the New Zealand bamboo, for the climate is not hot enough for the cocoa-nut. The jungle sides of this Illawarra Mountain were also enriched with the aborescent fern (alsophila australis), the trunk of which, not growing so tall as the palm, lifted none of the beauty of its large feathery leaves out of the reach of our sight.
“At the foot of this range of mountains is scattered the red cedar tree, of which the colonists make their furniture, and with which they fit up the insides of their houses. It is a genus of cedarlae, allied to flindersia. The procuring of this timber occupies many sawyers and boatmen from Port Jackson. The cedar planks, as they are formed by sawyers at the pit, are carried on men’s backs up to the mountain summit, whence carts (approaching by a narrow road cut through the forest on the ridge) convey the planks to all parts of the colony, or they are carted to the shores of Illawarra, and navigated to Port Jackson in large open boats. The government have not (by reason of their ample supply from Hunter’s River and Port Macquarie) secured any portion of these cedar grounds to themselves, simply compelling each person to take out a permit from the Colonial Secretary’s office, which must specify the number of feet of timber required, and without which protection, the horse and cart, or boat, and the cedar, are liable to seizure by any constable. In a new run in the wild forest, the sawyers have to perform the preparatory labour of clearing their path, and a fall for the trees, which would otherwise be prevented from reaching the ground by amazingly strong vines (scandent or volubilous plants). They then pit the stem, cut into short cylinders of from 8 to 12 feet in length, and saw them into planks of one or two inches thick. For these they receive of the cartmen 22s. foe very hundred feet, from which the sum is to be deducted 6s. per hundred, paid to the carrier from the pit to the cart, leaving 16s. to be divided between the pair of sawyers. The cartmen, after carrying an average load of 300 feet in the plank upwards of 60 miles to Paramatta, over a road, in part very rocky and difficult, obtain 45s. or 50s. per hundred feet, from builders, carpenters, &c. It is to be regretted that so few of the timbers that grow on this mountain are known. Excepting the red cedar, the wild apple (achras australis), the plum (cargillia australis), the sassafras (cryptocarga glaucescens), the rosewood, so called from its scent not colour ( a genus of meleaceae ?), and the turpentine tree (tristania albicans); the wood-cutter had no names for the many trees of gigantic growth which cover this mountain.
“Illawarra is a fine district of good grazing, and some excellent arable, land close to the sea-shore; insomuch that, though distant and difficult from Sydney by land, it was settled in Governor Macquarie’s time, when he refused to let anybody go on the other side of the Nepean. As a marine situation, it is very beautiful. The Five Islands show like one large and two small ones, and look picturesque seaward, while the background presents a line of hills, among which the Hat Hill of Capt. Cook and Mount Molle are conspicuous.
“Sunday, 19th October. - Rested, or only walked over the miles of Illawarra farm, the property of David Allan, Esq. late Commissary General of the Colony, who had the merit of setting the example of settling the Five Island district. The creek ravines still presented a tropical luxuriance of vegetation - palms, ferns, and vines, or parasitical trees, the last festooning and twining their branches in all directions, and greatly relieving the the tall leafless monotony of the gum-trees. Epidendra also built their nests among them, the asplenium nidus, the acrostichum alcicorne, and the dendrobium aemulum. There is also a large-leaved tree, the slightest touch of which brings away hairs like cowhage: it is an undescribed species of urtica,
“Monday, 20th October. - Rode to Shoal Haven, thirty-six miles still further to the south, six or seven of which were through a mass of vegetation, requiring pioneers to penetrate it. The vines or lianas wreathed the trees, like the boa constrictor, and festooned the way, as if they were placed for one of Astley’s equestrians to leap from the horse over them, or hung dangling like the ropes of a belfry. The valley reminded me of Humboldt’s descriptions of South American vegetation. The ground was unequal to boot, so that travelling through the jungle was extremely difficult and fatiguing. Here we first saw the seaforthia elegans, a palm equal in size to the cabbage-tree, with pinnate, ferny, or cocoa-nut leaves, from whose broad membranous leaf-stalks, or the spathae of the flowers, the natives make their water-buckets, simply by tying up each end, like their bark canoes; in the same manner the dairy farmers make milk pails and cream cans; and of the leaves they make hats and thatch - the cedar, both white and red; and another smaller fern-leaved palm-tree, yet undescribed, of great beauty, its trunk more ligneous, and its leaves more palmy, than the common arborescent fern. Our way through the dark dingle crossed the same fresh-water creek fifteen times. The crinum here re-appeared, together with a large arum.
“In the first part of our journey, this day, we crossed the shallow entrance from the sea of Illawarra Lake, a large openong a little to the south of the Tom Thumb’s lagoon of Captain Flinders. The lake was illustrated by natives in their canoes, looking very characteristic and beautiful, now that the progress of English civilization has disarmed this part of the coast of those savage dangers, with which it threatened Captain Flinders and Mr. Bass, when they were here in the Tom Thumb open boat. The view was so picturesque - the lake, the hills, and the Indians, ‘the spirit of them all,’ - as to deserve a painter. Our route admitted of two or three gallops along the sands, which afforded great reliefs to the tedium of the forest paths and the fatigue of the jungle. Although we set out almost at sun-rise, yet it was nearly sun-set before we arrived at Shoal Haven, where Mr. Alexander Berry has taken his grant of land, on either side of the Shoal Haven river. This is the gentleman who first learnt at New Zealand the fate of the ship Boyd, which was cut off by the savages in the year 1809, and who brought away the very few survivors of that massacre. * [*Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. II. p. 403] He has, since his final settling in this colony, explored the geology of this coast, with great ardour, from Port Stephens to Jervis’s Bay, and read before the Philosophical Society of the colony an excellent paper upon the subject.
Thursday [sic], 21st. October. - Ascended with Mr. Berry the mountain called by the natives Coolingatta, under which he is building his house. From this considerable, but well-grassed, eminence, we saw, as in a map, the sea, the river, and the coast, from Cape George, which is the south head of Jervis’s Bay, to Black Head or Point Bass of Captain Flinders, a fine point of grazing land (some of it naturally clear), which we had passed on our way the day before, including Bowen Island off the Bay, Crook Haven (the Shoal Haven of the charts) and Shoal Haven River. The mist prevented us from seeing the Pigeon House Hill of Captain Cook, still further to the southward. The entrance of Shoal Haven River from the sea is dangerous even for boats, and that of Crook Haven, three miles to the southward, or the real Shoal Haven of Flinders, is not very safe. One of the arms of Shoal Haven is separated from Shoal Haven River by an isthmus not a hundred and fifty yards broad; and across this Mr. Berry has cut a canal, being the first first canal in Australia. ‘The land at the back of Shoal Haven (says he), and south of the river, is low and swampy, so that in some places to be incapable of producing trees. There is, however, a more elevated border along the immediate bank of the river;’ and this he has cultivated. He has been up the river more than twenty miles [Burrier], when he was stopper by a long rapid. At this place the river was about a hundred and fifty yards wide, and was flowing perhaps double that distance over small water-worn stones, which it hardly covered. The tide flows thus far, which may be considered the termination of inland navigation. So much for the Shoal Haven River. Although I am afraid that these grants of land will hardly ever repay Messieurs Berry and Wollstonecraft for their outlay upon them, yet whoever extends the settling of New South Wales further than anybody has gone before him, is a benefactor to the colony. I am afraid, in this case, that Man has taken possession before Nature has done her work. Immense swamps and lagoons have only been just left by the sea, and the forest land is yet indifferent for grazing; but, though the cedar grounds end before Shoal Haven [an incorrect statement], the sea is open for any exportable produce that can be raised on patches of alluvial soil, on the alternate projecting points of the river; and Mr. Berry need not be alarmed lest any occupation of the immediate back country should shut in his cattle-run.
“Returned to Illawarra this day, though very rainy and stormy. Overtook some natives, the women (as is usual among all savages) acrrying the children and baggage, and the men nothing but a spear and fire-brand. The men led our horses through the difficulties, while we dismounted, and both men and women kept up with our horses a whole stage, upon the promise of sharing our luncheon at the end of it.
“Wednesday, 22nd October. - Rested this morning, and in the evening went to see the natives fish by torch-light. They make torches of bundles of bark, beaten and tied up, and with the light of these, scare the bream into motion that lie among the rocky shallows, when they either spear them with the fiz-gig, or drag them from under their hiding places with the hand, bite their heads, and throw them high and dry on the shore. The sight is very novel and picturesque - the torch being flashed in one hand and the spear poised in the other - though there were but few natives here at this time, the majority being absent feasting upon a whale which chance had thrown upon the coast. The Indians, however, by no means attribute this to chance, but to the kind providence of the spirits of their fathers, whom they believe to be transformed into porpoises (dolphins) after death, like Bacchus’s pirates in Homer, and who, in that shape, drive the whales on shore. With this view, the natives obsecrate the porpoises by songs, when they see them rolling. I found also that the aborigines of New Holland were strictly divided into two classes, the hunters and the fishers; and that they did not dare to encroach upon each other’s mode of gaining a livelihood. Red Point of Captain Cook was the scene of our torch-fishing. Much of the rock was flat, and veined in squares, as if it had been paved, seemingly the effect of iron and fusion. Captain Flinders says, the cause of its being named Red Point escaped his and Mr. Bass’s notice, but it was plain to us that the iron gave it a reddish appearance.
“Thursday, 23rd October. - Returned to the neighbourhood of Liverpool this day, though very showery. The ascent of the Illawarra Mountain was very steep and difficult, the worse for the rain that had fallen. We were obliged to climb dismounted. The hill appeared to me worse than the pass up Mount York on the Bathurst road; but the route that avoids it is not preferred.
“So much for the county of Camden, which contains the celebrated Cow Pastures of New South Wales, and is full of excellent grazing land, at the back of the mountain ridge, and well watered, which Governor Macquarie’s good agricultural districts of Appin and Airds are certainly not. The country at the back of that is called by Mr. Berry ‘the verdant, well-watered, and very desirable pastoral district of Argyleshire.’
B.F.”
|
