Rosewood History

Queensland Times (Ipswich, Qld.), Saturday 13 November 1926, page 7

MR. E. RAFTER
BUILDER AT 85

At 85, Mr. Edmond Rafter, of Grandchester, can do as hard a day’s work as many men half his age. A reporter who interviewed him recently found him perched precariously on the ridge of a high shed he was building, driving nails as well as a young tradesman. He declared he was too busy to talk, but was induced to come down from his perch to tell something of the “early days.”

He was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and on Easter Saturday, 1862, left Dublin to board the immigrant ship Teresa at Plymouth. The voyage lasted 16 weeks. His first work when he landed in Queensland was as off-sider to a well-known bullocky, Jimmy Banks, of Cooper’s Plains. In this job he helped with the carting of the timber for the first bridge across the Logan River on the road from Jimboomba to Cooper’s Plains. Then he went to Westbrook, shearing, and when the shed had cut out moved on to Pine Mountain, where for three months he worked with Messrs. W. Dowe and Brown cutting pine and hauling it to the river, where they made log rafts and took them downstream to the mills.

FLOOD DAMAGE 1N 1865.
He started out alone in this work, but the river rose very high in 1865, and swept his logs away. That year the Bank of Queensland closed in Ipswich, and the whole country was at a standstill. There was no demand for timber, so Mr. Rafter went back to the droving. He worked for a time for a sawmill on the Condamine, and now and then took small shearing contracts. He selected 320 acres of land at Bigge’s Camp (Grandchester) under the 1870 Homestead Settlement Act. Between shearing seasons he fenced the land and built a house. After nine years of this he settled down to dairying, and kept at it until six years ago, when he let the farm; and started odd job contract work. Among the many things he did be fore he started dairying, before he selected, and while he improved the property, were fencing at Westbrook for Mr. Hugh. Nelson, who afterwards became Premier, and work as a lengthsman, and afterwards as a ganger on the newly built railway from Grandchester to Ipswich.

RAILWAY CURIO.
He also worked for a time on the construction of the line, and Mrs. Rafter, whom he married in 1872, still keeps as a curio, the first pick that was used on the line. Road contract work for the Tarampa and Mutdapilly Divisional Boards was also part of his work in those days. The first engagement offered to him when he came to the country was that of delivering the “‘Queensland Times,” The wages offer ed were not high enough, and he refused the job. Money was much harder to get than he had been led to believe by the immigration agents in Ireland. They had said, that in Queensland there was “money everywhere,” and that the tracks were often blocked by branches broken from the trees by the weight of wild fruit they carried. When he first went to Grandchester the big tunnel on the Little Liverpool Range was being built. The railway encampment was like a small town of tents near the small tunnel. Most of the population of the district was then black. Hundreds of blacks were often seen around the camp, many of them stark naked, fiercely tattooed and painted, and armed with long, dangerous-looking spears. However, no harm was ever done to anyone by them. Even the earliest settlers. Messrs. John Creedy, Edward Pender, and John Webster, were not troubled by them. “There have been many a hot day and many a big flood since the first settlers came here to change the sheep station at Bigge’s Camp into a farming district,” the old man says. Then the road to Toowoomba carried all the traffic, passengers and goods, for a big part of the inland. At every waterhole one would find two or three bullock teams camped, and there were hotels between Ipswich and Toowoomba at the Three-mile, the Seven Mile, Rosewood, Calvert, Laidley (two), Gatton, Helidon, and at the foot of the Toowoomba Range. Mr. Rafter’s four brothers have had almost as interesting a colonial record as himself. They also have lived chiefly in the West Moreton and Darling Downs districts.