Rosewood History ©
A bullocky and his team near the Rosewood Railway Station c. 1882
(Photo: State Library of Qld)
PIONEER TIMES
In our days of motor cars, trains, trams, motorbikes and bicycles it is difficult to picture the images in the mind’s eye of the old-timers in those faraway days when the pioneer was hard up for any kind of conveyance.
It begs the question. How many of us today would have the grit and determination of those pioneer men, women and children? It is astonishing what people can endure when their backs are to the wall.
Faced with dense, virgin scrub and only hand tools it must have been a testing time for the settlers. Horses, two horse drays, wagons, carts and “shank’s pony” were the only means of transport. Many men walked or rode long distances between towns just to have a look at a tract of land that had been opened up for selection.
It was not unusual for people to walk the twelve odd miles (approx. 20km) from Rosewood Gate to Ipswich and back before the railway line came through. In fact many of our pioneer immigrant families walked from Ipswich to the Scrub to make it their home.
Rough tracks were cut through the scrub which housed some dangers for “new chums”. Negotiating these thoroughfares was an art in itself. Often times it would be a very long way around to get to a destination e.g. to a creek to get water, to a railway station, to a church gathering or to simply to visit a neighbour. Some settlers in poorer circumstances had neither horse nor cart in their worst times.
The first supplies to townships were transported by pack bullocks before bullock drays became the universal method of transporting goods. The bullock driver and his team was a common and harmonious sight in the Australian landscape. What would the settlers have done without them? To the observer it looked as though the bullocky hadn’t a care in the world, ambling along slowly at walking pace. Anybody could drive a horse, but it wasn’t everybody who could drive bullocks. It was solely by the “holt” and the movement of the whip that they were handled. A spade and an axe were essential items out on the track. The driver’s eyes were continuously focused on the beasts and a good dog was of invaluable assistance. They travelled about 10-12 miles a day (a “stage”) and the sheer size of some of their loads was a sight to behold. It could take weeks or months to get to a destination.
Devon born Samuel Phelps, at age 11 (later a saddler at Rosewood, was living at Walloon with his family in 1861 when a neighbour engaged him at 2/6 a week to travel with him and his bullock outfit to Surat. For a month or two he camped at Rosewood, which he said comprised a hotel, a blacksmith’s shop and a slaughter yard on the Toowoomba-road. It was a great camping place in wet weather, he commented, and added as one with bitter recollections, It was famous, too, for its dingoes, wallabies, and mosquitoes. Sam Phelps told an interesting story of the bullocks struggling over the range, difficulties in crossing flooded watercourses, and the inconvenience of having all of their belongings soaked through. The destruction of old, useless bulls was too cruel to discuss. When he returned to Walloon he had no wish to go on the road again; but because he had two brothers who had teams, he had to keep at the job he disliked for several years more. In his boy’s mind, the experiences of one drought in the West left a lasting, terrible impression. Bullocks were dying everywhere for want of water, and the people were suffering badly. Finally he refused to take out one of his father’s teams.
Here is an account of the bullocky’s experience travelling from Drayton to Ipswich, written by correspondent “Ben Bolt” in 1923.
THE BULLOCK TEAM DAYS
“The Old-Bullock Dray,” of which Richmond Thatcher sang in the “roaring fifties,” was not a gorgeous affair, but it gave to many a stalwart pioneer a big shove on the high road to prosperity, and laid the foundation of fortunes that ran into five figures when probate dues were demanded. A two wheel concern without a brake, we found to be a disadvantage going down the pinches of the two ranges that lay between us and Ipswich. We could have locked our wheels, but the authorities set their faces against the practice, as locked wheels tore up the road, and the bullocky had to lash a good sized tree behind his dray to steady his team to the foot, where the piece of timber was unhooked and “snigged” to the side of the road. Thus was the summit of our Main Range denuded of timber, and Toowoomba given a clear way to run her vaunted tourist road. Then, “how jocund did we drive our team afield,” as Thomas Gray put it in other lands, and more circumscribed freedom.
THIRST QUENCHERS – In those days Galton kept an hotel at the foot of the range, and the old-time bullocky, who was a good drinker, quenched an ever recurring thirst before pushing along by the Monkey waterholes, over the Postman’s Ridge, down Soldiers’ Flat and across the sandy bed of the Lockyer into the little hamlet of Helidon, where a second camp was made and a second thirst dispersed. Then the eight, ten or twelve bullocks were yolked up alongside the dray. The polers backed into the pole, the 9ft whip, with its 6ft. handle of white myrtle or Cyprus pine, was waved with sundry obfuscations, and Grantham was cast behind, and the Gatton Creek, then bridgeless, was safely negotiated without a capsize, and a camp was made as near Jackson Curry’s hotel as possible. Some of the carriers used to push on to Cook’s Hotel, but most of them preferred the flat in front of Curry’s.
Next morning a start was made for Laidley, and the next the Little Liverpool had to be negotiated, and the night found the camp-fire lighted at Bigge’s Camp, now Grandchester. Then by eight to 10 mile stages through Rosewood, where a road had been made alongside the Rising Sun Hotel, but we stuck to the flats along the creek and sometimes stuck in them; the Seven-mile with its mile of logging calculated to shake out our pole-pins; then Three-mile where Johnnie M’Grath kept a pub, and the One-mile, where his brother Jimmie kept another, and a camp was made between Jimmie’s and the river. It was on that flat that the flood of 1864 caught us, and the Bremer kept flopping over the rails of its bridge for a fortnight. But when a thirst was on the river wasn’t in the race. Then loaded with supplies at Hassell and Ogg’s, J. and G. Harris, John Panton, or other merchants and forwarding agents for Drayton, Toowoomba, Warwick, Dalby and Downs and western stations.
THE NEWCOMERS – Sometimes a family, hired by some Downs squatter, would be seen perched up on the bullock dray, while the husband and father trudged alongside the driver; who in most cases stuffed him with weird stories of bush life making that family ruefully regret having left the home roof-tree. But many a family who had landed on the Downs on the top of a bullock dray helped largely, developing its latent resources, and rose to affluence in the infant colony. The bullock team being in the forties, fifties and earlier years of the sixties, our only mode of transit, those who wished to reach the Downs had Hobson’s choice. Here and there along the road could be seen a few two and three-horse drays carrying a few bales of wool down, or a few hundredweights of supplies up; but, the old bullock dray kept pride of place from the time Leslie’s teams were lowered down Cunningham’s Gap, until the little Lady Bowen drew into the railway station at Toowoomba on April 26, 1867, with her primitive railway carriages and a few tons of supplies from Ipswich.
ROSEWOOD DISTRICT 1875-1916
BULLOCK DRIVER – Robert Elliott jnr., James Yarrow, Charles Alfred Smith
CARTER – Thomas Farrell, Richard Webster Blackmore, David Elder, Joseph Edward Griffiths (Cream Carter), Reginald Henning
TEAMSTER – Frederick Absalom Loney, George Loney, Edward Ernest Baills (Mt Walker), Arthur Freeman (Tallegalla)
© Jane Schy, 2024