Timbercutting in the South Arm
Cedar getters were the first pioneers of the South Arm. The bullock teamsters cut "drawing roads" through the dense bushland. The work was arduous, and the timber cutters had only an axe, adze or cross-cut saw as their primary tools of the trade. The trees were enormous, and springboards were used to climb (and lop) these forest giants. So skilled were these men that they could tell within inches where a tree would fall.
It was a hard life, especially for the women looking after their families - A Milsom.
The men built rough humpies close to the area where they were felling. These were crude structures comprised of timber slab and bark, bedding was usually hessian bags filled with bracken fern, and cooking facilities would be outside over an open fire.
When the cedar trees were felled, they were cast into the river or creek where the logs would lay, sometimes for four or five years, waiting for a flood to send them down to what the cedar-cutters called “saleable water”. Sometimes the felled timber was left in the scrub for 10 or 12 years.
From the 1860’s Byangum, being the head of navigation, became a staging depot/loading area to transport cedar logs, which had either been hauled to Byangum by bullock teams or floated downstream from the upper reaches of the South Arm.
At Byangum, some of the logs would have “dogs” or hooks driven into them. A chain would be run through the outside logs holding all the logs together to create a raft. The timber cutters would put their mark on their logs’ end, which would then be tallied for payment.
Old rafter Joe Hall used to raft these logs to Murwillumbah. He would erect a camp on the raft and push the raft down the river with the tide using a long pole. If the tide travelled upriver, he’d pull over to the bank and camp for the night until the tide turned.
At Murwillumbah, the logs would be loaded on ships bound for Sydney. Some logs would be washed out to sea and picked up by sea-going vessels bound for England.
As time moved on, local sawmills were established. Millwork was a dangerous occupation, and the loss of fingers was a common occupational hazard. After much research, we now have a list of 27 sawmills operated simultaneously on the South Arm. Most of these were “case mills”, producing timber cut to make banana cases.
The first known sawmill on the South Arm was on a property known as TIRZAH, advertised for sale in August 1889 Bakers Road, Byangum. After the cedar trees were removed, other timber species such as teak, pine and hardwood were felled.
