Road trip: Boys on an adventure. Setting off for Port Macquarie 1956. This is the second in a two part series. You will find the first here.
In 1904, the North
Coast Steam Navigation Company published its Tourists’ & Settlers Guide to the Northern Coastal River Districts
of New South Wales. By then, the Great Northern Railway had attracted most
inland traffic, but water travel was still the dominant transport mode along
the North Coast and up the coastal rivers.
The Guide is something of a classic period
piece, one that tells us much about the detail of Australian life in a
particular place at a particular time. It includes hints about cycle tourism.
By 1904, the safety
bicycle had become a popular sporting and touring machine, but it was still
more the workhorse for many working men in country and city alike. Bicycles
were used to get to work, to collect orders and to deliver goods.
By the 1950s, bikes
had become the province of young people, boys in particular. Both girls and
boys peddled to school, all schools had bike racks, but boys were allowed to
roam, girls were restricted.
“I still remember”,
Catherine Marker recalls, “learning to ride a bike when I was 7 or 8 with
friend Beryl teaching me. However, as a girl I was not allowed to do the fun
rides my brothers did”.
Bikes gave boys
freedom. They travelled.
John Caling recalls: ‘I used to ride out to my old mate
Robin Munsie's place "Strathhaven" on Burying Ground Creek most
weekends. When I first started that ride the Grafton road was only sealed as
far as Ralph Toombs' property at the edge of Armidale. The rest was gravel and
pretty rough in places”.
Dick McDertmott
remembers riding to Woolomombi Falls, Dangarsleigh Falls, Gara Gorge,
Thunderbolts Rock, the Dangarsleigh War Memorial and Gates, Dumaresq Dam, the
Blue Hole, the Pine Forest, Bald Knob and Hillgrove.
Sometimes, Dick and
his friends would travel with rabbit traps, slug guns over their shoulders. The skins would go to Thos Green and the meat to the Niagara cafe.
Most trips were day trips, but long trips were a rite of
passage for many boys.
In 1956, fifteen
year old Keith Douglas, Ken Sweeney and Richard Hoy set off for Port Macquarie
down the then dirt roads. By the end of the first day they were at the bottom
of the range. “Not a bad day’s ride”, Keith later commented.
Four years later, fifteen year Philip Kitley and friend
David Belshaw set off to ride to Sawtell, something that Philip recorded in a
piece in the Armidalian. They made it
in two days.
There wasn’t a lot of money around following the Second World War. Many of our bikes were made from bits and pieces, heavy steel frame bikes, but they were well used.
There wasn’t a lot of money around following the Second World War. Many of our bikes were made from bits and pieces, heavy steel frame bikes, but they were well used.
Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 26 June 2019. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here 2017, here 2018, here 2019
12 comments:
I budgeted at 10/- per week Jim as enough to keep me on my road trips in the 1950’s. Strange how the bicycle in its early days was emancipating for females but by the 1950’s had lost that characteristic.
Y the way I spent this morning in the company of Bill Oates looking at material for archiving. He ‘s due back in Bellingen in three weeks time.
On another topic I have just finished listening to a discussion on Doggerland with its obvious parallels to the flooding of Sahel landscapes.I suspect it will be sometime before we have the depth of data available for those lost lands that is now available for Doggerland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006707
That's a nice story, John. When bike is carriage and you sleep out, 10 bob could fund you! What records were you discussing with Bill? Your families?
I listened to the Doggerland program with interest. It will be a long time. I am not convinced we ever will! That's partly a matter of relative difficulty, partly lack of money, partly a question of focus.
Bill was at the Bellingen Museum to assess some records for archiving JIm. If you are in touch ask him if he has some interesting glass negatives recently to hand.
Re coastal flooding and lost habitable environments the lecture I attended at UNE gave a date of 9000BCE and later for Aboriginal settlement of the North NSW coast. I did challenge but was told authoritatively that no earlier sites had been found. I didn't pursue the point but thought the reason would be earlier settlement sites were now in fathoms of sea water. Even earlier sites would also have disappeared when sand mining swept through the entirity of the North Coast in the 1950's/60's. Sand Miners were particularly interested in the back dunes not the existing beaches.
I may do that re Bill. I was talking to him about our family papers but he was not keen. No space. Which is a problem at a time I have to move.
There is a problem with dates. The earliest date I know is, from memory, about that date. However, we have earlier Pleistocene dates for the Hunter and on Stradbroke Island, so it seems likely that there was some occupation. The land revealed when the sea fell was probably not very attractive. I tried to explore that in some of my posts. When the sea came back, it took several thousand years for the current environment to start to emerge.
If you look at the Doggerland story, we need a lot more tracking to consider what might have been possible.
I have a friend with a similar problem Jim, so far he has managed to hang on to a room at his University but eventually time catches up with you and you have to surrender a deal of your life as it is yours and other folks are already carrying theirs. I have to confess I understand the principle but am somewhat resilient in practice.
My question was specific to the North Coast of NSW Jim, say Port Stephens to the Tweed. An Academic answer had to be evidenced based and so it was, no evidence before ~9k BCE. now using deductive reasoning you know that has to be wide of the mark from any understanding of just how rich the resource base was to sustain occupation. A significant resource base would have followed sea levels as they fell, rose, fell and rose again. Most coastal evidence of occupation would have been organic and in this subtropical climate not easily preserved. Shell middens would also have followed the coastline and as we are at a relatively high water mark only the more recent would be susceptible to archeological discovery, same for fish traps as there is at Arrawarra. There is a large shell midden lost in suburban Sawtell as a significant number of others would be as urbanization has spread along the coast. I suspect the most desirable areas for Aboriginal camp and ceremonial sites would also be the ones to appeal for European
settlements so lost early. West of the Dividing Range is much easier to deal with.
I, too, am resistant! I think that is what you meant rather than resilient.
I knew the area that you were talking about, John. What we have to do is to better identify just what the changing resource base might have been. If we can establish that it would have suited or allowed human settlement, then it is a reasonable assumption that human habitation was present if it can be shown in adjoining areas at roughly similar times.
We cannot assume, however, that it was always productive. Here the coast that we know does not provide a guide because that productive environment is relatively recent. I have written a little on this. I suppose we might pose the question this way: could the North Coast have been occupied in the Pleistocene? If so, why? I think that this is one of the most important questions in New England prehistory.
Resistant, yes indeed Jim. To answer your question I would start by asking if the biota present at European settlement was substantially the same in the Pleistocene, if not in what way did it differ. If we know the biota, even with non-Aboriginal knowledge, we could estimate the food resource available. Mangroves and Melaleuca would make a good start. Given that the Dorrigo National Park is based on remnant Gondwanaland rainforest I would be willing to infer what we see now would not be much different to what you would have seen in the Pleistocene other than landform differences. We know that there was trade and ceremony exchanges between Coast and Tablelands over Millenia as well as language links. As the climate deteriorated on the Tablelands, not just the once, as a hunter/gatherer you would have folk memory to adapt via seasonal movement, seasonal movement of varying degree being intrinsic to aboriginal societies. The Aboriginals of the Darling River had Custom arrangements that allowed for those living in the deserts further West to move onto particular areas of the Darling in periods of water stress, once the rains came they would move back on Country, why not similar between Coast and Tablelands.
Morning John
"To answer your question I would start by asking if the biota present at European settlement was substantially the same in the Pleistocene, if not in what way did it differ."
I think the biota was different in the Pleistocene, at least in distribution. I also think that it changed many times and especially in the LGM. Consider the mangrove example. While mangroves grow as far south as the 38th parallel, they are a tropical or subtropical bush that grows in saline or brackish water inter-tidal water, especially estuaries.
Because of the structure of the continental shelf, the coastline revealed by lower sea levels would have been more rugged, the sea water also colder, especially during the LGM. There would have been deposition of silt and hence the build up of some delta structures but these would have been small compared to today. The result would have been far fewer mangroves.
I will pick up other things in a later comment
The following reference and a short quote give a good wide ranging review of the Australian context for sea level change Jim.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.co.uk/&httpsredir=1&article=1936&context=smhpapers
238 sea level. The samples collected for radiocarbon dating were collected from locations
239 extending from the Gold Coast in Queensland to Badger Head in Tasmania, representing an
240 extensive geographical range (1,400 km in latitude) along Australia’s eastern seaboard. The
241 additional data incorporated by Thom and Roy (1983, 1985), notably the mangrove stump
242 data, shifted the sea-level envelope to attain present levels much earlier than the previous
243 work by Thom and Chappell (1975) thus showing that the rates of sea-level rise were faster
244 than previously thought (we note that Thom and Roy also used ‘environmentally corrected’
245 14C ages for the marine reservoir effect in radiocarbon dating for their reconstruction). These
246 studies laid the groundwork for the recognition that local sea levels are partly dependent on
247 the geomorphological setting, and that geomorphological evolution of the coast may both
248 preserve evidence of relative sea-level change and influence how other sea-level indicators
249 preserve evidence of past sea-level changes. Nevertheless, the data allowed the construction
250 of a broad envelope to constrain the position of early to mid-Holocene relative sea level for
251 the east coast of Australia, indicating that sea level reached its present height by 6000
252 radiocarbon yr BP.
Colin Woodruffe at James Cook appears to be at the centre of estuarine and mangrove changes post LGM, he has set out a very good model of process.
Palaeoecological reconstructions, from drilling, dating and pollen analysis, record mangrove distribution over past millennia. Estuarine plains are underlain by a vertically continuous stratigraphy of muds, implying continuity of widespread ‘big swamp’ mangrove forests during decelerating stages of post-glacial sea-level rise c. 7000 years ago. In contrast, on higher-energy open coasts, mangroves back-stepped, but re-established as the shoreline prograded when the nearshore built to suitable elevation: a catch-up mode. These results demonstrate that mangrove response to sea-level rise has varied, determined by the availability of sediment and the oceanographic processes by which it is redistributed. How mangrove forests adjust in future will also vary as a function of local topography and sediment availability. Extensive plains flanking estuarine systems are particularly vulnerable to tidal creek extension and saline incursion under future higher sea levels.
John, thanks for this comment. Sorry for the slow response. I have been up country.
I have saved the paper for later reading. Your second comment was interesting. Because the continental shelf in New England is generally narrow and slopes, it is likely that much (not all) of the land revealed by the sea level fall would fall in the higher-energy open coast category. I need to review my material here.
As the waters rose, the coastline moved west to beyond the current shoreline. In the Macleay it was near Kempsey. Deposition from the rivers helped by higher rainfalls then pushed the coast out aided, I think, by deposition of seaborne sand. Then came the mangroves.
The last line in the model description is interesting re the future.
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