Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

Murwillumbah. The railway runs along the narrow coastal shelf between the mountains and the sea, and is the lifeline for the small communities strung like beads along it. The area is defined by the spectacular semicircle of mountains, ridges and escarpment which forms the volcanic shield of Mount Warning. The volcano has been extinct for at least two million years but the traces of its activity remain in the monumental upheaval of the land into fold upon fold, ridge upon ridge of rich volcanic soil. The buttresses of the ancient volcano reach down like the ribs of a fan from the apex, the volcanic complex centred on Mt Warning. The fan opens wide to the sea at Ballina, Byron Bay, Brunswick Heads and Tweed Heads. These buttresses were once richly clothed with the subtropical jungle known to the cedar-getters as the Big Scrub. This is a magical landscape even today, but in its primeval state, before Captain Cook first sighted and named Mt Warning, or the first white foot stepped into its green and fantastic gloom, it would have resembled a scene from Jurassic Park with its groves of bangalow palms, its impenetrable thickets of stinging tree and lawyer vine, and its under-layer of tree fern and cunjevoi.
    The European history of the area goes back to the times when the cedar logs were hauled by bullock teams to the edge of the bluffs at sites still known as Cooper’s Shoot, Skinner’s Shoot and Possum’s Shoot. The raw logs were sent spinning down the shoots to the narrow coastal shelf where other bullock teams hauled them out into the surf to be loaded onto schooners waiting in the bay. We are not told how many were crushed by a ricocheting log, or how many drowned in the surf in what seems to have been a desperate enterprise for both men and bullocks. At the time of my story the Big Scrub is still being felled to make way for pastures of paspalum and clover. My mother’s snapshots show friends and relatives posed against chest-high stumps in paddocks that best resemble the churned-up battlefields of the Somme. This is called clearing, as though it’s a virtuous pursuit, a cleansing of riotous and uncontrolled nature. The basis is being laid for future battles between developers and the claims of conservation.
    If the apex of the volcanic shield is Mt Warning, the focal point is Cape Byron, the most easterly point of the Australian mainland. On it stands the lighthouse, solid, dazzling and pure, the eye of this world. The light at Byron Bay presides over my story. It can illuminate and warn, but is powerless to prevent the actions of any, let alone those with whom I’m concerned. A minor and fixed light shines steadfastly out to sea, visible only from certain dangerous shoals. The main light does a complete revolution, flashing intermittently from dusk to dawn. Its arc fingers the distant volcanic folds running down to the sea, the cliffs and waterfalls, the clusters of bangalow palms and the remnant patches of rainforest back to Goonengerry and the Whian Whian State Forest. It briefly lights up the exposed cowbails where a family is finishing the last of the milking. Its arc takes in villages with historic names such as Eureka and Federal, and more evocative titles such as Jerusalem Creek, Emigrant Creek and Repentance Creek. Others like Tintenbar and Newrybar are derived from Aboriginal place-names, although the Aboriginal race is at this time banished from both the rainforest and the farms. Billinudgel itself was once the Aboriginal place of the king parrots .
    At the time I speak of, Christmas 1924, Billinudgel is like a small American frontier town. Its one street, overhung with the verandahs of the general store and butcher’s shop, terminates on the corner close to the railway station, where the two-storey timber pub, the New Brighton Hotel, later to be known as Ma Ring’s, is clamorous with male drunkenness, mateship and good humour. The general store is large and rambling, with