October 2019 – Edition 175

Tents were also popular for short-term accommodation.

Here is a very touching photo of a family living in a tent (with timber additions) in Queensland in the 1880s. It demonstrates the hardships facing early workers and settlers. Presumably the lady’s husband has obtained work locally.

She is holding a baby and there is a large kettle on the outdoor fireplace. It would have been fortunate for them that Queensland has a warm climate.

Northern hemisphere readers may be puzzled at the use of bark and rough split logs in the construction of bush huts in Australia, compared with the northern hemisphere pines, which were straight and split easily, and the wood was comparatively easy to cut.

An excellent example of the ease of constructing softwood huts in the United States is afforded by the famous Lewis and Clarke expedition, which comprised a number of backwoodsmen. In about 1800 the men constructed huts for their snowbound winter in the High Sierras, and then used the light timber to build rafts to travel down the river to the Pacific Ocean.

Roofing would have been mainly bark or occasionally split timber shingles, but rarely comprised corrugated iron until much later.

Readers may be surprised to learn that corrugated iron was invented and patented in England as early as 1829. From about 1850 it appeared as a building material in Australia, and by the mid-1880s Australia had become Britain’s largest customer. Local production facilities were begun by the legendary BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary) at Newcastle in 1915 and at Port Kembla in 1939.

However in the colonial days corrugated iron, which was galvanised with a coating of zinc, was mainly used in the cities due to its expense and weight. In fact it became so popular that it was used for suburban fencing, as I remember in a pre-First World War house where I lived.

[Here is another Holtermann photo, showing two ladies in front of a bark hut, clearly showing the bark chimney.

Cooking could have been carried out on a fire in the open, as shown in the earlier tent photo. Cooking in a hut would have been on an open fire combined with a chimney.

Construction of a chimney was essential if a fireplace was to be installed inside a hut. The chimney could be built into the side or end of the hut or it could be partly detached. If it was built into the hut it was best if it was made of (or lined with) tin, stone or brick so that it could not catch on fire, however despite this bark and wattling was frequently used to save expense, as shown graphically in the above photo.

Flooring was mainly provided by compacted earth, clay or stone, and sometimes the more expensive sawn timber.

In the case of slab huts, in particular, the timber in the walls was not tight fitting and allowed draughts to come in during windy weather. Also many huts were built in areas with cold winters. Calico sheeting or hessian fixed on the inside of the walls was often used, but a simpler method was to fasten old newspapers to the walls, using simple flour glue. I saw this used in an old stockman’s hut in the 1960s, and found it very interesting to read newspapers dating back to the 1880s.

The style of fencing would have been governed by its purpose, for instance horizontal “post and rail” fencing for cattle paddocks and vertical picket fences for smaller animals.

In the early days glass for windows was expensive due to the length of time taken to make panes of glass and the difficulty in transporting it over rough bush roads. Perhaps large glass windows became a status symbol, compared with small panes of glass.

Accordingly instead of glass some bush huts had shutters propped up with poles, as shown on the right hand side of the above hut (these were common in the mountain huts I have visited).

Some huts had no windows.

[Below photo of trapper’s hut]

In remote areas, in particular, huts were often highly improvised. Here is an old photo of a trapper’s hut in the remote Burragorang Valley in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Its method of construction is very mixed, to say the least, and the collection of objects hanging from the roof on the right hand side is a variety of traps to catch rabbits, foxes, possums and wombats. Nearby is his rifle. An animal skin is nailed to the door.

Modern readers might question why a hut would be of such a minimal standard, however it should be remembered that before the First World War there were no unemployment benefits or other Government assistance.

Also in comparatively remote areas it was common to patch up huts with any odds and ends which became available. After kerosene was discovered in the 1860s shale oil was mined at Hartley (one of my great great grandfathers was a shale miner there) in the Blue Mountains. Used for household lighting and heating, in rural areas it was distributed in four gallon drums housed in wooden crates. When the “kero” had been used the drums and crates could be flattened out and used for patching. Hessian bags (used to store corn or wheat) were also popular.

When I was young I would take a one gallon drum in my billy cart down to our local produce store to get it filled with kero. Being a small boy I somehow managed to come home smelling of kero and being banned by my mother from coming into the house until I had changed my clothes.

At this stage I have concentrated on the use of local materials in Australia, aimed at ease of construction and keeping costs down. The same principle was applied overseas, as I will now show.

Crofters were poor farm workers living in parts of Scotland and on the northerly British islands. Trees were rare, due in some cases to over-enthusiastic clearing by earlier absentee landowners or to the harsh climate. The crofters leased the land, so there was also not much incentive to build substantial housing.

The only local materials readily available were stone for walls, and straw or grass for roof thatching.

Similarly, typical log cabins were very popular in rural areas in the United States. Unlike Australian trees, the conifers were straight, and of uniform diameter for considerable lengths, and were easy to cut and trim, all of which made walls of horizontal logs easy to construct. The timber could also be split easily for roof shingles or roof sheets.

Remembering that my original motivation for researching bush huts came from an article I wrote previously about Philip Behl, who adopted my wife’s young orphaned great grandmother Louisa, I am now returning to Philip.

When he first arrived at his farm holding in Wolumla on the far South Coast of New South Wales as a single man his first priority would have been to construct a hut as quickly as possible for the least expense, using local materials, so that he could start farming as soon as possible. All local huts would have had bark roofs and dirt floors, but the options for walls would have been to use (a) vertical sheets of bark or split logs or (b) “wattle and daub”.

However Philip and Mary were married later in 1866 and had had three children in fairly quick succession, so it is likely that when Louisa arrived at Wolumla shortly before Christmas in 1872, 13 years after Philip took up the holding, the farm would have been well established with a much-improved small timber cottage and outbuildings. Louisa may have slept in a verandah “lean to”.

Our ancestors certainly had much harder lives than we have now, as demonstrated by the old methods of housing. In my research I could not help marveling at what our ancestors endured. I hope that when you turn on your air conditioning your reaction will be similar!

 “
All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”