August 2019 – Edition 173

Introduction

Above is St Pauls Church of England, Stanthorpe (located in the south east of Queensland) built as a bark hut in 1872. Reverend Frederick Richmond is standing at the door. The bark hut was a temporary structure, with a new church being erected in the following year. The impetus for this construction arose from an influx of miners resulting from a “tin mining rush” to Stanthorpe in that year.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was in Australia a resurgence of interest in folk songs. One of my favourites was “The Old Bark Hut”, the first verse being:

“Oh, my name is Bob the Swagman before you all I stand

And I’ve had many ups and downs while travelling through the land

I once was well-to-do my boys but now I am stumped up

And I’m forced to go on rations in an old bark hut

In an old bark hut in an old bark hut

I’m forced to go on rations in an old bark hut”

My additional motivation for this article is that it will build on my recent article of May 2019 about my wife’s great grandmother (Louisa Eleanor Lenton) and explains the options available to Philip Behl when he settled at Wolumla in the 1860s and took in Louisa in 1872.

However the article is also relevant to early explorers, and my wife’s and Brian Harrison’s convict ancestors. Perhaps it is also relevant to my great great grandfather Thomas who probably dabbled in gold fossicking in the early 1850s.

The Holtermann Collection

Some of the photographs in this article come from the Holtermann Collection.

Arguably the most famous photographer in Australia in the 1800s, the picturesquely-named Beaufoy Merlin was born in England in 1830 and came to Australia in 1849. He began his photographic career in Victoria in 1866 (trading as the American and Australasian Photographic Company) where he photographed the buildings in Melbourne and in country towns. He then travelled to Sydney, photographing towns on the way. Within a few years he had developed a unique style of outdoor photography involving the use of figures in his photographs.

1872 saw Merlin setting up a photographic studio in the mining town of Hill End (north of Bathurst) in NSW with the assistance of the wealthy miner Bernhard Otto Holtermann (of “Holtermann Nugget” fame). Holtermann appointed Merlin to be official photographer for his planned ‘International Traveling Exposition’.

This project became one of the greatest projects in Australian 19th photography. Holtermann bought Merlin a larger camera. A studio was built on land owned by Holtermann in Hill End and excursions were made to surrounding areas by a horse drawn caravan containing a dark room. Unfortunately in 1873 Merlin became too ill to continue the project, which he passed on to his assistant Charles Bayliss (1850-97), before he died from pneumonia later that year.

In 1951 a collection of 3500 glass photographic slides was found in the Holtermann family’s family home (coincidentally this was not far from my grandfather’s house), these now form “The Holtermann Collection”.

By coincidence there was a family connection with Holtermann. My great great uncle George Jepson Jerrems worked for Holtermann’s company in its early travels but blotted his copybook by pinching ten shillings and spending time at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Sydney’s Darlinghurst Jail.

I will now describe the primary methods of construction of bush huts in Australia in the 19th Century, where the main emphasis was on the ease and cheapness of construction and repair.

Here is a photo of a giant tree stump in eastern Victoria, demonstrating the size of some of the hardwood trees.

Central to the construction of buildings (including houses) and wharves from the early Australian convict days was the use of hardwood timber, which occurred in vast forests. Although there were some extensive softwood forests, including red and white cedar, these occurred mainly on the NSW North Coast and the fine-grained timber was soon used selectively for furniture and internal fittings. It was so popular that it was also exported overseas, mainly to England, and eventually became rare.

Some hardwood trees were particularly suitable for specific purposes, including turpentines for wharf piles (which are still used for this, being resistant to marine borers) and yellow box trees which had a perfectly round trunk and were used to make wagon wheels.

Another advantage of hardwood timber was that it was fairly resistant to pests like borers. One native softwood, known as “native pine”, was very common on the NSW Western Plains and was very easy to cut but it was very susceptible to borers.

Readers may recall my earlier article about timbergetting, which showed enormous trees, some over 70 metres tall.

I can vouch for the toughness of the Australian hardwood because when I was young I helped my father cut up trees for firewood with a two-man cross cut saw about five feet long, after which I would split the logs using a sledge hammer and steel wedges.

I found using the cross cut saw quite fun because provided it was very sharp my father and I could get into an easy rhythm of swinging backwards and forwards and “letting the saw do the work”.

Bark huts were somewhat of an institution in colonial days in Australia due to the ready availability of sheets of bark in forested areas. The potential size of sheets of bark is shown graphically in the above photo of Stanthorpe Church. The role of the saplings (used also on the other huts in the photos) on the roof was to weigh the bark sheets down so they did not curl.

To state the obvious the bark was peeled off large eucalypt trees, some of which reached over 30 metres to the first branch, the upper limit for useful bark. The trees were felled and the bark was stripped off the logs using axes. The bark was quite thick and resilient, as demonstrated by the name of one type of eucalypt known as an ironbark.

Other trees with thick bark included stringybarks and mahoganies.

In lightly forested areas smaller strips of bark could be obtained from smaller trees.

Also stating the obvious, the bark sheets had to be flattened and cut to shape.

Australia’s aborigines had used bark for many thousands of years for canoes, coolamons (dishes) and gunyahs (shelters).

To the side is a photo of a spectacular scar tree (as they are known) showing where the bark has been cut away for a canoe. How the aborigines climbed to the top is probably a story in itself.

There are thousands of these trees in inland Australia, particularly on rivers and billabongs (lakes formed by rivers).

In early colonial days bark was frequently used to build huts for convicts and settlers. In later years bark huts were built by settlers and miners.

Here is a Holtermann photo of ladies dressed in their “Sunday best” in front of a bark hut in the gold mining town of Gulgong in mid- western New South Wales in 1872.

At first glance one might query why such proud ladies would live in something as basic as a bark hut. But I think the answer is that their husbands knew that they would only be staying in that locality for one or two years while the alluvial gold could be obtained by individual miners or groups of miners working together, after which more technical means of obtaining the gold such as mines would have been opened.

The families would then move on to new “strikes”, seeking the elusive gold metal.

Internally the spartan nature of the huts was mitigated by the use of coloured curtains and drapes, and ornaments and pictures so that the hut felt like a true “home”. Curtains could also be used to create partitions.

Here is another Holtermann photo showing a mixture of methods of construction of bark huts by the use of split timber on their sides to produce what became known as “slab huts”. This term was a misnomer because the timbers were not in “slabs” at all.

Rough split saplings or logs were used for “slab” construction. The timber was split using wedges, but even if it was then smoothed off it could still be very uneven, and would have gaps. However one of its saving graces was that it was very durable.

The timber could be placed vertically or horizontally, and would be held in place by strips of timber placed at right angles at the ends.

In the above photo the hut on the left is a mixture, using sawn timber and a window on the front, and bark on the roof and sides, whereas the hut on the right uses split logs on the sides, and a tin chimney. The fence on the far left demonstrates the use of vertical pickets. The lack of front door steps would indicate that both huts had earthen floors.

Sawn timber



Sawn timber was often used instead of slabs, or for doors etc. This involved the use of (a) pit saws operated manually by two men, which were very labour intensive but low cost, or (b) power saws in a sawmill using an up-and-down saw with a reciprocating motion or the faster circular saw, where, if this technology was available locally, the sawn timber would have been expensive.

The use of pit saws dates back to the early days of settlement in Sydney, when convicts cut down large hardwood trees in the river valleys near Sydney and the logs were floated down to the fledgling settlement.

One of these convicts was my wife’s ancestor James Moore, who had been a sawyer in England, and was quickly allocated to pit sawing for the Government Stores. Unfortunately James’s timber cutting career was cut short later when he was cutting timber in New Zealand and the local Maori tribe took umbrage and converted him to first class protein.

As often happens I have run out of space for this article, so I will complete the subject of bush huts in a future article.