Karen Murphy

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This issue is all about archeology. Karen Murphy is one of a team of archeologists excavating the site of the town of Mill Point, trying to piece together the layout of Mill Point and the lives of the townspeople.
Mill Point was a small town based around a timber mill on the shores of Lake Cootharaba, on the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane. The mill and the town packed up and left in 1892 when they ran out of timber in the surrounding bushland.
Artefacts uncovered include slate pencils from the school, fragments of dolls, bottles for hair tonic and sauce, broken ceramics, and earrings.
I asked Karen Murphy about colonial archeology and Mill Point, and I picked up a lot of interesting titles on archeology.

READERSVOICE.COM: How long have you been interested in colonial archaeology and what interests you about this type of archaeology in particular?

KAREN MURPHY: I’ve been interested in archaeology in general since I was about eight years old and read about the Incas and the Egyptians. Once I started studying archaeology at university seven years ago I became much more interested in Australian archaeology both Indigenous and historical. I have focussed my research more on the historical archaeology of Australia over the past few years. I’ve always been interested in Australian and Queensland history, even researching my own family history, and I think there is so much of Queensland’s and Australia’s history and archaeology that has yet to be examined. Looking at our more recent past enables us to learn more about ourselves and where our society is now, and also to better understand where we want to go.

RV: What was the Tennessee Hollow project you were working on in the U.S.? What similarities were there to Mill Point, Lake Cootharaba?

KM: Tennessee Hollow is part of El Presidio de San Francisco which was the first European settlement in the City of San Francisco. The Presidio was the fort set up by the Spanish in 1776. The project is a collaboration between Stanford University, U.S. National Parks Service and the Presidio Trust. I worked as a field assistant on the project for five weeks in 2004. The project is a study of how the valley was used during the Spanish-colonial and the Mexican periods of the Presidio (ca. 1776-1847). At a broad level, the project is similar to Mill Point as they both investigate the daily lives of the community that lived at the site in a time when outsiders were moving to new places and new frontiers.However in other ways the site is quite different.The Presidio was a military community and the people were culturally diverse including Native Californians, Mesoamerican, African and European people. At Mill Point the settlement was a company town run as a capitalist enterprise with mostly European people in the community.

RV: When did interest in the Mill Point, Lake Cootharaba, sawmill site start?

KM: The site has been of great interest to the local community for many years, more particularly once the land was taken over by the Queensland Government as a national park in the early 1980s. A plaque was installed near the site for Australia’s Bicentenary, and The National Trust installed a memorial stone at the settlement’s cemetery in 1993. The first archaeological investigations were undertaken by Dr Eleanor Crosby and Anne Hibbard in 1991 to develop a conservation plan for the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. The Cooroora Historical Society has also had a long interest in the site with a display about Mill Point housed in the Noosa Shire Museum at Pomona. The more recent Mill Point Archaeological Project began in late 2003 following community concern about the site, in particular the cemetery. A collaborative project was set up between the Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, University of Queensland and Noosa Shire Council. The first field season was held in early 2004 with the main components of the site being surveyed and recorded by archaeologists and archaeology students, in order to have the site entered on the Queensland Heritage Register.

RV: When did you hear about it and start getting involved in archaeological research there?

KM: I first heard about the project when the 2004 field season was undertaken by some of my colleagues at the Cultural Heritage Branch of the Environmental Protection Agency (where I was working at the time). When I decided to do my PhD in archaeology in 2005 I wanted to focus on doing historical archaeological research in Queensland, and was interested in the great potential that the Mill Point site provided to help tell us about the early residents of Queensland.

RV: Before actual excavation started at the site, what sorts of records or reading was done to get as much background on the site as possible?

KM: A lot of historical research about the site had already been done by Dr Eleanor Crosby (during her 1991 work at the site) and by local historian Dr Elaine Brown who had undertaken a detailed history of the early timber industry of the entire region. Irene Christie, another local historian, had also done an immense amount of research into the mill. The historical documentation that they had consulted included newspaper reports from the period, photographs of the settlement, personal letters from mill residents, and oral histories from mill descendents. Before excavation started, the project team also did extensive surface survey investigations to identify the materials left behind from the mill. Because the site of the settlement is so large, survey investigations help us to identify different areas without the need for excavation, and also to identify areas that might be best targeted for excavation.

RV: Research discovered news of a cricket match, and school trips to the beach. Can you talk about these and where researchers found out about them?

KM: There are descriptions in the newspapers of the day by various visitors to the mill settlement. Published in The Brisbane Courier, the Gympie Times and The Queenslander, there are detailed accounts of the trip up from Brisbane by boat to the settlement and descriptions of the people, the industry, the facilities, the forests and the activities undertaken at the settlement. In 1876 a correspondent from the Gympie Times spent his Christmas holiday at Elanda Point. The sawmilling stopped for the week and the community celebrated with a range of activities including hunting and fishing, excursions to the ocean beach, a regatta on the lake on Boxing Day, and a cricket match on New Year’s Day with the timber-getters and bullock drivers versus the sawmill hands.

RV: Can you briefly tell the story of the founding of the site, with the Gympie gold rushes and the four businessmen who started the venture?

KM: In 1865, Queensland had only been open to free settlers for a little over 20 years, and had only been separated from New South Wales as its own state for six years. It was facing financial crisis – banks were failing, unemployment was high and there was civil unrest. The outlook was bleak until an important discovery in 1867 on the Mary River by James Nash – he found gold. Within six months there were over 15000 men on the Gympie goldfields. Even today, Gympie is often called “the town that saved Queensland”. People were drawn to the Gympie goldfields from all over Australia and the world. Elsewhere in the region, the speculator, Charles Samuel Russell had noted rich timber resources in the Noosa district.He travelled to Gympie in 1869 looking for newly rich miners as partners to join him in his new business venture. He found four wealthy men to join the enterprise - James McGhie, Abraham Luya, Frederick Goodchap and John Woodburn. Russell proposed to apply for a large block of land at Lake Cootharaba in the Noosa district and develop it as a farm to fulfil the selection requirements. The main attraction however was the area’s rich timber. The partners, first known as A.F. Luya and Co., built the sawmill on the property in 1870 and began milling timber. After the required two years of residence and improvements, the company acquired the title to the land. Russell left after this time, handing over his interests to the other partners, who then became, McGhie, Luya and Co. from 1873.

RV: What would the population of Mill Point have been, at a typical moment from 1869-1892?

KM: There are various estimations of the population but they are just that – estimations. The company records have not been found so we can only go by other records such as the census, and school records of the number of children, to try and estimate the numbers. There are descriptions of 24 two-roomed cottages, and mention of 150 employees and their wives and children farewelling one of the owners. The school records show up to 40 children enrolled at any one time. So estimations of the population at its height vary between about 150-200 people.

RV: Have there been relatively few artefacts found at the site or enough to paint a picture of life there?

KM: We have found thousands of artefacts left behind by the residents of the mill settlement. A lot of these consist of the everyday rubbish left behind, and other items lost or discarded – broken bottles, broken ceramic plates, cups and bowls, buttons, beads, nails, and slate pencils. Even though the evidence is fragmented it still provides us with plenty of material with which to paint a picture of the everyday lives of the people of Mill Point.

RV: How many field excavations have you been on at the site?

KM: As part of the Mill Point Archaeological Project we have done fieldwork at the site since 2004. There has been two weeks of surveying in February 2004 and again in February 2005. Excavations began with two weeks in July 2005. This year we have spent eight weeks excavating at the site over the course of the entire year.

RV: What did the site look like when field work began there?

KM: The site is very overgrown with vegetation both native and exotic, including the original melaleuca swamp species as well as weeds such as lantana.We have done extensive clearing of weed vegetation in order to be able to look for archaeological remains, however in the Queensland climate the battle against weeds in National Parks is constant. There are numerous physical remains from the mill and later periods that were able to be seen including the tramways embankments, chimney and farmhouse remains, fenceposts, and pylons from the wharves in the lake.

RV: What might you do in a day of field work at the Mill Point site?

KM: On a typical day of excavation the crew is up and heading to the site by 7.00am. We drive to the National Park and then the crew walks into the site while the equipment is driven in by four wheel drive.The crew rotates through various tasks, being assigned one particular job each day. We usually have two or three people working on excavating in specific 1 metre by 1 metre squares. Everything needs to be carefully recorded as we go because once we dig it up the archaeology is destroyed. We take lots of photographs, make lots of notes, and describe everything we see and do. The excavators take the sediment that is excavated to the wet-sieving station set up down by the lake. With two people operating the hose and sieves, all of the sediment is put through 3mm and 6mm sieves so that we can recover the artefacts. The sediment at Mill Point is very gravelley so the sieved material then goes up to the sorting tent where we have two or three crew members working on going through the gravel to remove the artefacts. T he artefacts are sorted by material type as we go so that it makes analysis back in the lab easier. At the end of the day the sorters pack the artefacts into plastic bags to take back to the lab in Brisbane. Then it’s a nice walk back out of the National Park about 5.00pm for some hot showers and cold drinks. You can check out our activities on our daily fieldwork diary on our website at http://www.atsis.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=42042&pid=42037

RV: What are the problems you encounter living on-site?

KM: When we are working in the field we don’t actually stay at the site itself as it is a National Park and the designated camping areas are away from the site of the settlement. We stay in nearby Boreen Point at the Apollonian Hotel in quite comfortable share accommodation. The publican looks after us well with plenty of food and drink to keep our energy going. Having all the volunteers sharing the accommodation is part of the fieldwork experience and we try to always make it a both a social and educational experience. We usually have talks on archaeology in the evenings, along with pizza and movie nights, and very competitive games of Trivial Pursuit.

RV: What is the layout of the site, with buildings, houses, shops, a church, the mill itself?

KM: Because we don’t have any of the original company records and the remains of the settlement have deteriorated so much, the layout of the site still has a lot of pieces missing. There are written descriptions of the layout at the time, and a map sketched by a man whose ancestors worked at the site. From our survey we have been able to identify the location of the mill itself right on the point beside the lake, and the location of some of the workers’ housing, the tramway and the cemetery. But we only have one photograph of the entire settlement viewed from the top of the main mill building to show us where other buildings were located. Further archaeological investigations may help us to identify the location of such places as the school, and the blacksmiths. Because the buildings would mostly have been made of timber though, there will be little remaining of the structures themselves.

RV: At your talk you spoke of the discovery of sauce bottles, and how they differed from brands at another site. Also you found hair tonic bottles from the U.S. Can you explain how the discovery of these artefacts led to other questions?

KM: One of the most common products we have found is Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce – which of course you can still buy in the shops today.What is interesting is that Lea and Perrins is the only brand of Worcestershire Sauce we have found. Holbrook’s sauce was also popular at this time, but there is no evidence of it in the Mill Point settlement. This directly contrasts with the archaeology at the gold-mining towns of Paradise and Mount Shamrock in the Upper Burnett region – where the only sauce bottles the archaeologists found were Holbrook’s – no Lea and Perrins. This leads us to questions about the transfer of goods into the settlement. Was the company dictating what was available for the workers? Did they have any choice as to what could be ordered? It also leads to questions of broader patterns of global distribution of goods and patterns of consumption. Or was it just the storekeeper’s favourite brand? We have also found hair tonic bottles such as St Jakobs Oel from the Charles A. Vogeler Co in Baltimore, in the USA which was popular from the 1880s for treating hair loss. They also had the competing preparation for hair loss at the settlement – Barry’s Tricopherous from New York – which was popular from the very early 1800s. I find it interesting that they only had one brand of Worcestershire sauce but two brands of hair loss tonic!

RV: What were the squares found there on the last day of one field excavation?

KM: In keeping with one of the “rules” of archaeology – that is, you always find the most exciting things on the last day – we revealed our first possible structural evidence of the workers' houses at the end of the February field season this year. The concentration of bricks we found in two of the 1 metre by 1 metre squares that we excavated left us with a promising place to start excavating in June and July. During the June-July season we revealed a large concentration of bricks around 3 metres by 2 metres in diameter along with a high concentration of artefacts. We are not yet sure what the brick concentration indicates - perhaps a fireplace, or they were used for helping with soggy ground in front of a house, or perhaps related to the footings or stumps of the house itself. We’ll need to do some more analysis for a clearer picture, but based on the artefacts, it does appear to be the location of a house belonging to a family.

RV: Would people who lived there have travelled to Brisbane or anywhere else? How would they have got there and by what route?

KM: The company’s steamer the Culgoa made regular trips up and back to Brisbane from nearby Tewantin. The boat would take shipments of timber and passengers to Brisbane, and would return with goods and passengers. Smaller paddle-wheel boats then made their way from Tewantin to the settlement for both passengers and goods. The Brisbane Courier often had a front page advertisement for passage to Gympie via Noosa on the Culgoa, calling it the “shortest route”. This was before the completion of the Brisbane-Gympie rail line so the trip by boat was no doubt much quicker and more comfortable then trying to get through on the rough roads from Brisbane. There was also a route from the settlement to Gympie along Cootharaba Road which would also have been used by the residents either by horseback, coach or bullock dray. There is one story of a sawmill worker, from a personal letter from the time, who used to row a small boat from the settlement all the way down to Tewantin on his days off, to visit his fiancée, and then he would row all the way back overnight to start work first thing the next morning. Finally, Mr Luya, one of the owners, suggested that if he married the girl he would provide the timber for him to build a house for the couple at the settlement and he wouldn’t have to row to Tewantin all the time.-continued next page.

RV: By what route and means would their supplies have arrived at Mill Point?

KM: Most of the supplies would have arrived from Brisbane via the steamship the Culgoa. It would have supplied the township at Tewantin and surrounding areas, as well as the settlement itself.

RV: What sorts of accidents occurred at the sawmill at Mill Point?

KM: Although the steam-driven equipment at the mill was described as the latest technology, that didn’t stop it from being dangerous. On a cold July morning in 1873 the men had just finished their breakfast and were standing with their backs to the boiler to warm themselves and have a smoke. They noticed a bulge in the boiler moments before it exploded. The five men were injured – Phelim Molloy had one of his feet blown off, his brother Patrick was scalded, Charles Long was killed instantly, Joseph White had his leg blown off and was seriously scalded, and Patrick Tierney was also badly scalded. The doctor was called immediately from Gympie and arrived several hours later, but it is likely there was little he could do for the badly injured men. Three more of the men died of their injuries over the following week at Cootharaba, and the fifth Patrick Molloy died of his injuries a month later in Gympie. All of them were in their twenties. There had been another boiler explosion in Maryborough earlier that year (in which a third Molloy brother had been killed). This lead to an official enquiry which resulted in regulations being put in place about the operation of boilers and licensing those who could operate them. Details from the cemetery records also reveal other accidents including such descriptions as “accidentally killed by log” and “injuries at Cootharaba sawmill”. Other men who died may also have had work-related conditions including “rupture of intestines” which may have been an untreated hernia condition aggravated by heavy manual labour. Not only was it dangerous for the working men but also the children – one ten-year-old boy was killed after his left leg was torn from his body by a timber wagon.

RV: Can you describe the tramways and how they would have transported logs to the mill from the hinterland?

KM: The company built over four miles of tramway inland from the mill to bring the giant logs in from the forest. The tramway was built on raised earthen mounds through the swamp, enabling teams to work continuously, even in wet weather, bringing logs out of the forest to the nearest point on the tramway. Logs were loaded onto carts using a winch on a trolley, anchored to the tramway sleepers. Horses pulled the carts, each carrying a four ton log, down a steady gradient to the mill on the lake shore.

RV: What sorts of trees did they cut down and how tall or old would they have been? Are there any left?

KM: The timber that they were felling was what today we would call “old growth forests”; they would have been growing for centuries. They were focussed on the softwood species of trees including red cedar, white cedar, cypress and kauri pines. One worker described the majesty of the forests in 1883 in a letter back to England - “Anyone who has not seen the Australian scrub can have no idea of its grandeur; the timber seems endless….”. Of course the timber wasn’t endless and there are no trees of the size they were cutting down left anywhere in the district today.

RV: How was the timber transported from the mill to other towns?

KM: At first the timber planks were transported to the Gympie goldfields by bullock dray along the Cootharaba Road. This was not very successful due to the rough road and the steepness of some sections.They built a wharf beside the mill so they could load the timber onto punts. The partners designed and built flat-bottomed paddle-wheel boats called droghers to tow the punts of sawn timber from the mill, through Lake Cootharaba and Lake Cooroibah to Colloy, near Tewantin. They also bought the steamer – the Culgoa - to transport the timber out over the Noosa River bar and down to South Brisbane where they also set up an office and another mill in the mid-1870s. The owners, McGhie, Luya and Co, distributed and sold their timber from their timber yard in South Brisbane (which was located close to today’s Goodwill Bridge). They often had full page advertisements in the Post Office Directory (the Yellow Pages of the day) of various timber products including doors, window sashes, joinery, mouldings and architraves. Most of the timber from Cootharaba would have serviced the Brisbane market, and a lot of the timber would likely be found throughout old Queenslander houses and public buildings in Brisbane even today.

RV: What evidence has been found of the Aboriginal inhabitants in the area?

KM: During the Mill Point Archaeological Project excavations we have found a couple of flaked stone tools belonging to the Aboriginal people of the area. These have been found in deposits deeper in the ground than the mill period artefacts so are likely to have been left by people prior to the mill being set up. There is some historical evidence from photos and documents that local Aboriginal people worked for the mill, and there is much more investigation into the Aboriginal inhabitants in the immediate area of the Cootharaba Mill that can be done. Dr Ian McNiven has done extensive investigations in to the Aboriginal occupation of the surrounding Cooloola region.Archaeological evidence indicates that Aboriginal people have been using the region for at least 5500 years. There are shell middens throughout the region including on nearby Teewah Beach, the Cooloola sandmass and along the Noosa River. There are also stone artefact scatters in the Cooloola sandblows, and evidence of burials in the region. Other evidence of the Aboriginal inhabitants include a bora ring and scarred trees.

RV: Can you recommend a few books, whether or not on archaeology, especially any out of the way stuff people might not have heard of, and maybe say why you liked them?

KM: Some books of relevance to Mill Point:Cooloola Coast: Noosa to Fraser Island: The Aboriginal and settler histories of a unique environment, by Elaine Brown, 2000, University of Queensland Press. An excellent and enjoyable volume of the whole history of the region and its people.

Struggle of Memory, by Joan Dugdale, 1991, University of Queensland Press. A novel which begins at the Cootharaba mill settlement.

Some Australian historical archaeology books which show the variety of research that has been done in this country: Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks, 1890-1930, by Jane Lydon, 1999, Monash Publications in History.

Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood, by Grace Karskens, 1999, Hale and Iremonger Publishers.

Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community, by Susan Lawrence, 2000, Melbourne University Press.

Paradise: Life on a Queensland goldfield, by Jonathon Prangnell, Lynda Cheshire and Kate Quirk, 2005, UQASU and Burnett Water Pty Ltd.

Valleys of Stone: The Archaeology and History of Adelaide’s Hills Face, by Pam Smith and Donald Pate, 2006, Koppi Books and Miln Walker and Associates.

And Indigenous Australian archaeology: Archaeology of the Dreamtime: the story of prehistoric Australia and its people, by Josephine Flood, 2004, JB Publishing.

And archaeology in general: The Archaeologist’s Field Handbook, by Heather Burke and Claire Smith, 2004, Allen and Unwin Publishers. This is like my bible, full of great hints and tips, and details of how to do archaeology in the field. I never go into the field without it.

-copyright Simon Sandall.