“ I was born in Traralgan in East Gippsland, Victoria. My father worked in the local paper mill. When I was 3 we moved to Melbourne and on the strength of where I was born I always tried to make out that I was a country kid. My parents were fantastic because they were very nature based. They made sure that my brother and I had a lot of camping and a lot of exposure to nature so right from the beginning I felt really embedded in the natural world. It’s a fantastic thing to give your kids.
My mother was working for the Brotherhood of St Lawrence and then worked as an Administrator at La Trobe University so I had a history of women doing useful work and she was also the one that ran the money in the house.
Living opposite the paper mill was pretty awful place to live but I never felt deprived and we had access to the river there. I do remember when I was about 10 we couldn’t access the river anymore because it had become too polluted. Prior to that it had a little swimming club and we all went down to the Yarra River and hung out. I remember that making a big impression on me when we couldn’t swim in the river because it was too toxic.
One of the places we camped was O’Reilly’s on the border of NSW and QLD. One of the walks from the guesthouse was to this enormous Brush-box tree. I’m not sure what the girth would be but it feels like about 3 metres. I remember meeting this tree and thinking, this is my country, and I had this very strong feeling that rainforest is where I belong. It’s funny to look back now and realise there was this epiphany when I met this Brush-box tree, of all trees, because that was the tree that was the basis of the big battle at Terania Creek.
There’s also the story of the Stinson wreck in 1937 and Bernard O’Reilly who was still alive at that time I stayed at the guesthouse. He was the one who spotted the Stinson wreck. This plane had been flying from Brisbane to Lismore. It hit the top of the range, burst into flames and killed some of the passengers. Bernard trekked through the wildest most rugged terrain to try and find the wreck, which he did, and there were still people alive. He was a master at it. He spotted a dead tree up on the range and thought that had to have been burnt so he battled his way up there. That was my introduction to the area and it also alerted me to the place Lismore which is where the plane was meant to arrive. I was only 10 but my head was reeling with this area.
I finished school in Melbourne and felt like a nature nerd, sort of out of place but when I was 15 and still at school I met Hugh. I’m 71 now so it’s such a long story. Hugh once said – It’s lack of imagination that’s kept us together (laughs). We met because we were both going to some bird observers meeting which is incredibly boring but we were the only people under 50 in the room so we made a beeline for each other. He was 22 and he was the only boy I’d met who was interested in nature.
We spent our courting days going down to Phillip Island banding penguins. The banding program at the time was fairly primitive. You had to put your hand down a burrow and drag out the penguin to band and weigh it. Problem is there may have been a Copperhead snake down there or a Mutton Bird. Hugh had very long arms so he did most of this.
When Hugh was in his early 20s we were holidaying by the beach in Victoria. We found a snake and Hugh picked it up at the back of the head. It swung its head a round and bit him on the ball of his thumb. It was a Brown. We put the snake in a bag and went to the local clinic. We did all the wrong things, firstly picking it up then moving and not even bandaging. Just stupid stuff. Hugh was taken to Melbourne in an ambulance. He was allergic to the Anti-venom and he almost died. Luckily he managed to scrape through but it was a close call.
I left school at 16 and started Uni at 17 and did Politics, Spanish and a few other things but ended up dropping out and going to New Zealand. I was silly because why would I leave Hugh? I was young and foolish and God love him, he followed me there. We worked in a shearing gang for a few months. At that stage we wanted to stay together and had to decide where that would be. We loved NZ but we were drawn back here. I was 19 when we returned.
We decided to marry because Hugh’s parents were staunch Methodists and they were upset about us not marrying. We didn’t care either way so we got married and I changed my name to Nicholson against my principles. My Dad was originally called Murphy. There’s weird misconceptions about the Murphy name but Dad was really good at tennis and it looked like he might be a star and he wasn’t going to be a tennis star with the name Murphy. He changed his name to the local park which was Chelsworth Park. So for ever after people said, Gee that Laurie Chelsworth must have been important, they named a park after him (laughs). So I changed from Chelsworth to Nicholson.
We were looking for land and heard that the cheap, derelict land we were looking for was in Terania Creek or Tuntable Creek. Sure enough there was very cheap land. The block we ended up buying was right at he end of the road and had just been sold for $3,000 for 100 hectares. The place was covered in weeds, no house, this was 1974 so the access to the land had been washed away from the ’74 flood. By the time we came along the Nimbin Festival had happened and that put the land up to $20,000. We bought it with help from my parents which was their life savings. We couldn’t move there because we had no money so we went to work on a cattle station in the snow country. It was hard because we had to kill kangaroos to feed the dogs. My doctor said that’s probably where I got the Hydatid disease which I still have 40 years later.”
(To be continued this evening – if I finish editing in time)
