Henry Wickham, adventurer, Knight, smuggler, tobacco planter and father of the rubber industry.

Bill Bryson, writer of many entertaining non-fiction works including Down Under and A Short History of Nearly Everything dedicates several pages in his 2013 book One Summer: America 1927 to an eventful story of 70 000 smuggled rubber seeds and a young English adventurer in Brazil.

While the Herbert River Valley in the late 1870s was on the frontiers of exploration and settlement, it was just that, the unknown potential, that attracted men and women from all of the world, both moneyed and those of meagre means. While some came and persevered, the vast majority, came, ventured and went on to disappear into the ether or go on to make their mark somewhere else in the world. One such was a Henry Alexander Wickham, that very same adventurer who had ventured to Brazil in 1871.

When he died in 1928 at the fine old age of 82, and by then Sir Henry Wickham, he was variously described as ‘father of the rubber industry of the British Empire’ or a “living [Sir Walter] Raleigh” or a “smuggler” who was responsible for the industry that “has changed the habit of civilisation and put 35,000,000 automobiles and 40,000,000 bicycles on the roads of the world.”

So what was he doing in the Herbert River Valley? Bill Bryson recounts that after Wickham had sold his 70 000 rubber seeds to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a good amount “With the money thus made, Wickham went to Queensland, in Australia, to start a tobacco plantation.” While he is described in the Herbert River Story as American, American he was not. He was English, though he spent much of his adult life in the colonies. A short obituary gives these details: Sir Henry Wickham was born in 1846. He was explorer and pioneer planter for half a century in the equatorial belt, Central America, Orinoco, Amazon Valley, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. He was sometime Commissioner for the Introduction of Para Indian rubber for the Governor of India, and also inspector of Forests and Commissioner of Crown Lands.”

The thing about popping up in the colonies is that you can be anything and anybody you want to be and so Henry Wickham, arriving in the Valley in circa 1877 after his failed plantation venture in the far north of Brazil (as described by Bill Bryson) convinces a Mr. J.E. Hammick that he is a tobacco expert from the Americas and they embark on growing tobacco together at Hammick’s property of Coolamantong. Meanwhile Henry Wickham has bought his own property called Maragen. Douglas R. Barrie in Minding by Business: The History of Bemerside and the Lower Herbert River District of Queensland Australia recounts the difficulties Wickham and Hammick faced growing tobacco in the Valley. As Barrie recounts it wasn’t that they couldn’t produce a good grade of leaf, it was that they couldn’t cure it quick enough to meet the large local demand, so the product they had to market was in the end  inferior and did not meet the discerning standard of the local market!!

Wickham also tries some coffee growing. Coffee, tobacco, sugar, cotton, these were plantation crops that were looked to as potentially securing the settlement and economic viability of the north. He seems quick to blow his own trumpet for already in October 1877 the Acclimatisation Society notes a letter they had received from Henry Wickham detailing that he was having success with coffee growing. The Society records that “…it appeared that plants of the Liberian coffee, which that gentleman had himself imported from Kew, were thriving vigorously on the Lower Herbert, and that there could be no question of the climate being suited to this very promising addition to the exotic plants of commercial in the colony. Whether it would become a staple product was of course quite uncertain; but the fact of the plant being found in dry, hot situations, near the sea level, afforded great encouragement for believing that it would freely yield its fruit in Queensland.”

However it would seem that nothing of his plantation ventures in the Valley inspires Wickham with optimism to continue here, despite his initial flurry of hopefulness, and so by 1882 he ceases tobacco and coffee growing and leaves the district soon after. However much of the 569 acres of land he ownes was not disposed of until much later. Some of it became the Mount Maragen Town Selections. While a town as envisaged never developed, Bemerside eventually became that township with the Seymour Hotel built on one of the larger of the town blocks.

Sir Henry Wickam, drawn by Tom Cottorell
for the Advertiser in 1928.

When he left the Herbert River Valley after his failed tobacco growing attempt Bill Bryson writes that  “Then he went to Central America, to British Honduras, to grow bananas. That venture failed, too. Nothing if not resilient, Wickham recrossed the Pacific to British New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), took out a twenty-five-year lease on land in the Conflict Island, and set about collecting sponges, cultivating oysters and producing copra from coconuts. At last he achieved modest success, but the isolation was more that his wife could bear. She decamped to Bermuda and never saw him again.”

Sources:

 “Sir Henry Wickham Dead,” News, September 28, 1928, 15.

Barr-Linney, J. “Adventurers of the Century: Sir Henry Wickham, A Living Raleigh,” The Advertiser, May 5, 1928, 23. Illustrator Tom Cottorell

“Smuggler Founded Great Industry. Sir Henry Wickham and the Rubber Seed,” The Southern Mail, February 4, 1936, 3.

“Death of Pioneer Planter,” The Telegraph, September 29, 1928, 8.

“Queensland Acclimatisation Society,”  The Queenslander, October 13 1877, 22.

Barrie, Douglas R. in Minding by Business: The History of Bemerside and the Lower Herbert River District of Queensland Australia. Ingham: Douglas R. Barrier, 2003.

Bryson, Bill. One Summer: America 1927. London: Transworld Publishers, 2013.

Vidonja Balanzategui, Bianka. Herbert River Story. Ingham: Hinchinbrook Shire Council, 2011.                     

The Tree of Cockaigne

Chloe Salmon reaches the top of the greasy pole and clutches her
prize of cash. Photograph by Sarah Scragg, State Library of
Queensland: Australian Italian Festival

Picture attribution: Landscape with greasy pole. Majolica Cloister
of Santa Chiara, Naples, (1739-42). Architect Domenico Antonio
Vaccaro, painters, Guiseppe and Donato Massa.

We repeat community and family traditions, but often we don't know where or how they originated. The greasy pole, which features at each Australian Italian Festival is such a tradition.  Everybody enjoys the spectacle and amusement but does anybody know the origins of this challenge? It  began in a time when the poor and the rich ate very, very different foods. The competition, which requires strategy and stamina, traditionally, has as its reward, foods of some value, like prosciutto e formaggio! Winners of the greasy climb were rewarded with food that was usually unavailable to them.

Peter Robb in a work called Street Fight in Naples: A City’s Unseen History has this to say about the history of the greasy pole. “All over Europe the Tree of Cockaigne was part of the carnival festivities that preceded the austerities of Lent. It was basically a greasy pole with a couple of sausages tied to the top and whoever reached them first won the sausages. In Naples the Land of the Cockaigne was always more elaborate, Naples having more poor people than anywhere else in Europe. The rewards were greater and so was the violence of the contest. The Land of the Cockaigne involved painted scenery and an ersatz forest  of trees, a complex construction usually described as the Cockaigne machine, bearing cheeses, hams, sausages and other delights in their upper branches. The mass assault on the food was a brawl that always ended in shed blood, broken and bones and quite often deaths. It was an entertaining and reassuring sight for those who were not themselves hungry, and choreographed for laughs.”

The Land of Cockaigne comes from Dutch literature and refers to Luilekkerland which is the land of the lazy and the gluttonous. In popular stories this land was described as a “mythical place where there is no need to work, and where food and drink are so abundant that we only need to open our mouths to take in what we desire.”  The Land of Cockaigne is the subject of many famous artists’ paintings.

Next time you watch and laugh as keen competitors slip and slide down and hopefully up the pole spare a thought to the hungry of Naples for whom long ago, the prize meant more than life and for whom the risk of scaling the pole could be injury or death.

Sources: Robb, Peter. Street Fight in Naples: A City’s Unseen History.London:  Bloomsbury, 2010.

“Heilbrunn Time Line of  Art History,” The Met,  http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/26.72.44/.

From small things, big things grow....

While sugar has been the longest lasting, most profitable crop grown here there has been much experimentation since the first European settlement in the Valley in finding alternative or supplementary crops. Tobacco achieved some commercial success over a number of attempts and physical evidence in the form of drying sheds dotted around the district, and a tobacco press still preserved at the Tyto precinct give mute testament to that industry.  Rice was another, and today the Biasi, Accornero and Russo families are venturing on a 21^st century experiment with production of that crop. However it is not the first time that rice was grown in this district.   

Rice was possibly introduced to Australia by Chinese gold prospectors coming to Australia for the Gold Rushes. In the 1860s rice was being grown by the Chinese in North Queensland to supply the northern gold fields. However it is the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme that makes large scale rice production possible. By 1928 Australia was growing enough rice to supply its own domestic consumption needs and had in that year even produced an excess of 3 000 tonnes that could be exported. Rice was grown in paddies and depended on a ready supply of water. In order to encourage a domestic industry, the Federal Government, in 1927, imposed a duty on imported rice, but also came to an agreement that rice would not be grown outside Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA).  

In 1930 it was reported in the Northern Miner in relation to the Herbert River Valley that “Some interest is being shown, no doubt on account of the restriction of the extension of the acres of sugar cane lands, in the introduction of new crops into the district. Mention has been made in previous letters of the growing of pawpaws at Abergowrie. For some time past both tobacco and rice have been grown on a small scale on Frank Fraser Ltd’s land at Blackrock, and last week several excellent examples of rice were on view at Messrs Hardv and Venable’s office Ingham, grown by Mr. Mackie at Blackrock. The tobacco grown is reported to be looking splendid, and a fine crop is expected from it.”

Nevertheless a commercial venture of rice was understood to be hampered by legislation as this Townsville Bulletin report of July, 1946 testifies: “At the last meeting of the Bowen Chamber of Commerce it was stated that in response to representations from the local chamber, the following additional chambers have expressed themselves as favourable to the action taken by Bowen regarding the removal of restrictions on rice growing in Queensland — Ingham, Warwick, Gympie Traders' Association and Ipswich. The Brisbane Chamber advised that thev are still in communication with the Department of Agriculture on the subject.” In September of that year in response to a question by Mr. Theodore (Herbert) of the Secretary for Agriculture and Stock, the reply was given that rice seed had been obtained from overseas and indicated that rice growing in Queensland conditions would be trialled. On further enquiries by the Townsville Chamber of Commerce in 1950, the Federal Department of Commerce and Agriculture stated that there were no Federal restrictions on rice growing and that in fact “Agricultural production is a State function, and there is no restriction on rice production. At the same time, growers would be well advised to consult the State Department of Agriculture before going in for cultivation on a large scale. At present, rice is grown commercially in Australia only in the Murrumbidgee irrigation area. There, the competing demands of fruit and other crops for the limited quantities of water available make it necessary to control the area put under rice. This, however, is not with the' intention of restricting rice areas, but to make the best use of the water."

In 1967, centred on the flood plain soils of the Burdekin delta, a small rice industry began. A long grain, high quality rice was produced for which there was a ready market.  At the same time what has been described as a “tiny lower Herbert, rice industry” also took off.  Hampering this fledgling industry was availability of a suitable water supply.  An alternative way of growing rice which presaged the way that the Biasi, Accornero and Russo families are now growing rice in the Herbert River Valley was shown possible by a Mrs. A.E. Maddern of Yuruga in 1950: “An Interesting experiment with rice seed, carried out by Mrs. A. E. Maddern, of Yuruga seven months ago, has proved successful. Of six grains of rice planted, three germinated and matured. Known as Dry Land rice, the seed was grown under ordinary district conditions, with very little cultivation, just being watered casually. A sample brought to town showed a well matured plant, the rice thickly clustered on the stems showing excellent development, a rough estimate being about 6000 grains of rice to the one rice seed. The seed was received from a sister of Mrs. Maddern's at Redland Bay, Brisbane, who also experimented at the same time but the seed failed to respond to growth.”

Traditional paddy field. Image sourced from: Ingham, Richard. "Gene breakthrough could boost rice yields by 20 per cent." PhysOrg, August 22, 2012. Accessed August 4, 2106.http://phys.org/news/2012-08-gene-breakthrough-boost-rice-yields.html.  

Rice grown "dry land" method. Image sourced from: https://twitter.com/canegrowers/status/575443544359374848
  

Sources:
“Detailed Historic Timeline of the Australian Rice Industry,”  Sun Rice, accessed August 4, 2016,

https://www.sunrice.com.au/media/6662/detailed_history_of_the_australian_rice_industry.pdf

Courtenay, P.P. “Agriculture in North Queensland.” Geographical Research 16 (1978): 29-42. Accessed August 4, 2016. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8470.1978.tb00313.x.

Queensland Parliamentary Debates [Hansard] Legislative Assembly.  September 3, 1946. Accessed August 4, 2016. https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/documents/hansard/1946/1946_09_03.pdf.

“Ingham Notes.” Northern Miner,  June 7, 1930, 2.

“Rice growing.” Townsville Daily Bulletin, July 6, 1946, 1.

“Ingham area.” Townsville Daily Bulletin, March 10, 1950, 5.

“Rice Sowing In North Queensland not Commonwealth. Controlled. Babinda Chamber of Commerce.” Cairns Post, November 4 1950, 1.