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Image Credit: Richmond River Historical Society, Website

This post is about the History of the Richmond River area west of Evans Head and Woodburn.

Camping 2 nights at Coraki at the Richmond River, I have time for some research what this area looked like when industrialized from 1860 on and what happened to the local tribes there and the river area, now mostly used for Sugar Cane production.

The Drogher Aggie and Timber Raft on the Richmond River

What This Image Reveals

This remarkable photograph captures a moment in the industrial transformation of the Richmond River valley, likely from the late 19th or early 20th century. At first glance, it appears to be a simple documentary image of timber transport, but closer examination reveals the mechanics and scale of an industry that would devastate one of Australia’s largest subtropical rainforests within a single human lifetime.

The Raft Itself:

In the foreground, we see an “immense raft” of squared timber logs—probably 30-40 visible in this section alone, though the full raft likely extended much further. These are pine logs, not the prized red cedar that drew the first timber-getters to the Richmond in 1842, a telling detail: by the time photography became common enough to document this scene, the cedar was already exhausted. The industry had moved on to other species, systematically working through the forest’s resources.

Look closely at the logs’ surfaces. They are not round, as nature made them. Each shows the flat planes created by days of labor with broadaxes—the “squaring” process that converted massive rainforest giants into marketable octagonal timbers. You can see how the flat surfaces allow the logs to pack tightly together in the raft, bound by chains or heavy ropes visible as cross-ties. This wasn’t just practical engineering; it was necessary geometry. Round logs would shift and scatter. These squared timbers, each branded with its owner’s mark, could be lashed into stable rafts and worked up and down the river with the tides, or—as shown here—towed by steam power.

The Drogher:

In the middle distance sits the Aggie, a modest steam-powered drogher—a shallow-draft tug designed specifically for river work. Notice its utilitarian design: no elegance, no passenger accommodations, just a working vessel built to haul. The visible smokestack tells us this photograph captures a moment after 1863, when William Yeager, the young Canadian entrepreneur, brought the first steam drogher (Keystone) to the Richmond River and changed everything.

Before steam, timber-getters worked with the tides, lashing rafts to the riverbank when the current turned against them, waiting hours or days to resume their slow journey to the wharves at Coraki or Lismore. The k—steam-powered at “5 miles per hour,” as one account proudly noted—eliminated that waiting. They could tow rafts upstream against the current, cross the treacherous bar at Ballina more safely, and maintain schedules that sailing vessels never could. This single technological innovation accelerated the timber extraction exponentially.

The Landscape:

The cleared left bank contrasts sharply with the dense vegetation on the right. This is not natural asymmetry. The left side has been “improved”—stripped of forest, likely for agriculture or settlement. The building visible there might be a riverside dwelling, a processing shed, or a warehouse. The right bank still shows thick growth, though whether this is remnant Big Scrub or secondary regrowth is impossible to determine from the photograph.

What we can’t see—but must imagine—is what this landscape looked like before 1842. The “Big Scrub” covered 75,000 hectares here, a vast expanse of subtropical rainforest dominated by white booyong and red cedar, growing on the fertile basalt soils deposited by the ancient Mount Warning volcano. The Bundjalung people had lived within it for at least 12,000 years, maintaining walking trails, camping clearings, and harvesting bush foods—black bean, macadamia, finger lime. They called this river junction Gooregie—“meeting of the waters”—a sacred place where ancestral spirits lingered.

What’s Missing from This Frame:

Every photograph conceals as much as it reveals. This image shows us the result of the timber industry but not its violence. We don’t see:

• The cedar-getters in rough bark huts, living like nomads as they moved from one stand to another
• The 135 bullock teams hauling logs through the forest, carving tracks through the understory
• The pit-sawyers digging beneath each felled giant to convert it into flitches, leaving mountains of waste wood to rot
• The two-ton chain strung across the Richmond River at Casino, catching up to 400 logs at a time as they floated downstream in floods
• The Bundjalung people, progressively pushed from the riverbanks as settlements grew, eventually confined to Box Ridge Reserve by 1907
• The 1842 Evans Head massacre of approximately 100 Bundjalung people—the violent “clearing” of human obstacles that preceded the clearing of trees

And we don’t see the scale. This single raft represents perhaps one day’s haul from one section of forest. In 1868 alone—just one year—over 3 million superfeet of cedar left the Richmond River for Sydney, carried by 242 sailing vessels and 12 steamers. By the 1890s, 99% of the Big Scrub was gone. Less than 1% remained.

The Technical Achievement and Its Cost:

From an engineering perspective, this photograph documents impressive innovation: the development of steam-powered river transport, the creation of a sophisticated rafting system that could move massive quantities of timber efficiently, the establishment of an integrated industry linking forest extraction, river transport, sawmill processing (at Oakland and Coraki), and ocean shipping to Sydney markets.

But that technical achievement came at a catastrophic environmental and human cost. The squared logs in this photograph each represent not just the felled tree itself, but the 30-40% of each trunk abandoned as waste in the squaring process. They represent the destruction of surrounding vegetation to access widely-scattered cedar (averaging only one tree per hectare). They represent the displacement of the Bundjalung from their ancestral lands, the extinction of cultural landscapes, the loss of irreplaceable biodiversity.

A Moment Frozen:

This photograph captures a routine working day on the Richmond River—probably unremarkable to those who witnessed it. The drogher operator, the raft handlers, anyone watching from the left bank would have seen this as ordinary commerce, the normal business of a thriving region.

But we see it now with different eyes. We know what happened next: the timber ran out, the sawmills closed (Oakland shut down after the 1921 flood), the river trade collapsed as railways arrived, and Coraki—once the largest and most prosperous town on the Richmond River—became a quiet backwater bypassed by the Pacific Highway.

We also know what didn’t come back: the Big Scrub, the Bundjalung territorial control, the thousands of years of accumulated ecological relationships. In their place: dairy farms on cleared land, catastrophic flooding worsened by the loss of forest cover (Lismore’s 2022 flood reached 14.4 meters, the worst in modern Australian history), and scattered remnants of rainforest totaling less than 700 hectares.

This photograph, then, is both document and eulogy—evidence of human ingenuity and industry, yes, but also a memorial to what was destroyed to create the world it depicts: that calm river, that working steamboat, those neatly squared logs floating toward the sawmills and the waiting markets beyond.

Image Credit: Richmond River Historical Society
Estimated Date: 1880s-1920s
Location: Richmond River, Northern Rivers region, NSW

Published by Peter H Bloecker, retired High School Teacher from Holstein.

Christmas 26 Dec 2025.