Mt Best - in some ways still is

When I was a young bloke, more years ago than I care to admit, I spent much of my time at Sandy Point, down on Waratah Bay.

On many a warm summer evening my brothers and I would go up to Mt Best to shoot rabbits.

We’d get half-a-dozen for the pot (it was a big pot) and then we’d entertain ourselves trying to get two, or even three rabbits with the one shot. We succeeded quite often, too. We were using 12-gauge shotties and cartridges must have been much cheaper then.

Well, I went away into the army, where the cartridges were free, and didn’t get back to Mt Best until a couple of years ago. I went into the Foster police station to ask whether there were any properties around where we might be allowed on with our shotguns. I asked about Mt Best and the constable gave me an odd look.

“You’ll get shot yourselves if you go up there with guns” he said. Mt Best had changed. There were now many of those small blocks which are too big for a garden and too small for a farm. I didn’t go up there and I didn’t think much more about Mt Best until I heard that Rob Allott, once my boss and a great bloke, had come from that part of the world.

I say “that part” because the hill country down there is not quite like the rest of Gippsland and the people are not quite like most other Gippslanders. In that Gunyah/Ruyton/Woorarra/Mt Best area you have to live locally a long time before you are seen as a stayer. Second-generation residents can still be newcomers.

Still, it is a fascinating area, with an interesting history and wild physical beauty, in the landscape at least. I’ve walked all the way up from the highway, up through the gorge, to Mt Best. It is steep country and it must have terrified the men who first took it up.

The surveys of the Mt Best area began in 1890 and the first blocks in the Parish of Woorarra were advertised for sale in 1892. Mt Best was then known as Mount ‘A’, apparently because Surveyor Astbury had carved a large

A into a tree near the top of the mount. The Lands Department accepted this name and used it in formal documents, rather like W Tree in East Gippsland. Th blocks were sold in Melbourne and many of the people who bought them had seen little or anything of the country.

C. McCracken and D. Gibson, the first settlers, came onto their blocks in 1893 and began the Herculean task of clearing their land. The hills were wildly tangled and very steep. The trees reached up sixty metres or more, though the locals still claim it was more.

These were ringbarked and left to die, and then burned off in the autumn. There was a problem with this. The dead branches sometimes fell from the trees and when the wind roared through the tops it was often necessary to bring the cattle into the farmhouse clearing for safety. In one storm a selector lost nine cows to falling branches, a real disaster.

The scrub was so thick that a gale could be roaring through the tops when there was not a breath of wind at ground level.

Clearing the timber provided many tall tales and even a few that were true. Like several other places in Gippsland Mt Best had the tallest tree in Australia. This was the “Wonga Stump” on Clemson’s place. It is claimed that the tree was 250 feet, 76 metres, tall and had a circumference of 83 feet (25 metres) about 20 feet (six metres) up from the ground. The hollow stump was used briefly as a church and a school until it was burned in the 1898 fire. They say.

The timber was a serious problem because of the work involved in clearing the land but it also provided materials for houses and fences. You’ll have noticed how few stone buildings we have in Australia outside the bigger places.

There were many people who made wages from the forest while developing their farms. At a time when a pound a week was a fair wage the usual rates of pay were two shillings and sixpence per tree for felling and two pence or “tuppence ha’penny” for ringbarking, Fencing was paid for at one penny per post or one shilling a chain. Clearing tracks was worth about two shillings and sixpence a chain.

These were fair wages, but not high. There was always a problem in newly selected areas in finding cash money to live on while a farm was brought into production. Some settlers did these jobs, or spent time splitting palings. Others were hired as “pickers up”. This meant stacking the unburned logs after the initial burn so that they could be burned again. It was tedious, dirty and backbreaking work but there were few choices.

I mentioned earlier the naming of Mount A but the name was not to last. In 1898 Sir Robert Best, Lands Minister, agreed to come to the district and the locals, of course, tried to persuade him to do something about the roads. Remember that these were the southern slopes of the ‘Heartbreak Hills’, where lack of access was one of the things which sent many farmers broke and drove them from their farms.

When Sir Robert’s party reached the top of the mountain he was asked whether he would consent to it being named after him, and he, of course, agreed. Mason’s Corner was named at the same time, after M.S. Mason, MP for the area at the time. When the name changes were officially approved some residents met at the top of the hill and opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate and to toast the future.

It is said with rather less authority that Mt Fatigue was named by Strzlecki. I doubt that the Count would have been sufficiently sure of his position at that time for any of this names to be attached to any specific point.

Schooling became available when the Toora Upper school was opened on 23 December 1881, a very strange date to open a school. Perhaps that was just the date when the opening was gazetted. The school ran half-time (ie. it shared a teacher) with Franklin River and then with Shady Creek. The Toora Upper school closed in 1903 for lack of sufficient enrolments. In the middle of 1902 the Mt Best State School had opened.

This school, too, went through some difficult times. It opened in the first Mt Best Hall, which burned down just before the beginning of the school year in 1906 and the children were then taught in a private house. In 1907 they moved into the church and in 1910-1911 they moved again, this time into the new hall.

A new school was not built until 1922, sixteen years after the original fire. The school battled to maintain its numbers but there were forty children enrolled until a new school was opened at Mt Fatigue in 1923. Like Mt Best, the Mt Fatigue school was run in a hall built by the local community. It closed in 1931 but there were few remaining children to transfer back to Mt Best.

Now, bear with me. This story was started in 1986. What you’ve read today is part one – but part two will have to wait until I find my original notes – I know they are here somewhere!