TIDBINBILLA MEMORIES
On [a] still frosty dawn in July 1959 I sat on a log beside the old wood cutters' track at Tidbinbilla fumbling at the controls of a tape recorder with numbed fingers to record the unbelievable beauty of the Lyrebird chorus. Beside me Harry Frith said quietly "one day this will be a National Park."
We had left Canberra at 3am that morning stopping many times on the way along the unsealed road to scrape the frost from the windscreen of the unheated Landrover and open the many gates. We left the Landrover just beyond the eucalyptus cutters hut and walked the rest of the way. When we had finished the recording we boiled the billy and ate our breakfast as the two cutters went by with their old horse and cart to gather their daily crop of leaves.
On our way home we stopped to chat with Charlie West who was living in the farm house that is still in use in the Park. Later I got to know him well as he was my only contact besides the two cutters in the four winters I spent with the Tidbinbilla Lyrebirds.
For the first two years of the study I was in and out from Canberra but in 1962 we built a hut and I was able to place microphones all over the study area connected to a switchboard and tape recorders to track and record the birds and live in relative comfort.
In that time I often met Charlie and the two cutters. Charlie did a great job keeping shooters off the area and was a mine of information. I heard that he once put a bullet neatly between the feet of a trespasser saying "if there is any shooting to be done around here I'm the one that will be doing it." I do not know whether this is true but I never saw a shooter on the place while I was there. I was at his place one evening sitting by the fire with Charlie and his grandad and played one of my recordings. His grandad said "that's a pheasant, used to be worth two and six a tail but they aren't worth nothing now." The Lyrebird feathers were used at one time to adorn ladies' hats. We have come a long way with our ideas of conservation since then.
The two eucalyptus cutters were an interesting pair. One was from Poland and the other from Yugoslavia. They would work for three months cutting and distilling the leaves and then a contractor would come with a truck to take them and their drums of oil to Queanbeyan. They would return after a few days with food and a few cartons of beer. On these occasions I was always invited to visit them and I learned that their families were still in Europe and all their money was sent to help with food and education for their children, some of whom were at university. One day they came to me in great distress. There had been a terrible earthquake in Yugoslavia and there was no news of the family. I took them to Canberra and the Red Cross people got news that they were all right.
I finished the Lyrebird work in 1965 and went to Western Australia and when I returned on a visit to Canberra the Tidbinbilla National Park had been established as Harry Frith had foretold.
Norman Robinson
Sorrento, WA, June 1993
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