Storm unearths buried history | Northern Rivers News | Local News in Northern Rivers

Byron Bay's Belongil Beach foreshore after taking a pounding from heavy seas.

Northern Star

LAST month's severe storm eroded a huge portion of the NSW coast, revealing hidden historic treasures in its sands.

At Evans Head, the wreck of what is probably the Pilot has re-emerged from its seabed tomb, not far from the mouth of Salty Lagoon.

As a result, contractors for Maritime Heritage NSW may pay the site a visit this week to record her exact location and take precise measurements.

The Pilot, 21 metres long, was built in Scotland in 1845 and driven ashore near Salty Lagoon in 1874 during a south-easterly gale.

Whether this wreck, measured accurately in 1976 at 17m long, is actually that boat is another question. Often names and registration were taken from old ships and applied to new ones, many built on the banks of timber-lined rivers like the Manning and the Hawkesbury before sailing north to trade with our pioneering settlements.

Marine archaeologist with Heritage NSW, Tim Smith, said the past few weeks had been full of excitement for historians.

At Woolgoolga, the wreck of the Buster has been uncovered to its keel. The 39m Canadian-built barquentine was wrecked at the government wharf in a south-east gale in February 1893.

Further south other wrecks also have been uncovered, including a previously unidentified timber ship at Stuarts Point - where the mouth of the Macleay used to empty into the ocean.

Mr Smith said there were 1800 wrecks documented in NSW but only about 280 had been found and identified on our coast. Most took place between 1870-1900, at a time when ship registrations were poorly documented.

For instance, 80 vessels were wrecked while crossing the Ballina bar.

“A lot were never seen again,” he said. “A lot of wrecks are buried in the sand.”

SPARE a thought for those colonial sailors who, in July 1889, experienced frightful conditions and only just escaped with their lives.

Today our weather forecasting models are incredibly accurate, if not quite perfect. Back then there was no such thing.

Sailors studied the barometer, paid attention to the shape of clouds and checked for dew on the deck of a morning.

When a black nor'easter descended on the NSW coast in the middle of winter that year, there would have been many sailors caught unawares.

In fact, a series of gales in that month (July) claimed five vessels off Cape Byron - the Fawn, Bannockburn, Spurwing, Hastings and Agnes. Some of those wrecks would be under the sands of Tallow Beach.

South of Brooms Head, off Sandon, the same gale wrecked the Annie Moore, with its flotsam ending up spread over 70 nautical miles of the coast after the blow was over.

Further south, off Moonie Creek near Coffs Harbour, the ketch Lady Lorn foundered and at Seal Rocks the schooner Nicolai sank stern first into calm waters.

DID you know there were several wrecks between the Evans River and Salty Lagoon?

One was an old fishing boat, which lies between Salty and Main Beach. It was built by a Casino man named 'Stumpy' Rous who planked it with green timber, which shrunk over time and caused the boat to leak.

He evidently fixed her up with masonite sheeting and, well, that didn't work so well. Stumpy and his mate, neither of whom could swim, ran the boat on to the beach to save themselves and there she sat.

But the most fascinating boat of all was wrecked on the north side of the river, on rocks at the 'wave trap', that little embayment between the north wall and the training wall.

Evans Head fisherman Rex Montford, now in his mid 80s, recalls keeping clear of the same rocks in his fishing boats before the walls were built in the early 1960s, and he and other fishermen eventually hammered an iron peg into the largest rock and hung from it a white square to alert passing boats at night.

Rex said he saw the skeleton of the old sailing ship as a boy, with a distinctive 'apple' bow - a very bluff design from the early 1800s or before.

“It had a high bow, a high stern and a rounded bow,” he recalled.

Evidently some curators from a Melbourne museum came to town and dug for its remains and uncovered a rib of roughly hewn timber, with planking attached with trunnels - a common and well-founded method of boat building right through the late 1800s in Australia. In Sumatra the practice survives to this day.

This last wreck is interesting, because there are other references to it, too. Retired schoolteacher and historian Ron Scully, of Evans Head, heard the wreck was located near the tennis courts, after it beached on a creek that now flows out into the river near the riverside kiosk. Before the creek was contained, it ran out near the tennis courts.

Another reference to the wreck comes from early Evans Head resident Harry Fogwell, who owned land between what is now Cedar Street and Fogwell Creek. In the history book The Iron Gates Have Opened by Hedley Davey, Mr Fogwell talks of an old Dutch vessel coming into the mouth of the river in the very early days.

ANOTHER wreck, recalled by Rex Montford, is more recent.

As a boy, Rex was always found hanging around the banks of the Evans River. One day a very odd boat appeared on the sand. Rex recalls it as the oddest fishing boat in the Evans River, owned by a local character named Charlie Dark. It was built of timber, and shaped like half a bubble.

She was tender and light. If Charlie stood on one side her gunwales would touch the water.

This boat was completely decked over with a little well which Charlie would stand in. He had a harness tethering him to his craft, and with just one sweep of the oar would scull out the river mouth over the bar and around to Schnapper Point to jig up snapper, trag or whatever for his small run of clients camping on the reserve.

The boat met every wave on the bar without a flinch, the white water simply carrying right over its deck. Charlie hung on and carried on. It is hard to imagine him surfing back over the bar without broaching, and perhaps that is why it ended up derelict on the river bank and was finally burnt by shire staff.