James Cutten's Diary
As part of Echo of the Past, one of the families in the display are the Cuttens, early European settlers at Clump Point. Frederick and Margaret Cutten and their eight children came to Queensland in 1870 for the economic possibilities of the new colony, and its health benefits.
In London, Frederick was a lawyer and the family was well off. They took up land on the Darling Downs for wool growing and then expanded into a sheep station in central Queensland, near Emerald, but that failed because of drought and poison bush.
Two of the brothers, Leonard (Len) and Sidney, went to the Etheridge goldfield and set up a pit sawing business, supplying timber for Georgetown. They did so well that the other two brothers, James and Herbert, joined them, and in 1883 they went tin mining at Fossilbrook near Mt Surprise. They aimed to finance a farm and in 1884 they took up a group of selections at Clump Point, Bingil Bay, naming the plantation Bicton. They continued mining and pit sawing until 1885 when they began work building the homestead. The rest of the family followed next year.
At Bicton they grew tropical fruits, tobacco, tea, and coffee, using local Djiru people and South Sea Islanders as labour. They processed their own coffee and exported mainly pineapples and citrus fruit south. The plantation was initially successful, particularly Bicton brand coffee, but eventually failed due to a series of cyclones, the loss of the import duties on coffee so the plantation had to compete with cheap overseas produce, and shipping being diverted for the war during World War One.
JCU holds a diary written by the eldest brother, James, in 1884. He wrote his diary in a Lett’s Diary and Gazetteer, packed with useful information – no Internet then to search for details like tables of measurements and important dates. His entries are mainly about day to day activities such as looking after the horses and their gear, washing, letter writing, riding to the Junction Creek telegraph office for mail or nearby stations for beef, tin mining, shooting and fishing, and talking to travellers passing through.
He describes hair-raising trips by dray to Port Douglas over terrible roads, taking their tin to be shipped away. After a trip to Cardwell to take up the Bingil Bay selections, they went back to pit sawing at Georgetown, which wasn’t as successful as they had hoped. The heat was awful, the flies were bad, six of the horses died, and a storm blew down the camp. It’s not surprising they went on to develop Bicton next year.
