Much knowledge of the European fur industry in Tasmania has been lost. Hunters rarely carried Box Brownie cameras, and too few of them were interviewed about how they operated in the bush. Many of them thought it not worth recording. It was just a day’s work. For many it was hard, uncomfortable, cold and remote work which they endured because they didn’t know a better way to make a living.
Trying to recover that knowledge from the written record is challenging but rewarding. A particularly useful source for the hunting regime around Cradle Valley is the papers of Ron Smith (aka Major RE Smith), who owned land in that area until his death in 1969. In 1911, long after the First Tasmanians were dispossessed of their land, Gustav Weindorfer, Kate Weindorfer and Ron Smith’s mother Mary Jane Smith took up private blocks at Cradle Valley, each of them 200 acres. Gustav Weindorfer’s land was later forfeited. The Weindorfers built their tourist resort Waldheim Chalet on Kate’s block, which her husband retained after her death. Ron Smith retained the 200-acre block in his mother’s name, chosen because of its King Billy pine.1
Smith needed to make improvements to his land to satisfy the terms of his purchase. Accordingly, he arranged that his younger brother Garnet (Garn) Smith would build a hunting hut on the property. In September 1913 Ron travelled to Cradle Valley to choose a spot for the hut, thereby ensuring that Garn built on the right block of land. Reaching the old piners’/hunters’ hut Cradle Camp one morning, he boiled the billy before crossing the valley to Mount Kate and selecting a spot in the south-western corner of the forest in some tea-trees. ‘It wasn’t a good place’, Ron told his fiancée Kathie Carruthers in a letter, ‘but there wasn’t a good place to be found’.2 He continued:
‘About a chain away I found the skull and jaw bones of an animal. I am pretty sure it is a native tiger. It corresponds with the description in the encyclopedia, and it is very different and bigger than the skull of Hanson’s dog.3 It is rather broken but I think it is worth keeping.’ 4
In March 1914 Smith showed Garn the chosen spot, but the latter didn’t get around to construction until January 1915, bringing a horse to do the haulage work.5 The original set-up included a separate skin shed, one of several built around Cradle Valley.6 Its first recorded use was in April 1917 when Lionel and Gordon Connell, and two Arnolds from Wilmot, father and son, stayed there while hunting.7
At some point the hut was remodelled with a skin shed chimney, that is, the original separate skin shed was replaced by a chimney with voluminous internal space for pegging out skins. This was a common design for hunting huts in the area. The conversion had happened by 1935 when Smith photographed the hut.
The building was still standing in 1949, years after Smith started logging the Mount Kate King Billy pine but was a ruin by 1962 when he visited it for probably the last time.8 Where was it? Apart from the photo, all we had to work with was a 1918 sketch (shown above) on which Smith had placed the hut and its original separate skin shed in relation to his property boundaries.
December 2022
Ian Hayes, Tim Jetson and I set off to find Garn Smith’s hut on Mount Kate. In no time we were barrelling along a boardwalk. At this point a strange thing happened. A woman in a long skirt and boater barred our progress, denouncing us as trespassers. Immediately we consulted our GPS. Had we strayed off the national park? Surely the eastern boundary was 2 km away. While we were thus flummoxed, the apparition directed us to Crater Lake, about 4 km to the SSW. Seeing the hackles rising at the back of Ian’s neck I surmised that we had been visited by the ghost of Saint Kate. Who else could legitimately guard Mount Kate? Fearing a burst of angel trumpets and bluestockings with butterfly nets we backpedalled furiously until she melted into a tree-fern, probably testing it for evidence of climate change.
(Left) Rustic King Billy pine bridge on the old logging track up Mount Kate. (Centre) Pandanus, King Billy pine and the butt of an old King Billy pine log, (Right) Cradle through the pine forest. Mount Kate. Nic Haygarth photos.
Free to resume our journey, we flung ourselves onto an old logging snig track and bolted up the incline. Our coordinates placed us in the middle of a King Billy pine forest. Soon we discovered why Kate was so pissed. The forest was a pigsty of crisscrossed King Billy logs heaped as high as a vaulting horse. Massive ancient trees towered above us but within the forest all was chaos. In our hearts we knew we were forces for order. Kate seemed appeased by this, sparing us further wrath.
The hunter needed grass for his prey to feed on. We wanted open country, not pine forest. At about this time I got separated from Tim and Ian. This worked to mutual advantage as when I accosted them again hours later they had found the remains of a structure in light scrub, enabling me to stop searching. There was a post with a nail through it, corrugated iron and other debris—but while the site was at the edge of the grasslands it was too wet for habitation.
Buoyed by the knowledge that ‘it wasn’t a good place, but there wasn’t a good place to be found’ I went home satisfied that my friends had found Garn Smith’s hut.
January 2023
But Ian wasn’t happy. This often happens. Ron Smith had marked two sites on his map, and Ian wasn’t convinced we’d found either. He recruited for a second assault. Peter Brown arrived from New South Wales. Eddie Firth and Tim looked resolute as we alighted from the bus at Ronny Creek.
Approaching the site of our previous discovery, Peter and I sloped through light forest, finding plenty of stumps, but no hut. At the site of the nailed post the others in the party found stacks of corroded sheet tin. What was the purpose of these, other than our bafflement? Further reconnaissance in the area revealed a tag dated 1951 on a King Billy pine stump. We wondered if the nailed post found last time was the remains of logging infrastructure.
On the way back Peter and I returned to the stumpy light forest. In an area where timber had been felled and firewood chopped Peter found the outline of a building on a reasonably flat site. It soon became clear that this was Garn Smith’s hut. The structure had measured about 2.4 m by 6.1 m, with 2.6 m of that length occupied by a chimney, that is, the same skin shed chimney in the historic photo. The fallen wall and roof timbers, nails, foundation and hearth stones were mixed in the humus. A nearby soak would have watered the hunters only in winter.
(Left and centre) The hut site in the regrowth. (Right) Nails in former hut timber. Ron Smith found his tiger skull within 20 metres of this site. Nic Haygarth photos.
The location had changed dramatically. Although the view in the photo had been obscured by 88 years of regrowth, the same profile of Mount Campbell was just visible. The tussocks and tea-trees in the foreground in 1935 were gone, possibly because the regrowth blocked out the sun. Wise after the fact, we again agreed with Ron Smith’s 1913 assessment that the site was not a good one.
January 2024
We never did find the site of Garn Smith’s early skin shed. However, that wasn’t the last piece of furry infrastructure on Mount Kate. In December 1944 while selecting logs to harvest Ron Smith located a skin store (hide hut) on his adjoining 60-acre block. The building footprint measured 2 m by 1.6 m and it was about 1.6 m tall.9
This was a hiding place for dry skins well away from the hunting hut/skin shed so that they couldn’t be stolen and/or found by the police. Hollow logs were sometimes used for this purpose. (Basil Steers fans may have seen his hide hut at the back of his no.2 hut on the February Plains which was wiped out by the 2016 bushfire.) The structure differed from a skin shed by having a split timber floor. Smith tried but failed to find the skin store again in January 1967, describing it as ‘the small skin store hut near the east end of the West Forest’.10
(Left) Moss-covered palings poking out of the humus. (Right) The ingenious nook which housed the skin store. Peter Brown left photo. Nic Haygarth right photo,
It wasn’t designed to be found, and a sweep of the West Forest turned up nothing. However, in January 2024 Ian and Peter went back for another look. At a junction of two logs Ian saw palings poking out of the humus. The location was ingenious. The two logs formed walls of the store which would have hardly projected above them, making the hut almost invisible from two directions. It would only have been spotted by someone climbing the hill towards it. A moss-covered pile of palings and a few scattered nails confirmed the discovery. Garn Smith or one of the hunters who used his hut probably built it in the pre-1927 era before the Cradle Mountain Reserve became a game sanctuary. Bits of it are still hanging in there nearly a century later as a testament to the durability of King Billy pine and the ingenuity of the old snarers.
Ron Smith’s diaries and letters, including his correspondence with Gustav Weindorfer, are the only primary source for these and other hunting sites. No one in his day knew more about the Cradle Mountain area than he, and no one explored it or documented it so thoroughly. If not for his interest and his devoted record keeping historic sites like these would be lost.
Copyright Nic Haygarth 2024
[1] Eventually all these blocks of private land were absorbed into the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park.
[2] Ron Smith to Kathie Carruthers, 26 September 1913, NS234/1/1/3 (TA).
[3] Smith had earlier found and removed the skull of a dog that apparently froze to death with hunter Bert Hanson in 1905 near the lake that now bears Hanson’s name.
[4] Ron Smith to Kathie Carruthers, 26 September 1913. Both that skull and the Hanson dog skull now reside in the collection of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston.
[5] Ron Smith diary, 27 March 1914, NS234/16/1/10; Gustav Weindorfer diary 27 January-9 February 1915, NS234/27/1/4 (TA).
[6] Weindorfer had already built a multi-purpose shed in which he dried skins. See Gustav Weindorfer diary 8 November 1913-16 January 1914, NS234/27/1/3 (TA).
[7] See Gustav Weindorfer diary 1–26 April 1917 and possibly in May and June 1917, NS234/27/1/7 (TA).
[8] Ron Smith diary, 30 December 1949, NS234/16/1/60; and 23 April 1962, NS234/16/1/78 (TA).
[9] Ron Smith diary, 11 December 1944, NS234/16/1/48 (TA).
[10] Ron Smith diary, 3 January 1967, NS234/16/1/89 (TA).
It’s such a interesting and important search and documentation of this history there is a incredible need to keep our history alive but also the stories of the people that worked out there with so little those people helped shape Tasmania.
This is amazing history. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for exploring and documenting this interesting story for posterity – we hope!
As we all get older and realise time’s running out, it seems more imperative that such things are recorded. Thanks again.