By nature and circumstance, Australia’s early European settlers had dwellings of bark and poles.  

In the rugged and untamed bush, it was far more convenient to take from the bush what it could provide in the way of a place to rest one's head, like a cave, a burnt-out tree-trunk and subsequently a slab-walled hut.  

The quickest and easiest method was to use the available materials the bush could provide and that was bark and poles.

No bushman was without an axe, and with this implement he could cut and erect a skeleton building of poles and sheet it over with bark stripped from a tree. The Australian stringybark provided the best covering but if that was not available, bark from most eucalyptus trees was a good alternative.

Green bark had a tendency to curl as it dried, so the roofing had poles laid lengthwise on the top section to keep it flat and also to prevent it being dislodged by wind.  

Walls could be bark or slab - a decision of the builder and the estimated permanency of the structure. Loose boards provided a doorway.

That this could be the very first building of a man and his wife in the early days of settlement is legend. Poets and writers wax lyrical about the sense of isolation and privation, but to hear of it first-hand from one's grandparents and to see their weathered hands is to know the truth of it.

After building a home there were many things to consider - beds were made of hempen bags strung on poles, which was slightly better than sleeping on the earth, especially when a thunderstorm flooded the inside of the hut.  

How to keep provisions dry and free from ants was an ever-present battle. It may be years before circumstance and availability when corrugated iron could be used to roof the dwelling, and sawn slabs replaced the bark walls. Corrugated iron was used to provide a chimney and fireplace at one end of the hut, having the structural timbers on the outside for safety.  

Sparks were a constant danger once the bark walls had dried. Water was carried from mountain streams in tin buckets and billies.

Toilet facilities consisted of a hole in the ground walled in by sheets of bark which was propped,and held in place by shortened logs, with the roof also of bark. A crude and serviceable seat was a wooden slab cut smooth with a square hole morticed through appropriately, and rested on round blocks or logs, or in many cases a single pole suspended on forked sticks at either end and this was known as the ‘long drop'.

 A neighbour could be a half-hour walk through the forest, even after a walking track had been cleared. To have a neighbour was a bonus; there would be the inevitable case of an accident to either party during the hard and dangerous clearing of the brush and forest and there was also the necessity of a woman to assist at births, unskilled as she invariably was, and a baby brought a new dimension to the striving couple.  

It could be more than a day’s walk or further to the nearest settlement - if there was a settlement at all. 

Returning with supplies or necessary means of survival this could mean a hazardous adventure as well, only to be repeated if the burden of fencing wire or wire netting was too heavy to be managed on the one journey.  

Men became beasts of burden until a horse or a bullock could replace him, and the settler was a fortunate man if he had an area of grass upon which to graze his animals.  

Nethervale, just south of Kiama. Photo: Emery Family Collection

To have the fortune to possess two bullocks to yoke raised the status of a pioneer immensely for he then had the means of cultivation and hauling materials and logs into position for fencing.

His crops would be damaged by the marauding kangaroos and wallabies seeking succulence, with the only means of preventing their incursion was eternal vigilance, lighting fires and tending them at nighttime being a necessary addition to the daily rounds, with fires in themselves a hazard if the forest litter should catch alight.  

Wives shared these duties to give their man a chance to rest, and a kangaroo dog or two had to be added to the set-up.

If the hapless settler had the luck to have cedar trees in his location, the harvesting of this timber would be a means of cash if it could be taken to one of the few ports of call of the sailing ships plying the coast and thence to the city markets.  

This involved the cutting of tracks through the bush and the hauling or carrying the lumber some miles in many cases, a painstaking task at best. Although the commodity was mostly received by agents at the wharf-side, and who had the responsibility of payment for the article the cutter received little recompense in comparison to the retail value when received in Britain when sent on by the wily trader.  

It was the beginning of the appearance of the adventitious “middleman”' or trader who bought and onsold produce for personal profit or loss. During the next 20 years our settler may have a family of seven, a small herd of cattle and a few accoutrements in the way of labour-saving devices, a plough and six or eight bullocks, a stock horse and a dray.  

His children may have all been born without the aid of a doctor, and a neighbour's wife may have developed into a renowned midwife servicing a small community striving to achieve enough recognition to have a local town available to them as a trading post, where farm produce like eggs and milk and butter and hides could be traded for tea and sugar and farm necessities. 

His wife was usually never recognised for the duties she was expected to perform and her contribution to the union. However, she stuck to job of having and raising children and supporting her man with a stoicism not unremarkable in her day but liable to be forgotten and unrehearsed 150 years later.