A fresh look at Bangalow’s distant past

Opening at the museum on Wednesday 25 September, the Bangalow Historical Society is staging its latest exhibition called Uncovering Our Past.

“Essentially, while Byron Bay and Ocean Shores are known for their beaches, Brunswick Heads has its river life and Mullumbimby has a funky rural vibe all its own, what Bangalow alone can offer the world is a portal to the Big Scrub,” said event coordinator, Christobel Munson.

“Before the earliest white people arrived in this area in the 1800s, 75,000ha of the Northern Rivers – including the area now known as Bangalow 2479 – was covered with dense rainforest. This became known to the early cedar getters and settlers as the Big Brush, or Big Scrub”.

Uncovering Our Past reveals what life was like for those early white settlers, hacking their way through dense subtropical jungle, through massive ancient trees shrouded in prickly vines, coming across completely unfamiliar plants and animals in their search for a new home.

“Our researchers have come across descriptions written by those settlers, such as government surveyors in the 1860s and children of early settlers, faced with a foreign and unexpected environment. They have also gathered images of the rich diversity of plants and animals of the rainforest, then, and now.”

Copies of the book The Big Scrub Rainforest – A Journey Through Time by Rous County Council and the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, will be on sale, as well as illustrations by Horticulturist Andy Erskine, one of the artists whose work is included in the book. A selection of photos taken by Nan and Hugh Nicholson of Terania Rainforest Publishing, highly regarded for their many decades devoted to photographing and conserving rainforests, will be displayed, as well as images of the fruits of the forest from Delta Kay’s Explore Byron Bay Bush Tucker Tours, plus artist and conservationist Dailan Pugh’s extraordinary line drawings of forest creatures.

“The Bangalow Historical Society invites you to step into our past, into the Big Scrub, to have a peek at the environment that was here 200 years ago”, she added. The Uncovering our Past exhibition runs until 30 October at the Bangalow Historical Society’s museum, corner Ashton and Deacon Streets, Bangalow. Ph 02 6687 2183. Entry fee $5. The museum is open Wednesday to Saturday, from 10am to 2pm.