The History of Paddys Flat Rd Woodenbong to Tabulam

[Music] foreign [Music] thanks for joining me on this ride we're going to do Paddy's Flat Road this is a very popular ride amongst Riders from Southeast Queensland and Northern New South Wales and through the winter months it's quite a tame ride with a difficulty level of almost zero all you've really got to watch out for on Paddy's flat rate itself is oncoming traffic and maybe the young kangaroo however throughout the subtropical summer months things can get a little gnarly and all paddies can throw up some pretty interesting surprises surprisingly even to me there's a lot of history surrounding this road and the whole area from wooden bong down to tabulan tabulum itself is steeped in history that's amazing so grab yourself a quality Kickback and I'll tell you all about it the tribes of the bungeelong people who occupy the lands of Southeast Queensland and Northern New South Wales for tens of thousands of years we're on to a pretty good theme with a fantastic subtropical climate these lands had an abundance of everything but in the late 1700s this happened and lands like that were exactly what the European settlers were after red cedar soon became one of Australia's greatest exports but by the 1790s it had already become very obvious to authorities that the red cedar was going to run out so they moved further afield which spawned towns like this wooden Bowl now let's get the name out of the road before we go any further originally called William town after the first family that settled in the area but the town was eventually christened woodenbong which was derived from an Aboriginal word now there's a little conjecture surrounding two different Aboriginal words that the name may have been derived from but I can tell you this much had nothing to do with this guy him and his artistic Flair come much later since day one even before the woodcut has turned up wooden wrong has been synonymous with beautiful cattle there still is to this day [Music] the Town Sports a nice little cafe which is pretty popular amongst Riders and there's a couple of service stations which I suggest you make use of if you're going down Paddy's flat because if you're anything like me the old adventurous spirit will take over long before you get to the end of Paddy's it feels pretty hard to come by down there I'm using Clarence way here to get down to urbanville but if you prefer to get straight into the dirt I'd suggest you go out to the east a little bit use emu Creek Road but if you're not Sookie about slimy green causeways go out to the west of wooden bong a bit come down Brewery Creek Road it's a fantastic ride both roots are all dirt and they'll both bring you out pretty close to urbanville urbanville is nestled in the afternoon shadow of what's known on the map as North obelisk hmm a bit of a stretch anyway locally it's known as Crown Mountain Urban villain wooden bong are only 12 kilometers apart and they both started out as cattle stations in the early 1800s extreme isolation and very hostile natives made life very difficult urbanville was known as Tulum back then a name that was derived from the Aboriginal word for lice in the 1850s a couple of guys were making their way from Drake to what's now known as Ipswich walk it on a creek bed they stumbled across this stuff instantly what was nothing more than a settlement on a cattle station grew into a massive circus which contained nearly 18 000 people at its peak before long the first white baby was born on the gold Fields William Urban and you guessed it that's where the name urbanville came from after the short-lived Gold Rush the town went through a few stages of relying on the timber industry beef cattle and dairy cattle which supported a nice new butter Factory to get to Petty's Flat Road from here simply head Southwest on Tulum Road or if you've come down Brewery Creek Road just turn right when you hit Tulum Road a couple of kilometers down the road on your left you'll find the roads of Tulum Falls now the giftable people of the bondulong tribe were very suspicious of the falls and told their children they were full of Tulum which is their word for lice in order to keep them away from the falls just down here on the right I'll point out where Brewery Creek Road comes out here it is here so we're now only a couple of kilometers away from the top of Paddy's Flat Road we're also now in what is actually still called the area of Tulum now probably like most of you I don't know how many times that I've done this ride and not even given a thought to its historical significance then late last year I started thinking to myself why does Paddy's Flat Road exist what's it here for and how long has it been here well didn't that open a can of worms the road pretty much follows a route used by the people that lived in the tabulum and Drake areas since around the 1840s the first few kilometers have been bitumen for quite a long time another couple of kilometers of crappy two-coat Seal have just been added to the bitumen but it ends at tin Hut Road here I want to go up tin Hut Road it's a dead end or it actually leads into a state forest but if you want to chill out for a while there's an absolutely beautiful Viewpoint up there as we hit the gravel I'll have to tell you that after talking to some of the locals they totally get why we come down here what they don't understand is that 90 of the Care flight Choppers trips down here are head-ons or head-on related case in point anyway I'll leave you with that the first sign of anything civilized after you've hit the dirt is this beautiful White House there's no doubt that most people ride past this house and think Hmm nice house and that's about it but most don't realize this is the old Tulum Pub built in the 1880s by a guy called Big John Payne the pub has been lovingly restored by the last couple of owners the current owners were nice enough to take me through the house and have a bit of a look around and the detail and attention to its historical past was amazing Big John passed away in 1910 and his wife Mary continued running the pub until the 1930s Big John's buried a couple of hundred meters back up the road under a fairly elaborate Monument so why a pub out here you ask well quite simply this was the epicenter of the gold rush and with two and a half thousand thirsty miners in the immediate area who wouldn't start a pub there was even an annual race day that was held opposite the pub just on the other side of Tulum Creek imagine the goings on when a couple of thousand miners turned up for that this whole area is still to this day peppered with mine shafts just down the bottom of the hill here about halfway between the pub and when you cross Tulum Creek Billy May's point I'm told by locals that this small patch of land that backs down to Tulum Creek was a bustling Village providing miners with shops and even a hospital there's even a cemetery down there somewhere it's privately owned now and barely has anything to show for those boom tones thank you a couple of hundred meters down from Billy Mays you're across Tulum Creek if you look down to the left as you cross the bridge you'll see the original Crossing [Music] as you ride along the plateau on the western edge of yabra National Park the road thins out a bit as you can see nice shiny clay and that's a bit detrimental when the first rains come but it's still quite passable through the wet season The Descent from the plateau down into the Clarence River Valley it's usually got quite good traction but if you are here in the wet season don't be fooled there's every chance that you're about to turn around and go home on this occasion a couple of wet seasons ago we were very lucky to get through and if you look up above Andrew on his 1290 here that river sand had been washed up there a couple of days earlier and the river had actually been a couple of meters higher than that again all clearance can get a bit angry on occasion foreign to make reference to the only bit of history that anybody seems to know about Danny the tank traps in order to get through that I'm going to have to revisit the Brisbane line which I spoke about in my first video the Brisbane line was a line of defenses from Brisbane to Tenterfield not Adelaide not Perth just tender field so the Australian military hierarchy being what they were early in World War II decided that the Japanese might come down Paddy's Flat Road and these little concrete pyramids we're going to stop them in their tracks at the time of their Construction in 1942 the only Australians had ever experienced a full frontal attack from the Japanese with the second 30th in Malaya and the Choco's on National Guard in New Guinea if any of these guys were consulted before the construction of these pyramids I'm pretty sure the reply would have been something like don't waste the concrete you see the Japanese were nearly more inclined to use bicycles than tanks they did a type of Blitzkrieg just like the Germans but instead of tanks and sneakers they just use people waves and waves of people so yeah to me the tank trap standards of Monument to Australia's naivety at the start of World War II and if you'd like to know more about the controversial Brisbane line refer to my first video on Brisbane Valley literally just around the corner from the tank traps are the graves of Christopher and Mary mealing there's another grave in between there's the really rough cast concrete stone I can't make it out but so Christopher and Mary were buried here in the late 1890s and apart from the fact that there was a Christopher mailing from tabulam that was in the Boer war in the lighthouse Brigade I can't find out much more about them so if you know anything hit us up in the comments to climb up out of the valley is pretty much the same sort of gradient as when you came down into the valley for some reason the road surface is much better on the southern side though the climb is rewarded at the top by some really nice viewpoints but it's quite difficult to get off the road and park up to have a look bitumen starts again around pretty Gully which is another area synonymous with gold body in the late 1800s a bit like Billy May's Point you'd really have to go Bush to find anything of any historical value around here though there is apparently a lot of mine shafts around here as well and there are water races or water channels which we use to shift water around the gold fields and that was used in the process of removing the ore from the gold there's really always a story around the names of places in these old gold Fields but not pretty galley it was called pretty Gully because well it's pretty there's new bitumen all the way out to the bruxner highway now and they've done it out of this cheap ass 2 coat seal and they've left loose five mil gravel all over it so you might want to take that into consideration before you start getting too excited now you have a couple of options between here and tabulan you can try hooton's road to the east rumor is the bridge has been replaced and you can actually get into Bon elbow but I can't say for certain whether there's any truth in that the other option being sugar bag road to the West which will take you into Drake but it can get a bit dodgy in the wet but it is quite an adventurous ride sometimes now as we approach the end of Paddy's Flat Road and turn left onto the brux and the highway to Coast into tabulam I'll start my story about the town in 1840 23 year old Scotsman Peter Pagan and his brother-in-law William Evans were the first white people to claim any land out here the pair built a shack and started farming sheep in April 1841 from about 200 meters away Pagan noticed some Aborigines enter his Shack he shot up the natives unsuccessfully and then tried to pursue them on foot later that day Pagan's body was found on the banks of the Clarence River now the ensuing crimes that were committed in the name of reprisal were absolutely horrendous to cut a very long story short over the best part of the next two decades Aboriginal camps were raised to the ground their children were stolen and many innocent tribesmen were simply shot dead one relatively tiny story in a very dark chapter of Australia's history oddly in the midst of these reprisals one white family was getting on famously with the wallable people of the tabulum area they even employed them on their brand new station and turns out that the family are a hell of a lot to these guys because they taught this guy how to ride a horse really well a little bit of a prerequisite if you want to become the first ever leader of the lighthouse Brigade and consequently the first ever General in Australia Henry George Chevelle was born here in tabulam in 1865. always known as Harry presumably after his childhood Mentor King Harry mundine of the wallable tribe on a side and ate all the Chevelle siblings were all fluid and wallable Harry's exploits in military history are seemingly endless letting the first ever contingent of mounted infantry to leave Australia he was much loved by his troops when World War one broke out Harry could often be seen in the trenches in Gallipoli one of very few Lieutenant generals that ever bothered to go and see how their troops were going first hand in 1917 Harry orchestrated one of History's last ever Cavalry attacks that Beersheba passing away just before his 80th birthday in 1945 General Sir Henry George Chevelle left a lasting Legacy in Australia's military history there's quite a good Monument here in tabulam to the mounted infantry and the light horse Brigade who had quite a big Camp here even before Harry went to school and that leads me to this debacle The demolition of the old tabulan bridge now let me break this down for you completed in 1903 by a coalition between Australia's favorite fighting Sons the light horse Brigade and local aboriginals this was the longest spanning Timber bridge in the Southern Hemisphere and it was still structurally sound now I totally understand its replacement but it's demolition that is beyond me that bridge had survived literally horrendous flood after horrendous flood and it was still structurally fine okay it was past motor traffic couldn't it have been left foot generations to come representing the people that built it it was very significant [Music] old members of the lighthorse and tabulam locals were absolutely devastated by this okay well that's it for now thanks very much for watching don't forget to do a bit of this and a bit of that catch you next time all my riding gear and accessories are from Shark Lids on the Gold Coast and I use Adventure first Simpson panniers because they're tough as foreign

Channel: ABMT

Views: 23,153

Keywords: Northern NSW, Northern Rivers, Australia, Adventure touring, Motorcycle, Suzuki Vstrom 1000XT, Australian History, Paddy’s Flat, Tabulam, Woodenbong, Urbanville

Id: V8qPOTOP0Vk

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023