This story was written for the Men's Health and Wellbeing group who now have the lease on The Rock and wanted to know about its history for their web site.
I’m going to start this brief history of “The Rock” at the little primary school at Somerset Dam because that’s where I first heard about Dianas Bath. Most of the pupils at Somerset Dam State School came by bus from the farming districts around and several of these came from the cattle farms that backed onto the steep valleys on the west side of the ranges between the Brisbane Valley and the coast - that long stretch of unbroken forest from the Mt Mee - D'Aguilar Range Road through Mount Glorious and down to Mt. Coot-tha.
The boys from these valleys used to sometimes talk about Dianas Bath - a cool, deep pool in the mountains that you could reach only on horseback or foot.
In those early primary school years I never visited Diana’s Bath but it stayed in my mind long after I’d left. When I was 17 or so - I got some better information about the stream it was on and set out one afternoon with my brother to find it. We were hiking from the upstream side and came upon it around the side of a rock-strewn hill covered with grass trees. It was such a tranquil sight. The rock face and the water were bathed in sunlight in the early afternoon and the surface of the pool was still except for a little bird breaking the water now and then under a willow tree at the far end. The bush in that area can be so quiet sometimes that the sound of a goanna a hundred metres away slowly shifting its weight on the dry leaves would make you think somebody was standing behind you.
My brother and I ate our oranges and then explored further downstream until we came on another really beautiful spot where the creek emptied from a string of small pools into a large, deep pool carved out of a gently sloping sheet of rock. On the south side of the creek there was an almost vertical rock face going up about the height of a four-story building – that perfect spot became the site for the Pole House.
The Cave
This idylic area was on the edge of a cattle run owned by the Clements family. The creek was the boundary and across it to the north, the mountains rose up steeply into the state forest. By a stroke of good luck this whole corner of the property bounded by Byron creek was on a 56 acre block with a separate title. The Clements had no need to sell this block and good reasons not to – not least the fact that in severe droughts when creeks stopped running and water holes dried up, Diana’s Bath provided one of the few reliable water sources for their cattle. But I got to know them quite well over many years mustering cattle and camping there and in October 1980 they did agree to sell this block to me.
There are many unusual rock formations in this country. The rock outcrops on the bluffs around the mountains for example are honeycombed with caves, some so narrow that you can barely fit through and some quite spectacular. On another corner of this block on the western side where the land flattens out and there’s easy access with a four wheel drive, there is a rock formation – one huge rock balancing on others - that forms an open shelter opening out towards the east across a gentle slope. This place – “The Cave” we called it – became our base camp.
By this time family and friends were often spending time here camping, climbing the mountains and swimming in the pools. We built a hut and extension to store things in and added a water tank to catch rain from the roof. We had a big stump – covered with a red tablecloth - for a table and smaller stumps to sit on. Thora, my mother and a wonderfully creative woman, could see the potential of the cave right away. It could be closed in on the western side to form a kitchen and living space and in time built into a fabulous home – a place she thought would be perfect to retire to one day.
Thora has a lot of creative friends, and many played a big part in the construction work at The Rock. We started with dynamite (thanks to local farmer and polymath Doug Davie for the know how with that) and we used it in controlled blasts to clear and open out the eastern side of the cave area. Construction started when Errol Leis – a glorious and very funny man – brought his girls up one weekend for a drive and to give a little advice and ended up staying until both the cave project and the pole house was completed. Errol built the stone walls and the big base slab and he and Thora were responsible for the whimsical wood stove and kitchen that closes in the western side.
I don’t remember how many weekends that whole cave project took but the building of it was the real fun. Errol would bring his family over the forestry tracks from Dayboro, and spend the weekend camping and building. Family and friends – lots of them – helped out. We didn’t compromise on our tucker. Some of the dinners in the late afternoons around that stump table with the red tablecloth were absolutely superb.
We had great times at the Cave in the years before the property was resumed but the highlights had to be the jazz parties that we held from time to time – usually on weekends when the moon was full. Neighbours and friends drove in and pitched tents under the trees. As night fell little fires flickered between the gums and the smell of sausages and onions wafted across the flat. We’d spread our rugs on the gentle slope in front of the cave as the Caxton Street Jazz band tuned up
The Pole House
The access road up to the pole house site on top of the rock outcrop was bulldozed in late 1983 or early 1984. The last short stretch to the top is quite step and would have been impassable without concrete tracks. Pouring these and the cave floor was probably the hardest day’s work we did.
The pole house is a relatively simple design. The nine timber poles are supported by steel saddles on pins anchored into the rock. There’s an open loft-style space upstairs for sleeping and a split level floor downstairs for kitchen and living. There’s as much glass as possible to take in the views and a roller door in the roof for the night sky. We used lots of timber from trees on the block itself for structural beams and cladding and milled them on site with a portable timber mill.
Building on this rock was hard and dangerous at times and the credit for getting it done has to go to Keith Lewis, a building teacher and friend of Errol and Thora. Some people have asked how we got those heavy hardwood poles standing. Keith built a rig consisting of a single inclined pole about 5 metres long with a pulley at the top and anchored back to the rock higher up the hill using two Turfor winches. This could be positioned with the top of the pole vertically above the base of whatever house pole was to be erected. A third Turfor was anchored at the base of this pole with its cable passing through the pulley at the top and then on to the house pole. We could thus lift it up and gently lower it onto its steel saddle.
Building work was on weekends only and lasted quite a time. Summer was fine but in the winter frost settled on the timber framework overnight and made the framework treacherously slippery in the early morning. I wasn’t good with heights. The front roof overlooking the rock pool below has lots of little dents around the roofing nails where I was trying to hold a rope with one hand and hammer with the other.
The outside walls are oiled with linseed oil. There’s nowhere you can safely stand a ladder to get to the high parts of these walls so we built hook points at the top of the poles and made a platform on rollers against the wall and used those very handy Turfor winches to haul it up and down.
Resumption, the Future, and the Past
We thought we would have this little paradise forever but as it turned out the site had potential for a pumped storage scheme for hydro electricity. The government’s plan was that water from the Wivenhoe dam could be pumped to a reservoir on the mountains above Dianas Bath using off-peak excess electricity and then flow down to generate hydroelectric power during peak times. Our property and that of our neighbours was resumed.
To date the project has not gone ahead and it may be that it never will. The prolonged drought of recent years has highlighted the vulnerability of the wide, shallow Wivenhoe Dam to evaporation and it may be that when its water level is low, it is too distant from the site to function as the lower reservoir.
If the pumped storage project was ever formally cancelled, we fervently hope that Dianas Bath and the Rock would become national parkland. It surely deserves that. In the meantime, it’s inspiring that the lease on the area has been obtained by the men’s support group Men’s Health & Wellbeing (Queensland) and that the Rock, Dianas Bath and the Pole House have a new and powerfully useful life.
Dianas Bath and its environs is a wild and beautiful part of Australia - pristine, magical and inspiring. I know nothing of the aboriginal history but people must have been swimming there or gazing out from the cliff tops on moonlight nights for thousands of years. But I’m going to finish this story with a little bit of more recent history that you may not know of. It’s about a ride that a stockman called Billy Mateer made at night through these mountains on a horse called ‘Lunatic’ to warn Brisbane of the floodwaters heading towards them in 1893. The bush poet Ellis Campbell has written a poem about it that you might enjoy. The link is here.
Attachment - Google Earth Pin
If you use Google Earth and would like to see the Rock area, you can download the Google Earth pin attached below.