While Harry was happy to work with Aborigines, he felt it wasn't proper to live with them. This led to a rupture between the brothers. Those who wanted paid work could chop wood on a piecework arrangement while those who didn't want to work were under no obligation to do so.Įventually Daryl fell in love and set up camp with one of Hood's daughters, Euphemia. The Tonkin brothers had a core of workers, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who worked with them on their mill, and an amicable relationship developed with the Aboriginal people living on the Track. For two decades, up to 150 Aborigines lived there.

Aborigines from all over Victoria began turning up. Word soon got around to various Aboriginal communities that at Jackson's Track there were “plenty of work, good water and firewood, plenty of game to be had”. The brothers decided to help him and collected his family to bring them to live on the property. One of these bush workers was an Aborigine, Stewart Hood, who had been driven out of a church-run mission station for opposing the authorities.

The men who worked with them hailed from all over the country. With axes and cross-saws they falled (according to the book the forest men always said falled, rather than felled) the huge hardwood trees of the Gippsland forests. As it was the Great Depression no money changed hands instead, the brothers were obliged to work off the debt. The brothers bought 550 acres of deserted farmland and regrowth forest. There some of the largest eucalyptus trees in Australia grew. They headed for the rich temperate forests of Gippsland, in the Great Dividing Range south-east of the state capital Melbourne. He and his older brother Harry arrived there in 1936, when Daryl was 17, after working on the north Queensland cattle routes. The book tells of Daryl Tonkin's life at Jackson's Track in the Gippsland region of south-eastern Victoria.

It is narrated through the eyes of a man whose account testifies to his personal humanity, and sensitivity to those whose lives he touched. It is a story of rural life that is rarely told. Jackson's Track is a remarkable story of ordinary Australian people-Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal-living together under difficult circumstances.

Jackson's Track by Daryl Tonkin