Michael Smith
2004
The lives of some of the people who lived in Koonorigan in the 1900's.The following history was written as part of the celebration of the ‘Koonorigan Public School Golden Jubilee’ in 1961. The little district of Konorigan lies on what is named on a Parish map of 1912 as ‘Konorigan Range’. It rises from the low land of Goolmangar, by way of a steep ascent to the main ridge that leads eventually to the Nightcap Range, which is the watershed of the Richmond-Tweed River systems. It is difficult to say who were the first white men to penetrate here, because these hills were all part of the real ‘Big Scrub’, and heavy standing scrub it remained until well into the 1800s. Thus, the cutters of cedar and pine, teak and beech were undoubtedly the first to enter this particularly steep part of the Big Scrub in the 19th century, and bullock tracks wound into and upwards along its ridges, drawing its logs to several ‘shooting’ places where they were ‘shot’ or skidded down to lower levels. Two or three vestiges of such ‘shoots’ can still be seen, e.g. where the logs came down to Coffee Camp to be hauled away by the teams.
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