by Narissa Phelps for the Lennox Wave

The Eyles family epitomise the way the earliest settlers arrived, adapted to changing opportunities and opened up the region to white settlement. The first of the family to move here were Joseph (b. 1812) and John Eyles (b. 1814), sons of ex-convicts Joseph Eyles and Elizabeth Smith. Both were raised on the family’s Parramatta farm leased from the renown John Macarthur. In 1842, Joseph moved to the Clarence, amongst the first to cut cedar there and explore the Richmond River. Soon afterwards, John joined him, and the brothers lived, with their wives, in river-front huts in the scrub around North Creek, Prospect and Ballina.

The brothers initially worked as cedar-cutters and timber merchants, cutting and shipping cedar to the Sydney markets. When Ballina was founded in 1851, both Joseph and John settled there, opening one of the first shops and soon afterwards the first hotel, the Sawyers’ Arms. John later became a gold miner, working the goldfields at West Ballina and possibly venturing north to Seven Mile and Tallow Beaches, where goldfields operated in the 1870s. Both brothers died relatively young—Joseph in 1865 (aged 52), and John aged 63 (1878) when he drowned near the Eyles sawmill at Fishery Creek.

Joseph (b. 1841), John’s eldest child, witnessed the birth and rapid growth of the area, and in his youth worked beside his father as a cedar-cutter. Like Joseph and John, he was involved in shipping, owning his own cedar-boat. He cemented the family’s ties to the Lennox region, operating a farm on North Creek in the 1870s. At his death in 1920, Joseph’s was described as the son of a pioneer father and his family as one of the oldest in the Richmond.

The Eyles sawmill, Fishery Creek c. 1900. Photo Wayne Williams.