Forbidden History - Australia’s Rainforest Railway

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

In this episode, we join experts as they take a look at the fascinating story behind one of Australia’s historic railway lines. Everyday, tourists take the picturesque journey among ancient trees, towering mountains and majestic waterfalls before reaching the tableland above. But this railway line has a hidden story that links deadly animals, mysterious holes in the ground and WWII’s Pacific War…   Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://surfshark.com/forbiddenhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or use code FORBIDDENHISTORY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Go to ⁠nakedwines.co.uk/forbidden⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines for just £39.99, with delivery included. Cast List:   Guy Walters: Author & Historian Claire Barratt : Industrial Engineer Tim Daniel: Reserve Army Major Duncan Ray: Adventurer Dr Dominic Selwood: Historian and Author Jo Barnes: Atherton Rotary Directory Mary Searston: Local Historian Ivan Searston: Historian Dr. Timothy Bottoms: Journalist & Historian Nigel Jones: Author & Historian Lottie Hastie: Local Resident Dr George Skeene: Local Historian Daphne Miller: Local Resident Desley Mosquito: Local Resident Wil Kemp: Savannahlander Driver Bob Slater: President, Athrail Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast and advertisements help keep us going. Ads are automatically placed and not specifically chosen or endorsed by us unless read by me the host. Thanks for supporting the show. A fight to forge a railway through Australia's most impossible landscapes. The Tablelands line is in many ways a symbol of the human spirit. Trying to build a railway in such a swampy area, it would be right up here in water. You know, the difficulty is immense.

An underground discovery that would change the region's fortunes. The risk were rock falls, explosions. People died. People had life-changing injuries. How could a secret World War II military base help in the fight against Japan? Whoever found the cure would win the war. And a silver bullet carving a path through the outback. There's no crossings. There's no barriers. The wildlife is on the tracks.

There's a lot of secrets attached to it. The whole thing is just awesome. The tablelands line is serious railway building. I mean, this isn't just negotiating a mountain pass or a swamp. It's kind of doing every challenge that you can possibly face and overcoming it. Imagine trying to survey when you cannot see the sky. Imagine you can't tell north from south by the position of the sun. This is an impenetrable forest to get through.

On a wet, horrible day when it's absolutely teeming down with rain and there's water running down the track and you're soaking wet. covered in leeches, it takes another dimension. And of course it comes at a great human cost. A lot of these poor people who come from all over the world were working in atrocious conditions and worked to their death. But the fact that it takes nearly a quarter of a century to build this line means that there were people there who were never going to give up

no matter what was being thrown against them. Built in the northeastern tip of Australia, in the state of Queensland, The original railway line of the network stretched from Cairns on the Pacific coast and finished inland at the town of Herberton. Duncan Ray is a local adventurer. This area between Herberton and Chiligo has the most diverse geology of any place in the world. You find pretty much everything here. Tin, gold, silver, copper, indium, antimony.

It's just endless. This railway line was built to make money for the mining industry, but it ended up playing its part in the biggest conflict the world has ever seen. We tend to think of the Second World War as quite a European-centric conflict, but of course the war in the Far East was just as big, if not more so. Australia, of course, was right in the forefront of this war, and not many people know that Queensland became one of the major Allied bases in the region. bases in the region.

What's really important about the story of this railway line is that it tells us so much about what Australia did for the fight against the Japanese. Away from the public eye, the railway line was helping with a huge military project. Joe Barnes's father was part of the Australian Army during the war. The whole war here is a bit of a secret. The Japanese attacked Hill Harbor and were moving into the Pacific. Australia was next in line. In February 1942, they bombed the northern tip of the country.

The whole nation was under threat. There was a line drawn across Brisbane called the Brisbane Line. It was said that, oh, we'll lose all that part of Northern Australia. We'll get it back later. The general blame is saying, no, we won't do that. We will defend. How did this region and its railways end up playing a role in the fight against Japan? To find out, we need to go back to the days of the Industrial Revolution.

At the end of the 19th century, the whole world is exploding. It's going crazy for raw materials to build towns and railways and infrastructure. And top of the list of desirable items is tin. Prospectors were searching the tablelands for raw materials to mine. Local historian Mary Searsden returns to the place where it all started. The whole reason for the Herbert and Tinfield was in fact a rock which was picked up by the original prospectors and the funny part about it is they didn't recognize it as all

until an emu came screaming down those hills and kicked its foot against a rock like this. and went limping away. They smelted and got a little tiny, whiny bit of tin, or so the folklore says. The gleams that you see are pure tin oxide. It was just so rich. 71% of this rock, at least, was just pure tin.

But this precious tin, so in demand across the world, was 40 miles inland from the coast. Nature doesn't put tin in convenient places. And to get it out the ground, you need equipment. And we're not just talking about a few wagon loads, we're talking about tons and tons of equipment. The tin ore was contained in the granite rocks that are in the area and they had to be crushed down. One of those crushing mills. It's called a battery because there are five big steel feet that were lifted up and down and any rocks that got caught underneath were crushed down to a very fine powder.

It's ridiculous to be shifting that stuff by hand. They needed a couple of mechanical way to do it. The only lines of communication between Herbotton and the coast were muddy tracks that were washed away in the monsoon rainy seasons. Six months to travel the 40 miles across rainforest, bogged to the axles at times, compare that to the railways. That same piece of equipment probably be here in Herbaden the next or the day after. A railway line was the answer.

But first, they would have to conquer nature. As a railway engineer, if you want to challenge, the Tablelands Railway will give it to you. It starts off in the mangrove swamps, heads into rainforest, and then through the mountains. And then you'll find yourself in the bush environment. Four incredibly different, very challenging environments in a relatively short distance.

The 40 miles that separated Herberton from the coast didn't only present a challenging terrain. There was also the threatening wildlife, crocodile-infested rivers, spiders and snakes lurking in the dense forest, and even trees were to be feared. Tim Daniel is an Australian Reserve Army Major and a survival expert.

One of the dangers in the rainforest is called Wait-A-Wile or Lawyer thine. It's a cane and it throws out these little tendrils with recurved hooks on them. If you get into a big thicket of this, it can take you hours because you get tangled up in it and you have to unpick yourself or cut yourself out of it. There's no shadows, there's no reference point. So unless you've got a compass and you understand the lie of the land, it's very difficult to navigate. Not only was it difficult to navigate, but the railway surveyors planned to cross the tribal lands of the First Peoples of Australia. For Aboriginal communities who had already been affected by decades of pastoral expansion, the railways brought a new wave of dispossession.

In 1882, the authorities contacted an unusual man by the name of Christy Palmerston, A mysterious character with unknown origins, who they trusted to find a route for the railway to the coast. Now, Christy Palmerston was a very important character, well certainly he thought so. He was a bushman, an explorer. He'd done a lot of work in the Cairns region. Palmerston relied on a young Aboriginal boy, Pompo, who likely had no say in the matter, to guide him through the ancestral indigenous tracks, in his tracks that crisscrossed the jungle. Christy Palmerston spent three months combing the country between Port Douglas and the barren gorge looking for suitable gradients and he makes that remark that he just couldn't

see where a railway could come through. In spite of the impossible landscape, Palmerston eventually put a route forward. He recommended going from Port Douglas that was then a thriving harbor town in the north. This option avoided having to build any tunnels and included very few bridges. In the end, though, the dwindling town of Cairns was chosen, because it was thought to have a better port, but that meant building 15 tunnels and no less than 90 bridges. For better or worse, the line would start in Cairns. Now all they had to do was build it, but that was easier said than done. Building in the tropics,

meant that the weather was a constant worry. In this area, there is an annual average of seven feet of rainfall and regular cyclones. Nature threw quite a lot of curveballs up on the line between Herbiter and Cairns, but you have to get over it in engineering terms. You have to see each new challenge as something to rise to and to force that railway through. They really did meet an awful lot of challenges. The first hurdle was that Cairns was built on a challenging terrain.

They had so much difficulty in trying to build a railway in such a swampy area. It would be up to your knees or right up here in water. The difficulty is immense. And of course not only swamps, you've got snakes, you've brown snakes, taipans, black snakes and leeches, as well as a myriad of mosquitoes, which of course helped spread fever amongst the workers. and brought them down very easily. To make it worse, the railway contractors tried to keep costs low,

weren't offering proper health care to their workers. The Cairns Post reported the story of a man who was suffering from a fever. When they got him to the hospital, he had a small hole in the bottom of his back, which was maggot-ridden, and he died in the hospital. And the challenge had just begun. We continue the story after the break. After the swamps, the railway builders had to reach the top of the tablelands by carving through the hostile jungle on a steep climb that went over a thousand feet.

When you set out to map out a railway line, you want to find the flattest spot, the lowest points to take that track through. Following the rivers are a fantastic way to do that. And the Barron River just took you naturally through to where you wanted to get. But using the river was not enough to keep the costs down. Monsoon season, mudslides and multiple route changes meant that the expenses escalated. In the end, building the first 32 miles cost the equivalent of over 22 million US dollars in today's money. It was an incredible achievement.

But in 1890, Australia hit a decade of financial turrets. of financial turmoil. The funds for the line to Herberton were pulled out, and building works were dropped. But one man stepped in. Gentlemen by the name of John Moffat, who a mining entrepreneur from the 1880s, decided he could do it.

He never overbuilt anything. So his railways tended to be a little bit light on rail size. Starting in 1900, they were put down very quickly, In the next three years, he built over 200 miles of railway. These railways linked his mining empire in the West to the existing line. The original route had been completely diverted away from Herberton. One of those lines led to the town of Irvinebank. John Moffat set his whole empire based on this little community here.

And Herberton became the premium mining towns of North Queensland. and probably the center of tin mining in Australia. One of Moffat's most lucrative deposits was based just outside Irvine Bank. Vulcan mine was the deepest tin mine in Australia and yielded some of the purest tin in the world at the time. The railways and the mines had a workforce that made themselves heard,

and it's no coincidence that the first socialist government in the world was elected there back then. albeit for a week only. Despite a strong union and left-leaning policies, working underground was harsh to say the least. The decision to go and work in a mine is never going to be easy. It's never going to be anyone's first glamorous job to take up.

You go there to earn money, and you do earn good money, but at what cost? Time has stood still in these abandoned mines. Objects left behind by the last workers give a snapshot shot of life underground at the turn of the 20th century. It's hot and sticky in here, and when they're working in here, they would be covered in dust. Some of them got miners' tithers and died from that. The risk were rock falls, explosions. My great uncle, he worked in a mine in Charter's Towers, and at one stage, the rock started

moving, and the timbers were starting to groan and creak under the weight of the falling, or the loosening rock. So he held the timbers up while the other miners that were working with him were able to escape out of the mine. But the sheer weight of holding that up ruptured all his stomach and he died a couple of days later, unfortunately. People died. People got sick, people had life-changing injuries. So that balance between the money in your pocket and your health had to be very, very carefully weighed up. After the Australian deprived of, the train line carried on, growing south, and finally reached Herberton in 1910. Mining by then was not as lucrative as it once was.

But the lines took on other purposes. They were used for timber trade, railway ambulances, and for transporting students on their way to school. In the 1940s though, something very strange happened to the region. With the Second World War, this area in Milanoir exploded. Suddenly you've got thousands of troops coming and going. World War II brought a huge spike in railway traffic in the region. It went up by 66%. And notably on the Keynes to Herberton line, in one 24-hour period,

there were 43 trains as opposed to the usual sleepy one or two. But why was there so much activity in this remote part of Australia? Australian troops fought all over the world during the Second World War. They fought in North Africa, the Middle East. They fought defending Singapore and Thailand, Burma, you name it. But they also fought on the island of New Guinea, which is just under a hundred miles from the Queensland coast. So this is right on Australia's doorstep.

This is fighting for the defence of the homeland. The fight in New Guinea was so close that people living in Cairns, said that they could hear the bombs. They needed a military base in Australia to support the Allied fight, and they found it in the Atherton Tablelands. Part of the reason they chose this area is because of the railway.

That infrastructure, that civil engineering, allowed huge numbers to come in and to be transported around goods and people. That enabled the Australians to rapidly fortify the area and turn it into a military zone. This top secret project transformed the area into a hive of activity. They built fortifications, radar stations, and airfield, anti-aircraft units,

supply facilities, and barracks. They were all there to accommodate the tens of thousands of Australian and American troops that took over the sparsely populated region. Thanks to the Tablelands mild climate and tropical geography, it was the perfect location for troops to prepare for fighting in the Pacific. Tim Daniel tells us more. We're in Kalanga and we're on a feature I'd call Tactics Hill. And this was used by the 16th Brigade for training.

And they dug in an entire battalion defensive position on this little ridge. Going around with a metal detector we found piles of used cartridges from both Owen guns and Bren guns. It was used as a teaching device and they practiced attacking and defending here. The railway line runs along on the other side of the river. It's well within weapons range. I think this position was chosen mostly because of its tactical teaching, but also the theory would have been that it blocked use of the railway. So if the Japanese decided to advance along the railway,

this position would have effectively prevented them from moving along the railway. North of Kalunga stands an old building, which is the old Tolga station. Now a museum, there is very little clue to the pivotal role it played during World War II. Lottie Hastie remembers. You know, the railway men were kept very busy on keeping the lines update. They couldn't afford an accident with, you know, thousands of troops on board. It was a busy, busy station. But Tolga Station hides another secret.

A few kilometers along the railway, there are historic remains in a place called Rocky Creek. So today, what you can see at Rocky Creek is but a shadow of what it was like during the war. Much of the site is neglected. You've just got these old walkways left covered in bitumen. You've got some pipes left over from toilets and bathing blocks. But what are these abandoned remains doing in this area? And why are they so close to where the railway once ran? Rocky Creek was the biggest hospital complex in the southern hemisphere.

The huge hospital complex built out of the bush, built where there was nothing there before. It was built incredibly quickly for a purpose, out of canvas, and then later on bits of concrete on the foundations, in a very temporary kind of way. And eventually it became an enormous complex with 1,200 beds in the military zone, treating all sorts of patients, war wounded, those suffering from venereal disease, and even psychiatric disorders. In its three years of operation,

60,000 patients were treated at the Rocky Creek Hospital. Today, the only standing building that remains is a structure they call the Igloo. This igloo was built as a temporary building, 73 years ago, put up very quickly, and it was used as an entertainment place. The stage was used for vaudeville acts and traveling shows that came through

to entertain the troops. There were dancers held here, and there were nurses, of course, who were working at the hospital, and there was a great deal of exchange between the Americans and the Australians. But a more sinister business was taking place in the vast Rocky Creek complex.

A secret, experiment with the potential to help win the war in the Pacific. In the Southwest Pacific War, malaria was every bit as much a threat as the enemy. The US calculated that at any one time, 25% of their soldiers were incapacitated with malaria. Malaria is a disease that gives you very high fever, aching bones, aching joints, and it recours. The way that the disease is spread is the mosquito. somebody who is infected and then bites somebody else who's not infected, the infection is spread that way. Mosquitoes thrive in humid, muddy, lowland terrains. The tablelands high altitude

away from these insects was a perfect location for the hospital to treat this disease. Among the more controversial experiments carried out at Rocky Creek was malaria injection. I think the idea behind subjecting volunteers to the malaria bug was that, as it affected Japanese as well as allied soldiers, whoever found the cure for malaria, would win the war. Finding a solution for this disease would have given a tactical edge in the South Pacific fight, so no effort was spared. In the midst of it all, the Tablelands railway network was vital. Not only was it bringing patients in, it was also taking them away. There were 25 trains a day at times, bringing troops here for training and troops who were injured or sick.

There are photos that I've seen of them putting people on stretches through the windows because they didn't fit through the doors. There were so many patients that Rocky Creek, despite being vast, was not enough. To remedy it, ambulance trains were working around the clock to move patients onto hospitals in the south. Those trains were given priority all along the coast. After the war, the Tabelands transport system was completely transformed. While the troops left behind brand new roads,

they also left a railway network in tatters. The railways suffered extreme wear and tear during the war during the war because they simply hadn't been designed to be used at that intensity. So they required quite a lot of work afterwards to bring them back into a good condition. Dr. George Skeen is a local historian who worked for the railways from 1967 to 1997. I met many people from all over the world. People from different cultures and met and had a good time. You had a bed, single bed, single mattress, two plates, spoon, knife and fork, a water bag.

and the work was very hard. The government was transforming the basic lines that had been built for the mining industry into reliable, sturdy structures. I worked on bridges, I was always shaking. I didn't like heights. The risk was crocodiles in bridges. They had people in cages that go down

and check the piles in the water. It was salt water, I think it erodes, timber or something, very quick. But while the tracks were being refurbished, the roads were becoming more and more prevalent. By the late 1980s, trains had stopped being lucrative, and much of the Tablelands railway network was closed. A page was turned. The building of the railways had changed so much for settlers, but also for indigenous communities. Sisters Daphne Miller and Desley Mosquito are descendants of the Jitable people.

It did disrupt our way of living back then and probably a little bit more frightening than anything, not knowing what's happening. It became something that we had to adjust to and depend upon. The railway was our mode of transport. It was just so easy to go over the road and catch it and travel from here to Cairns. And so it became part of our lifestyle. There's everything to us got us where we wanted to go. The closing down of the railways have left many people with a sense of nostalgia.

But luckily, there is a group of people who are making sure that the past is not completely gone. The Carranda Scenic Railway still covers the rainforest section of the line. Will Kemp is one of the two drivers. We get to move through awesome landscapes and we get to move a train along a line that's you know now the best part of a hundred and ten years old the line's pretty old pretty unique the whole thing's just awesome. Lee and I are always hearing new stories that have happened years and years and years ago. One particular one was a couple of years ago as a

I told everyone who were coming into this old mining town, I had a passenger come and got really, really excited. He was an older gentleman, but his father was actually a miner in that town and had been killed in a mining accident before this passenger was born, so he never even met his father. He had no idea that the train travelled through that town,

so it held a lot of meaning to him, and I'm sure that there's a hundred, a thousand, Stories that we are still yet to hear. Back in Herberton, the railways have left another legacy. The Tablelands Railway has seen over 130 years of human activity. That's a lot of stories. And it still continues today. There are volunteers out there working, keeping things going.

Around 35 men volunteer here, along with Rocky the Dog. They meet up twice a week in a combined effort to keep the original railway line alive between Herberton and Atherton. The workshop started about seven years ago. The built workshop being built four years ago, and that's when we got our steam locomotives in and our equipment. The volunteers are also working along the railway line, and it brings home what it must have been like for the early railway builders.

Working on a railway in the late 19th century is hard work. You've got tools, to an extent, you've got machinery, but only very limited. And it's still hard work. And one thing that hasn't changed in 130 years is the climate. When it rains, it really rains. And when it's sunny, it's incredibly sunny. So for the volunteers out there today, yes, they might have slightly better hand tools and better machinery. I really hope they have.

But the climate, that's still a tough challenge. From the very beginning, the Tablelands railway story has been an epic saga of loss and triumph over the elements. And its original line has now left its mark on the region. Cairns hadn't got the railway. If it had been Port Douglas, they would have been the centre. Now, it really did make a world of difference. Cairns became a pivotal place for export and import for far north Queensland. And it's what set this region going as a major centre in far north Queensland. But it also had a further reaching impact.

And the irony of its success is that it ultimately brought about its own demise. This particular railway line, when they built it, it's civil engineering. It's creating a safe way to move an awful lot of material over quite a long period of time. But suddenly World War II happens and everything changes. The railway network allowed things to get moving very quickly. It was at that point they built a road. So the success of the infrastructure of the railway brought the road and the road actually condemned the railway. There is much to be learned from these abandoned tracks.

The Tablelands line are in many ways a symbol of the human spirit. You realize that it was built for a reason that no longer exists. And so therefore you look at it and you think maybe it's just a bit of a folly. But actually what happened during the Second World War with the Tablelands Line makes you remember that what looks useless today could be very, very useful tomorrow. But above all, it has left its mark on the lives of those who have either worked or traveled along its lines. And no doubt, the next generation will ensure its legacy lives on.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out where did everyone go, histories of the abandoned. A deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places.

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