Richard and Tess Wiltshire kindly sent us some photos taken from Bicton Hill, Mission Beach, Queensland, Australia, named after Bicton in Devon.
A plaque at the summit explains:
You are standing on the summit of Bicton Hill, named by the Cutten brothers after the town in Devon, England. The Cutten brothers arrived on 1st April 1882 and were the first permanent European residents. They used Bicton Hill as a ship lookout.
As explained in NE Stork's Living in a dynamic tropical forest landscape (pp 74-75), James, Leonard, Sidney and Herbert Cutten (who had experience with tea-growing in India) cleared tropical forest and ("aided in no small way by the efforts of local aborigines") established tropical fruit crops, followed by tea in 1885, leading to their reputation as founders of the still-extant Australian tea and coffee industries. Though the Cutten plantation was largely destroyed in a cyclone in 1918, there are still remnants in what is now a World Heritage nature reserve and tourist destination.
The name Bicton may have come from Bicton House rather than Bicton the parish (Devon has no town of that name). According to Edwina Toohey's 2001 book Before the aeroplane dance: the Torres Strait and Cape York : islanders, aborigines and adventurers from the 1860s to 1914:
To their estate the brothers gave the name Bicton, after the elegant country house of their friend Lord Rowles [sic] in England.
... but the chronology of this doesn't work, since Lord Rolle died in 1842 and can't have been a contemporary of the Cutten brothers, two of whom were in their mid-70s in 1930 (see Part C, Chapter 4, They Came As Strangers).
- RG
Bicton Hill
