Irene King

Sleeper cutting was physically an extremely hard job for men. And, therefore, it was not a vocation usually associated with the ‘gentler sex’, ‘the fairer sex’.

Irene King, however, was born a sleeper cutter, became a very successful sleeper cutter, and is reputed to be the only woman in N.S.W. to have held a sleeper cutter’s licence.
Irene was born in 1905 in Gippsland, Victoria. Her Dad was a sleeper cutter.

In 1925 she married Alf King, a short man in stature (he was known locally as ‘stumpy’) and a World War I veteran who had been severely gassed on the Western Front. They remained in Gippsland for the next 13 years during which time Irene gave birth to three sons and ran the mail service between Nowa Nowa and Wairewa.

In 1936 the Kings relocated to Bega and both Alf and Irene were employed on the Taylor family property at nearby Tarraganda. They worked there for two years until the attraction of a rough life in a forest became overwhelming, and they moved to work in Tanja State Forest. The Taylor family gave Irene two Jersey cows as a parting gift so that her family could continue to have a fresh supply of milk.

Irene became a sleeper cutter in Tanja State Forest utilising the skills she had learned from the father and husband.

Alf King later became unable to work, so Irene – working as a sleeper cutter – became the breadwinner for the family. And she did everything expected of a sleeper cutter – she felled trees, cut the logs into billets (probably 8 foot [2.4 metre] lengths), then squared then with a broadaxe before snigging the finished sleepers (dragging them out of the bush, using a horse) so they could be transported to nearest wharf for shipment.
At one stage, Irene also had a small sideline business, supplying charcoal to a blacksmith in Bega – which, of course, she had to make and also had to deliver.

When Irene retired, she moved to Bermagui where she had land on which she could keep her Jersey cows.

Information taken from ‘When the Chips are Down’ by Robert Whiter.