Big Fig, Miriam Vale

Big Fig is a heritage-listed tree at Station Street, Miriam Vale, Gladstone Region, Queensland, Australia. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 6 January 2004.HistoryThe Big Fig at Miriam Vale is thought to have been planted around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, local residents recalling the Fig Tree as being well established by the 1920s. Or it may have been the fig tree planted "about a chain from the main entrance of the railway station" in 1916 by the Miriam Vale Progress Association. Whatever its origins, it became a focus for community activity, both social and economic, through much of the 20th century. The tree is a well-known landmark and meeting place in the town, and until 1977 served as the site for the collection of local cream and milk for rail or road transportation to Gladstone, dairying being an important economic activity in the Miriam Vale district.Miriam Vale pastoral run was one of the earliest established in the Port Curtis district, reputedly taken up in January 1854 by Arthur PJ Chauvel and Joseph Sharp, along with the runs of Urquhart, Polmaily and Walton, soon after the proclamation of the Port Curtis Pastoral District on 10 January 1854. Acceptance of their tender for these runs did not appear in the New South Wales Government Gazette until 9 June 1857. Walter Blomfield, reminiscing in 1949, states that cousins Edwin Cordeaux Blomfield (Walter's father) and EK Cox purchased the lease, along with 8,000 sheep, in 1856, although the lease was not recorded in Queensland as being transferred to Cox and Bloomfield until 1869. Early squatters in the area concentrated on wool production, exporting their produce via Gladstone, which was established in 1853-54.