Night Ride into Danger

by Jackie French

  Cobb & Co was founded in the gold rush days of 1853 by an American, Freeman Cobb, and his partners in Victoria. It changed hands several times, expanding across Victoria and then to New South Wales and Queensland. They first imported American coaches, including the Concord stagecoach, light vehicles with layers of thick leather strapping called thoroughbraces that were both lighter and more comfortable on unmade roads than the metal springs used by competitors. Soon enough coaches were being made in various factories around Australia, employing coach builders, harness-makers and repairers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, painters, trimmers and upholsterers for their red plush seats. By 1874, when this book is set, several firms in Australia operated as ‘Cobb & Co’ and also linked their services with small local coach companies for the more difficult or less travelled routes.

  The system brought fast travel to outback Australia, but despite the red plush seats, the coaches weren’t actually more comfortable for the passengers than other coaches. The seats were narrow, and so was the space for passengers’ legs and feet. The leather curtains gave little protection from heat, cold and wind, and though the action of the thoroughbrace suspension system was less jolting on the rough Australian tracks and roads than the metal leaf-springs that were common in England and Europe, the thoroughbrace system caused a lot more motion sickness because the coach rocked and rolled and wallowed a lot more than leaf-spring vehicles. Their main advantage over metal springs was that the coaches didn’t rattle themselves apart and the leather thoroughbraces didn’t break as the metal springs did in the harsh conditions. Most coaches were built for eight passengers but often carried many more on top, but there were smaller and far larger models, including the short-lived 84-seat ‘Leviathan’.

  By the 1870s Cobb & Co’s main business model was to carry the mail, passengers and their luggage to connect with the ever-growing network of railway lines and their steam trains. The light coaches were extremely fast, using specially bred and trained horses in teams that were changed every ten to twenty miles, light coaches, and legendary skilled drivers (Jehus or Whips). Cobb & Co were also reliable. A ticket might cost four pounds or more in the days when a farm labourer was only paid forty pounds a year and a good cook about thirty, but Cobb & Co would probably get you to the train on time, or to your new job, a hundred miles from the train line: worth every penny when the stakes were high.

  Most of all, they provided reliable transport where there had been none, bringing supplies and mail as well as people, including dancers and theatre troupes. Kids ran out to wave at the passing coaches, the only strangers they might see from year to year. Cobb & Co meant that villages could hire a schoolteacher, or small farms would survive because they could get their produce to the Sydney market.

  Cobb & Co was romanticised for its determination to ‘get through’ no matter what the weather or terrain. They even ran at night, using the three lanterns in this book, with a bugle blown on approach to warn coaching stations to ready the next team of horses and their harnesses, or to tell carts, riders and, hopefully, wombats, kangaroos or emus to get off the road. Cobb & Co assumed the right of way. Other traffic may have accepted this. I doubt the wombats or the emus did.

  The real Cobb & Co was slightly different from the legend. Exhausted drivers rolled their coaches. Horses on the less well-managed runs died in harness. The ‘country accommodation and meals’ were often a blanket on the floor and chops, chops, chops. There are countless travellers’ stories of the day or night the coach was washed downriver, or rolled when it had only just left the coaching station, overloaded with passengers on top.

  In reality, a Cobb & Co journey varied enormously from region to region, owner or manager or driver, the ‘Whips’. The make of coach varied, as did the number and quality of horses, and the reliability. Some stories tell of comfortable seats, dry straw to keep their feet warm and a hotel with clean feather beds and buttered eggs for breakfast. Others tell of hundreds of miles of dust and terror with drunken passengers paying the driver to take the reins. But even those journeys left the passengers with a story to tell. Cobb & Co was loved.

  The last coach journey in Australia under the name of Cobb & Co was in Queensland in 1924, but you will still see the name in films and TV series or at tourist sites, and in Henry Lawson’s poem at the beginning of this book.

  I’m indebted to Norman Whitfield of the Old Braidwood Facebook page for all his magnificent knowledge of ‘old Braidwood’ and, in particular, the information about where the Cobb & Co Depot was, in Minnie Burke’s two-storey house in Duncan Street. (I had thought it was another place entirely.)

  At the time the book is set Cobb & Co ran the Braidwood–Goulburn route, and the mail contract was a valuable part of their trade. As the train lines were extended, their trade slowly ceased, especially after the introduction of motorcars.

  In 1874 there seem to have been subcontractors who would drive the coaches from Moruya up to Braidwood, and from Braidwood down to Araluen. I think, but am not sure, that Cobb & Co only had the four stations, at Manar — I can still remember the remnants of it — Boro, Sherwin Flats, now Tarago, with a Halfway House between there and Goulburn, but there were other posting houses on that route too during the coaching days. Malones took over the Cobb & Co route to Tarago, changing horses at Boro and Manar.

  THE COBB & CO TEAMS

  While many Australian coach teams were rough and half-wild, Cobb & Co relied on good horse breeders and trainers. Some teams had up to sixteen horses — more for the Leviathan — but the most common arrangement was a team of five.

  The polers were the horses closest to the vehicle. They were harnessed either side of a sturdy pole and in front of and connected by their leather traces to a movable cross bar that swung the two smaller front wheels to steer the coach. The polers were usually the strongest pair of horses but the teams were remarkably even in their size and strength. The leaders were the horses in front of the polers. Each horse had its own harness and they weren’t attached to each other, just to the coach, which is how a skilful driver could actually split the team to go around a sudden wombat. Typically, the horses in a Cobb & Co team wore very simple gear compared to most teams. The harness consisted of a bridle with reins going back to the driver, and a handfitted collar through which all the horse’s energy and pulling power went via the leather traces attached to the swingle trees connected to the crosspieces attached to the pole. There were no shafts, no back pads and cruppers, no breeching, usually no belly-band or girth. These arrangements could be varied according to terrain and load but this was the pattern that established Cobb & Co’s reputation for speed, reliability and safety. Driving down very steep hills a large foot-operated lever provided the friction through a brake block on the rear wheels to help slow down the coach.

  Sometimes a log was attached behind to act as a supplementary drag to help slow it down so that in the absence of shafts it didn’t overtake the horses. It requires more skill to stop a heavy coach rolling downhill too fast than to pull it uphill. Extra horses were sometimes led behind the coach to be added in for a particularly long and steep hill. Passengers were expected to get out and walk up steep hills or through sticky mud to take some of the load off the horses.

  Horses were selected to work together in teams — matched for colour and conformation as well as compatibility. Matching the horses for size, strength and stride length is part of the skill set of a good driver. Teams often worked in the same configurations and, on many runs, particular stations kept the drivers’ favourite teams matched with the next leg of the journey.

  Jem was lucky he was on a coach in an area known for good horses and good training and that his team would probably have travelled their section of the route and how to work together, needing only the lightest guidance. But that guidance would have been essential in taking corners at the correct angle and speed, slowing for ice and much else.

  Driving was also extremely hard physical work. The long leather reins required to drive
a team of five horses are very heavy. Most people could manage a single horse in harness. Many could manage two. A four-in-hand was only for the extremely skilled, physically able and mentally focused. More than that driven by a single driver needed skill, experience and talent — and even greater physical and mental strength. Jem’s drive would not have been physically or mentally possible without ‘Mr Smith’s’ help, but was still a triumph, and a notable one in the days when a man — gentleman or groom — was judged on his ability to manage horses.

  BRIDGES AND ROADS

  A few months after the time in which this story is based the first bridge was built at Warri over the Shoalhaven River, making a safe crossing from what had been a dangerous one. The first wooden bridge was eventually swept away in a flood, and for a while the FJ Holdens and other cars had to use yet another ford — or get stuck and pulled out by a red tractor. Its higher replacement burned down just as the new concrete one was finished.

  The bridge where Jem crosses the Mulwaree River outside Goulburn was built by convicts in 1843. A new bridge was built upstream in 1878 and the route of the main road into Goulburn was changed to cross it. That bridge has been replaced twice but kept in the same place.

  The route Jem took from Braidwood to Goulburn is not the same as the Kings Highway and Goulburn Road now. There are at least two major deviations and many small ones, as the roads have been straightened and culverts built, but the country he passed through was much the same as it is now, though there was more forest then than paddocks. The trees were also much larger, both wider and taller — the present trees are all regrowth and, with topsoil lost to erosion from wind and water, trees no longer grow as large on that part of the Southern Tablelands, and most wildlife has been lost to farming, shooting, poisoning and bushfires.

  Even in my lifetime I have seen the flocks of emus vanish, and dingoes no longer howl from the hills, or cross the road with yellow eyes flashing in the headlights at night, and quolls are rare. The last koalas were shot for their fur in the 1930s; the 2019–2020 bushfires destroyed most of the region’s wildlife and habitat, and even wombats are rare now as are wallabies, though kangaroos still survive.

  The drive from Braidwood to Goulburn is much safer and faster than it was in Jem’s day, but it is much more barren, too, for apart from the shapes of the hills and the deep skeleton of the land, all that you see is the work of people: paddocks and fences, electricity lines and houses. The rich world of bush and animals that fed and kept the Indigenous people of the tableland country has vanished like the coaches of Cobb & Co.

  HENRY LAWSON’S POEMS

  I first heard of Cobb & Co in Henry Lawson’s poem ‘The Lights of Cobb and Co’. It spoke of wild adventure, specks of light through the darkness, taking passengers to isolated stations, wild yarns and lost romance.

  Lawson’s youth as a boy on a drought-wracked farm must have been lit by dreams of Cobb & Co. But as an older man, and a broken, impoverished alcoholic, he was also imprisoned in Darlinghurst Gaol. And, as the poem ‘One Hundred and Three’ states, he was one of the few inmates who had the courage, or the skill with words, to speak about its horrors.

  Many of my books feature characters or scenes based on those described in poem or prose by Lawson. This book was inspired by these two poems.

  ‘THE LIGHTS OF COBB AND CO’, HENRY LAWSON, 1900

  Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;

  A lantern in the stable; a jingle now and then;

  The mail-coach looming darkly by light of moon and star;

  The growl of sleepy voices; a candle in the bar;

  A stumble in the passage of folk with wits abroad;

  A swear-word from a bedroom — the shout of ‘All aboard!’

  ‘Tchk tchk! Git-up!’ ‘Hold fast, there!’ and down the range we go;

  Five hundred miles of scattered camps will watch for Cobb and Co.

  Old coaching towns already decaying for their sins;

  Uncounted ‘Half-way Houses’, and scores of ‘Ten-Mile Inns’;

  The roaring camps of Gulgong, and many a ‘Digger’s Rest’;

  The diggers on the Lachlan; the huts of Farthest West;

  Some twenty thousand exiles who sailed for weal or woe —

  The bravest hearts of twenty lands will wait for Cobb and Co.

  The morning star has vanished, the frost and fog are gone.

  In one of those grand mornings which but on mountains dawn;

  The roads are rare to travel, and life seems all complete;

  The grind of wheels on gravel, the trot of horses’ feet,

  The trot, trot, trot and canter, as down the spur we go —

  The green sweeps to horizons blue that call for Cobb and Co.

  We take a bright girl actress through western dusts, and damps,

  To bear the home-world message, and sing for sinful camps,

  To stir our hearts and break them, wild hearts that hope and ache —

  (Ah! When she thinks again of these her own must nearly break!)

  Five miles this side of the gold-field, a loud, triumphant shout:

  Five hundred cheering diggers have snatched the horses out:

  With Auld Lang Syne’ in chorus, through roaring camp they go

  That cheer for her, and cheer for Home, and cheer for Cobb and Co.

  Three lamps above the ridges and gorges dark and deep,

  A flash on sandstone cuttings where sheer the sidings sweep,

  A flash on shrouded wagons, on water ghastly white;

  Weird bush and scattered remnants of ‘rushes in the night’;

  Across the swollen river a flash beyond the ford:

  Ride hard to warn the driver! He’s drunk or mad, good Lord!

  But on the bank to westward a broad and cheerful glow —

  New camps extend across the plains new routes for Cobb and Co.

  Swift scramble up the siding where teams climb inch by inch;

  Pause, bird-like, on the summit — then breakneck down the pinch;

  By clear, ridge-country rivers, and gaps where tracks run high,

  Where waits the lonely horseman, cut clear against the sky;

  Through stringy-bark and blue-gum, and box and pine we go —

  A hundred miles shall see to-night the lights of Cobb and Co!

  Throw down the reins, old driver — there’s no one left to shout;

  The ruined inn’s survivor must take the horses out.

  A poor old coach hereafter! — we’re lost to all such things —

  No bursts of songs or laughter shall shake your leathern springs

  When creeping in unnoticed by railway sidings drear,

  Or left in yards for lumber, decaying with the year —

  Oh, who’ll think how in those days when distant fields were broad

  You raced across the Lachlan side with twenty-five on board.

  Not all the ships that sail away since Roaring Days are done —

  Not all the boats that steam from port, nor all the trains that run,

  Shall take such hopes and loyal hearts — for men shall never know

  Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb and Co.

  The ‘greyhounds’ race across the sea, the ‘special’ cleaves the haze,

  But these seem dull and slow to me compared with Roaring Days!

  The eyes that watched are dim with age, and souls are weak and slow,

  The hearts are dust or hardened now that broke for Cobb and Co.

  This version is from Verses, Popular and Humorous (1900) the second collection of poems by Henry Lawson, released in hardback by Angus & Robertson publishers in 1900. ‘The Lights of Cobb and Co’ had been published before, but I can’t find a record of it to see if this version varies.

  ‘ONE HUNDRED AND THREE’, HENRY LAWSON, 1908

  With the frame of a man, and the face of a boy, and a manner strangely wild,

  And the great, wide, wondering, innocent eyes of a silent-suffering c
hild;

  With his hideous dress and his heavy boots, he drags to Eternity —

  And the Warder says, in a softened tone: ‘Keep step, One Hundred and Three.’

  ’Tis a ghastly travesty of drill — or a ghastly farce of work —

  But One Hundred and Three, he catches step with a start, a shuffle and jerk.

  ’Tis slow starvation in separate cells, and a widow’s son is he,

  And the widow, she drank before he was born — (Keep step, One Hundred and Three!)

  They shut a man in the four-by-eight, with a six-inch slit for air,

  Twenty-three hours of the twenty-four, to brood on his virtues there.

  And the dead stone walls and the iron door close in as an iron band

  On eyes that followed the distant haze far out on the level land.

  Bread and water and hominy, and a scrag of meat and a spud,

  A Bible and thin flat book of rules, to cool a strong man’s blood;

  They take the spoon from the cell at night — and a stranger might think it odd;

  But a man might sharpen it on the floor, and go to his own Great God.

  One Hundred and Three, it is hard to believe that you saddled your horse at dawn;

  There were girls that rode through the bush at eve, and girls who lolled on the lawn.

  There were picnic parties in sunny bays, and ships on the shining sea;

  There were foreign ports in the glorious days — (Hold up, One Hundred and Three!)

  A man came out at exercise time from one of the cells to-day:

  ’Twas the ghastly spectre of one I knew, and I thought he was far away;

  We dared not speak, but he signed ‘Farewell — fare — well,’ and I knew by this