by Paul Terry
Throngs of swagmen regularly made their way along the road looking for work or a feed. Most were well-behaved but some might commit theft, or worse. Rose, who had been taught music, classical languages and painting as a girl, now had to learn to use a gun. Her son never forgot the evening Rose handled an old muzzle-loader in the house after a particularly ‘villainous-looking’ stranger arrived:
Putting the hammer down, she let it slip and the gun went off with a frightful bang, bringing down a shower of whitewash from the calico ceiling and scaring the life out of a family of possums who lived up among the beams and were just preparing to go out for the night. I suppose the stranger must have heard the shot down in the travellers’ hut, for he was very civil when he came along in the morning to draw his meat, tea and sugar: ‘And if you could spare a bit of bread, lady, I’d be glad of it. I ain’t much hand at makin’ damper.’
When Barty was about three, he had an accident that affected him for the rest of his life. He had a fall—possibly as a result of being dropped by his Aboriginal nurse, Fanny—and broke his right arm. The accident was never reported to his parents and they did not realise the bone had been broken. But as the days passed, the boy’s distress grew, so Rose took him to a doctor in the town of Wellington, about 45 kilometres away to the north-east.
The doctor thought Barty was suffering from ‘inflammation of the brain’ caused by teething, and three times a day for three weeks, the little boy’s head was blistered and his gums lanced. Of course, this did nothing for the broken arm and it was only two years later, after Barty fell from a horse and hurt the arm again, that Rose learned it had been broken in infancy. Paterson’s arm was shortened for life, and while it must have caused him discomfort, it did not prevent him from becoming an accomplished athlete and a master horseman.
Moments of drama aside, life at Buckinbah was often lonely for Rose. It did not help that Andrew had to travel to Sydney in May 1866 to give evidence in the trial of a man who forged a cheque for £10 in the names of Andrew and his brother John. Far more serious was the worsening drought. As the 1860s drew to a close, farmers across a vast swathe of the western country looked in vain to the skies for a sign of rain. Day after day they were disappointed. Creeks stopped flowing, the earth cracked open and pastures wilted. Over-extended and battling to meet repayments, the brothers were soon in trouble.
Paterson later recalled that, in desperation, Andrew drove a flock of sheep from the Queensland property to Buckinbah. But disaster struck when the ever-cruel weather changed again. This time the land of drought delivered flooding rains and Andrew and his sheep were trapped on a sand hill that became an island surrounded by rushing brown water. The sheep had to be sheared on the hill and the wool was lost. It was the final straw. Their properties would have to be sold.
In May 1869, Buckinbah, Illalong and Stainbourne Downs were offered for sale with a combined total of almost 23,000 sheep in what stock and station agents in Sydney said was a buyer’s market. The drought and falling wool prices were stifling interest in sheep stations—unless sold at a bargain price—and investors were looking at the safer option of cattle properties.
The Patersons’ properties were passed in at auction, but the auctioneers later received interest from private buyers. Illalong remained in family hands—but Buckinbah and Stainbourne Downs were sold at a loss in 1870. Andrew and Rose packed up their children, horses and whatever goods remained, and headed southeast to Illalong. For the parents it was a humiliating blow, but for their son it was the beginning of a wonderful new adventure that left him with cherished memories. It was also a farewell to the western country, a place that left a small but indelible imprint on his memory:
Across the landscape moved mobs of kangaroos and flocks of emus, quaint uncanny creatures moving silently through that grey light like the creatures of a dream. If ever a great Australian play is written, the scene will be cast, not in the hills which never change, but in the flat country which can stage anything from the desolation of a drought to a sea of waving grasses, with a march of strange animals and a dance of queer, self-conscious birds.
These were the memories that remained. Not the hard scrabble of a bush family struggling to stay afloat, but a place where opal and pearl colours glowed in the false dawn way beyond the Divide, a place populated by strange animals where a boy could see forever under a silver sky.
2
A BUSH BOYHOOD
Andrew and Rose Paterson arrived at Illalong with Barty and his two younger sisters in the winter of 1870. It had undoubtedly been a gloomy journey from failed Buckinbah. The loss of their properties had been humiliating and Rose, in particular, worried about their finances and the children’s futures. No one would go hungry at Illalong, but the children needed, among other things, good educations. Six-year-old Barty had already shown himself to be a bright, active boy—if a little accident-prone—and it was important that he learned all he could to become a gentleman. At four and two, there was more time to think about the future of the girls, but they too would have expensive needs. As well as a standard education, they would have to acquire an appreciation of music, art and books. A daughter of Rose Paterson might be poor but she would still learn to be a lady. All of this would have to be paid for.
But Illalong now had to support two families. John’s family would remain in the main homestead—a rather grand description for what was a rickety and weather-beaten bush construction of slab and bark—and Andrew, Rose and their three children would move into an even smaller and more dilapidated house nearby. Their old home at Buckinbah must have seemed a palace compared to the new one.
On the plus side, Rose was enjoying a hiatus from pregnancy and childbirth. Two-year-old Jessie had been the last baby and it would be a further three years before Rose fell again for what she called the ‘common cause’. There was much to do and it was a good time not to be pregnant. It helped that the Paterson name was respected in the district. John Paterson was a country gentleman. He had been a member of the New South Wales Parliament and, like his brother, he supplemented his income as a magistrate, hearing minor cases in a small courtroom at the nearby town of Binalong.
The town itself was another positive. It had only been thirty years or so since the area was such a wilderness that the government had declared it off limits to European expansion. A plough line had been dug at Mt Bowning, half way to Yass. This furrow in the earth delineated the end of civilisation and the beginning of savagery. No white men were to cross this line until the government was ready to let them. This, naturally, did not impress the squatters and settlers who wanted the land past the plough line. Ignoring the government’s decree they crossed the line and began to ‘civilise’ the wilderness. Others followed and soon Binalong was an established Cobb & Co stopover on the long road between Sydney and Melbourne. Less than an hour’s ride from Illalong Station, by 1870 the town boasted a post office, a police station, at least two hotels and, most importantly, a school. It was there—in that single room with its sole teacher—that Rose’s children and their cousins would get the beginnings of the education they needed.
Such was the situation facing the young Paterson family as they ended their old life in the rolling lands to the west and started again in the hill country to the south. For Rose and Andrew it was an unsettling time, where the only certainties were hard work, worry and limited reward. For six-year-old Barty, though, it was the beginning of an adventure that would create a lifelong love for the wondrous bush, its remarkable people and its strange, beautiful animals.
*
Whatever hopes the families had for Illalong were shattered a little over a year later. On the morning of 15 August 1871, John Paterson left the station for a day’s business in town. He returned home that evening in good health but a few hours after retiring to bed he was convulsed by agonising cramps across the chest. A station hand was sent on an urgent dash to fetch the doctor at Yass, 30 hilly kilometres away to the south-east. But it was already too late
. Moments after the messenger galloped over the nearest hill, John died in his bedroom. When the doctor arrived the next day, all he could do was to diagnose an ‘effusion of blood on the chest’ as the cause of death.
The news quickly spread around the district and the following day’s Goulburn Herald and Chronicle remembered John Paterson as a ‘most esteemed neighbour and . . . a painstaking magistrate’. In a brief obituary, the paper told the story of a man who had been active and respected in his community. He had been elected unopposed to parliament in 1858 but found the practice of politics distasteful and was glad to have resigned. He had recently delivered an interesting lecture on ‘Scottish Eccentricities’ at the Yass Mechanic’s Institute and he had penned many ‘communications of great merit’ that were published in that very paper. The report finished by drily recording that ‘the deceased’ was survived by a wife and young family.
The loss of a husband, father and brother was a shattering emotional blow—and it was also a financial catastrophe. Without his brother’s help, and bending at the knees under a mountain of debt, Andrew could not meet the repayments on their mortgage. Inevitably, the bank foreclosed and Illalong had to be sold. There can hardly have been a bleaker time for both families. Already bereaved, they now faced losing their homes and their livelihoods.
But it was then that they received a stroke of luck. The new owner of Illalong was a neighbour, a man named Henry Brown, who owned five runs nearby. He took over Illalong’s debt, adding it to his estate, and hired Andrew as the manager of all six properties. It meant that Andrew had gone from property owner to hired hand, but the good news was that the family could stay at Illalong and Andrew would earn the useful sum of £200 a year. Although they would not be wealthy, Andrew and Rose at least had a stable home for the children.
Rose’s sister Emily, however, now faced life as a widow and there was nothing to keep her at Illalong. Taking her youngest children, she left for Sydney, where she moved into her mother’s house at Gladesville. Emily’s oldest child, ten-year-old Jack, stayed behind on the farm. The permanent inclusion of Jack in the household was a delight to Barty. Just two years older, Jack would become Barty’s constant companion for the rest of their childhood.
Rose’s family now moved into the main homestead. It had suffered through years of extreme weather and a lack of funds meant it had been rather neglected. Draughts whistled through gaps in the slabs in winter and in summer the same gaps admitted squadrons of buzzing, stinging insects. But Barty either did not notice these shortcomings, or as an old man he chose to overlook them when he remembered the house in Illalong Children as ‘an old-fashioned cottage, built of slabs covered with plaster, whitewashed till it shone in the sun’. The roof was made of bark (later replaced with tin) that regularly needed to be replaced with new strips peeled from the trunks of eucalypts. A verandah provided some shade at the front, and, inside, sheets of calico made a ceiling that acted as a thoroughfare for possums seeking a shortcut from the house to the garden.
For Barty and Jack, the house was just a place to eat and sleep, and Illalong Children makes little more mention of the homestead. Instead, these childhood memoirs run free outdoors, taking a wide-eyed delight in the wonders of the bush. There was a caste of furry and feathered characters. Magpies lined up on a fence to be handfed, curlews wailed in sorrow and little blue-cap wrens hopped cheerfully up to the kitchen door for scraps. Fleeing kangaroo rats provided endless and usually fruitless fun for pursuing boys and dogs, and the creek behind the house was a natural wonderland where a wild black duck took her troop of fuzzy ducklings for their first swim and a platypus drifted downstream as ‘silently as a brown streak of waterweed’.
Some of the characters were semi-permanent. Others came and went in a flash. The parakeets screeched their greetings as they dashed past in blazes of colour, an owl shrieked like a banshee at night and soldier birds, ‘fierce-eyed little grey ruffians’, inflicted a reign of terror over crows, snakes and hawks. The permanent residents included ‘Oily Gammon’, the water rat—‘quite a dandy with his black satin coat’. Oily Gammon defied all efforts to catch him; a snare made of a bent sapling trapped him once but he escaped by biting through the rope and he lived to create oily descendants that live in the creek today.
Then there was ‘Uncle’, a tame cockatoo who had learned to call the farm dogs. The dogs ‘regarded him as a superior intellect’ and never dared to trouble him. Uncle took delight in removing the pegs from the clothes line with his beak so that the clothes fell to the ground, but to his disgust the wild cockatoos would have nothing to do with him. Any flight into the paddocks would end in Uncle’s screeching retreat to the house.
A stern-looking eaglehawk who lived atop a hill was nicknamed ‘The MacPherson’ because his hooked beak and fierce eyes reminded the children of a Scottish chieftain in a book. When a younger eaglehawk—MacPherson Junior—was found injured in the bush, he was brought to the house to convalesce. ‘Mr Wattles’, the Muscovy duck, made the mistake of waddling too close to the tethered eaglehawk. Suddenly, a talon shot out. Mr Wattles was instantly quite dead and Macpherson Junior had a tasty lunch of fresh duck. Luckily, Mr Wattles was not popular in the farmyard and his demise caused little distress to anyone.
The swallows were a nuisance. Year after year, resisting stiff opposition, they built their nests under the verandah roof and left their calling cards in the form of droppings that coated the verandah floor like oily white paint. Continually smashing the nests seemed cruel and so a compromise was reached. Planks were hung beneath the nests to catch the droppings and everyone was happy, especially the swallows.
There were plenty of human visitors to the house, too. The road past the homestead carried a stream of swagmen, bullock drivers and horsemen travelling to and from the nearby towns or mountains. The girls, Flo and Jessie, sometimes worked at the station store, a slab-and-bark building that smelt of leather. They sold provisions to these passing travellers, although many only wanted tobacco. Meat, flour and sugar were sold to those who could afford it and given to those who could not. The signals of the road—perhaps a blaze on a tree or a cairn of stones on a fence post—told the swagmen they would get a friendly welcome at Illalong. A free feed was repaid with a little labour around the farm. But for Barty, the best payment came in the form of yarns told by the rugged bushmen. With wide-open eyes he devoured the stories told by bullockies, swagmen and stockmen and each tale added its own little layer to the store of knowledge he would one day parlay into some of Australia’s greatest bush poems.
Barty’s parents tried to discourage him from contact with the bullockies—they were thought to be ‘up to stratagems and spoils, especially in the way of stealing horses’—but he sought them out nonetheless. The young Paterson was pleased to discover that the tough bullock drivers did not deserve their bad reputation. They often travelled with their families, sometimes with dogs and chickens walking alongside their drays, and, as Paterson later recalled in The Sydney Morning Herald, the men treated their bullocks with kindness:
One of them [a bullocky] gave me a demonstration with a bullock whip, cutting great furrows in the bark of a white gum tree. When I said it was no wonder that the bullocks pulled, he remarked feelingly ‘Sonny, if I done that to them bullocks I’d want shooting, every bullock knows his name, and when I speak to him he’s in the yoke. I’d look well knockin’ ’em about with a hundred miles to go and them not gettin’ a full feed once a week.’
At about this time, Paterson got his first introduction to what became a lifelong passion—the ‘sport of kings’. One New Year’s Day, a station rouseabout took the boy to the picnic races at Bogolong (now the hamlet of Bookham), about halfway between Yass and Jugiong on the Sydney–Melbourne road. It was an instructive experience for young Barty. Bogolong was notable for its two pubs, ‘half a mile apart and nothing in between’. The rouseabout, a man of the world at eighteen, explained to his eight-year-old companion that there was ‘one pub to catch the c
oves coming from Yass and the other is to catch the coves from Jugiong’.
The racetrack was similarly unrefined. It had no grandstand and the track itself ran through box and stringybark scrub. But it was the characters he met there that really impressed the boy. As he recalled later in The Sydney Morning Herald, the racehorses were ridden by ‘wild men from the Murrumbidgee Mountains’—men who did much to develop Barty’s fascination with the rugged horsemen of the high country. Among the racegoers were ‘a sprinkling of more civilised sportsmen from Yass and Jugiong, blackfellows . . . and a few out-and-outers who had ridden down from Lobbs Hole, a place so steep that . . . the horses wore all their hair off their tails sliding down the mountains’.
An event that took place that day probably inspired Paterson to write one of his better-known poems ‘Old Pardon, the Son of Reprieve’. He had learned to ride and had travelled to the races on a pony with a lightweight child’s saddle. One of the mountain men took the saddle from Barty’s horse and placed it on his own. The mountain man, ‘about seven feet high’, said he wanted the saddle for his racehorse, Pardon. The boy was promised a ginger beer when Pardon won his heat. The horse won not one but two heats and Barty got his reward:
I had the ginger beer—bitter luke-warm stuff with hops in it—but what did I care? My new friend assured me that Pardon could not have won without my saddle. It had made all the difference. Years afterwards, I worked the incident into a sort of a ballad called ‘Old Pardon, the Son of Reprieve’—the story of a champion racehorse who won his owners pockets full of money.