by Liz Harfull
20
GRASS CASTLE LEGACIES
When it comes to outback Australia, few names are as legendary as Durack. Patrick ‘Patsy’ Durack was an obstinate, adventurous and visionary Irishman who opened up some of the most isolated pastoral country in the world, establishing vast cattle stations across far south-western Queensland and the Kimberley region of northern Australia.
Patsy emigrated to the colony of New South Wales in 1853 with his parents and siblings. He came from a family of tenant farmers, driven into poverty by a combination of the Potato Famine and greedy English landlords who evicted many thousands of small tenants during the late 1840s and early 1850s so they could increase the profitability of their holdings. It is thought that as many as 1.5 million people died of starvation and disease during this period, fuelling a long-standing hatred of the British. Desperate to escape poverty and hunger, another million or so left Ireland for far-flung colonies such as Australia.
The Duracks headed to the Goulburn district where another branch of the family had settled a few years before. Patsy was only eighteen when his father was killed just two months after they arrived, crushed to death under a wagon loaded with timber after the horse pulling it was spooked by a kangaroo. Young Patsy was driving at the time. Chronicling her family’s remarkable story in her best-selling book, Kings in Grass Castles, his granddaughter, Mary Durack, wrote that the tragedy turned him from a boy into a man overnight.
As the oldest son, Patsy took responsibility for the family and securing their future. After settling his mothers and sisters at Goulburn, he joined thousands of people from across the globe making for the Victorian goldfields. Unlike most of them, he set himself a clear and modest goal. All he wanted was £1000 so he could buy some land and a few cattle. He reached his target after eighteen months on the Ovens Goldfield, just over the New South Wales border, and returned to buy a property at Mummel.
During his time on the goldfields, Patsy became acquainted with another Irish digger by the name of Patrick Tully. Mary Durack described him as a thoughtful young man with gentle manners, from a farming family that had fought the Irish cause for generations. Patrick landed in Melbourne with his brother Joe and two cousins the same year that the Duracks arrived in Australia. His quest for gold took him to the Ballarat diggings in time for the famous Eureka rebellion in December 1854. He claimed to have helped build the wooden stockade where twenty-two diggers and five troopers died in bloody protest against exorbitant mining licence fees. The family story, as Stephen Tully knows it, is that his great-great-grandfather fortuitously missed out on the action, because he had left the stockade to fetch supplies.
The Duracks and the Tullys became inextricably linked when Patrick married Patsy’s favourite sister, Sarah. His right-hand ‘man’ on the family property at Mummel, she was an excellent horsewoman, known for her pluck and spirit, and her ability to work stock with the ‘cunning of an old hand’. According to a family history written by Stephen’s great-aunt Fleur Lehane, Sarah was very pretty, with dark hair, grey eyes and a clear Irish complexion. Happy and bright, she loved to dance and was a talented singer like her mother, who also taught her daughters to be fine cooks. Patrick met Sarah through a goldmining friend who married her sister. They became better acquainted when he visited relatives in the Goulburn district, and called in to see Patsy. Sarah convinced him to give up mining, and they married and settled initially on a block at Hume Creek, where they ran a modest mixed farming enterprise.
Thirteen years after they married, the Tullys headed north to Queensland, drawn by the enthusiasm and generosity of Patsy, whose hunger for land swept up most of the extended family in the coming decades, leading some to fortunes and others to ruin. His first attempt to open up new country in south-western Queensland in 1863 ended in disaster, when the 400 cattle and 100 horses he took with him died on the journey from lack of feed and water. He and his party only escaped with their lives because of help received from some local Aboriginal people.
Despite his near-death experience and considerable financial loss, Patsy refused to give up his ambition to build a cattle empire in what everyone thought of as an unforgiving and inhospitable wilderness. He was convinced that he would find permanent water, and that the losses during bad seasons would be far outweighed by the gains in prosperous times. He knew that the land burst into life whenever drenching rain and flooding waters spread through its intricate network of creeks and channels, leaving cattle wallowing belly deep in rich fodder.
Driven by a restless energy and a tendency to work like ‘he had the devil on his tail’, Patsy returned a few years later when better conditions prevailed, establishing Thylungra station on a tributary of Cooper’s Creek. Riding over rough terrain for many days, he and his brother-in-law, John Costello, staked claim to more than 44,000 square kilometres between them, stretching from just west of where Quilpie now stands to the Diamantina River.
Among the holdings was land which Patsy earmarked for Sarah and her family, on the eastern boundary of Thylungra. He kept writing to them, urging them to come up, but Patrick didn’t want to be a burden when the seasons were not favour-able, and he and Sarah had more than a few family tragedies to deal with, including the death of her sister and three of their own babies in just a few short years. After Sarah’s best friend died, and what was promising to be a bumper wheat crop succumbed to rust, the Tullys finally decided it was time to leave their troubles behind them and make a fresh start. They sold their farm, packed their belongings into wagons and bullock drays, and in 1874 headed north with the best of their cattle and horses. They were accompanied on the 1600-kilometre journey by their five surviving children and Sarah’s sister, Mary, her husband, Dinny Skeahan, and their three children. Along the way, Sarah gave birth to another son.
After months of travel, they arrived at Thylungra where they stayed for a month, revelling in the luxury of having a roof over their heads and being reunited with family. Then the Tullys moved on to their new property, which became known as Ray station. Ten years old at the time, their daughter Margaret recalled the wind blowing balls of roly-poly burr across the plain as they reached the site in the late afternoon. They were greeted by the excited chatter of a group of Aborigines camped on the bank of the creek where the Tullys built their first timber and daub homestead, thatched with cane grass. Sarah insisted her new home face towards Thylungra so she could see her brothers coming from the front verandah, even though it meant facing the prevailing desert winds and hot afternoon sun. According to Mary Durack, she also told her husband that Ray would remain their home no matter what happened. ‘We live and die here, the lot of us,’ Sarah said.
Sarah and Patrick remained adamant, even when Patsy’s lust for land and the prospect of greater riches pushed the Duracks to leave western Queensland and open up the Kimberley district of Western Australia. The Tullys had made a home in the Channel Country. They would stay and make a go of it. Besides, Sarah was not going to leave the son and daughter buried in the cemetery on Thylungra. Francis, the baby born on the trip north, had died in her arms when he was only two. Despite being a talented healer, her mother was unable to save him and the nearest doctor was in Roma, an impossible 500 kilometres or so away. Her daughter Annie wandered off when she was only three while the family was attending mass and a christening, during a rare visit by a Catholic priest. Sarah had sent the restless child out to play and did not notice her missing until much later. After an exhaustive search that went on for days, they found her body lying in a gully, wildflowers clutched in one hand. Whether it was from guilt or grief, Sarah never got over the terrible loss. Patrick was convinced that she had a breakdown, and relatives talked of her personality changing completely. She rarely smiled and was terrified of letting her children leave her sight. As they became adults, she liked to keep close control of her daughters, and discouraged them from marrying and leaving home.
It was without question a hard life at Ray, coping with isolation and an extreme cl
imate, with few if any luxuries. In the early years, there was no way of communicating with the outside world. Supplies were only delivered to the station twice a year, and the men were often away for months at a time, working cattle, droving them to markets as far as Adelaide, or fetching supplies, leaving the women to manage everything in their absence.
Sarah did not restrict her attention to the home paddock; she was keenly interested in livestock and the business side of the station. Mary Durack says Sarah even persuaded her husband and Patsy to take on sheep, despite their misgivings that they were not suited to the area, and would never produce wool of any quality. Patsy questioned what a woman could possibly know about such things, but Sarah believed the Channel Country would one day grow wool fine enough to dress the pope. Bowing to his wife’s suggestion, Patrick bought 500 sheep in the early 1880s. The venture proved so successful that he later gave up cattle altogether. After it passed out of Durack hands, Thylungra went on to become one of the biggest and most respected sheep stations in the world, producing a 1400-bale wool clip from highly regarded Merino bloodlines.
Patrick and Sarah celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary before Patrick died in 1922, followed a few months later by his wife. They are both buried in the family cemetery on Ray, which is still in Tully hands. Looking back at what drew his ancestors to settle and then stay in a place so starkly different to their cool, green homeland, Stephen reckons it comes down to their nature, and a fierce determination to escape English authority. Queensland might have been a British colony, but the Channel Country was a long way from the nearest bureaucrat. ‘I don’t know for sure, but going on what a lot of the Tullys are like, I think they had a feisty attitude and a fierce sense of independence,’ he says. ‘They knew it was up to them to make a go of it. If they failed, they failed on their own and no-one was going to tell them what to do. Yes, it was hard, it was tough, but it was all about what they could make of it. It was a case of, “Here I am, here I stay. This is it.”’
Stephen could well be talking about himself. He was only a toddler when he made up his mind that he wanted to follow in the family footsteps. ‘There was never any question,’ he says. One of ten children, Stephen spent most of his childhood at Bunginderry, living in the house which is now home to his own family. His parents, John and Wendy, bought the property in 1977, reclaiming another lost link. It was originally taken up by Patsy Durack for one of his sisters, but she died in childbirth and it was resumed into the neighbouring station of Pinkilla, which was purchased by the Tullys in 1905. Bunginderry was later separated again by the Land Commission and offered up for selection, with the Tully family holding it until the 1950s.
John grew up on another family property, Tenham station, further north-west, towards Windorah. His mother, Genevieve, was the daughter of pioneering Brisbane orthopaedic surgeon Dr Authur Meehan. From ‘the posh end of town’, she had no thoughts of becoming a station wife because her husband, another Patrick, did not plan to spend his life on the land. A barrister of the Supreme Court in Queensland, he served as an associate to Judge Hugh Macrossan and was all set for a glittering legal career until one of his older brothers was lost over the North Sea while flying with the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II.
Rejected for military service because he had only one kidney, Patrick was called home to run Tenham. He and Gen stayed for more than thirty years, raising a family of ten children. ‘She had never been out west. She would have lived a grand life and to go out there it would have been a big cultural shock to her,’ reflects Wendy, who considers the changing circumstances she had to adapt to in the 1960s much slighter by comparison.
Gen took on teaching all her own children, relying on a correspondence school providing lesson material until a School of the Air was established at Charleville in 1966. No stranger to medical emergencies with her own family, Wendy has been told stories of how Gen had to cope with a stationhand accidentally cutting off his arm with a circular saw, and her husband being operated on at the homestead, after his head was caught in a windmill. The Royal Flying Doctor Service brought in a doctor, who undertook the surgery while the pilot held a light for him to work by. Gen was eight months pregnant at the time.
Wendy was only nineteen when she arrived in the Channel Country. One of five children, she grew up within a couple of hours of Brisbane, on a dairy farm so close to the outskirts of Kingaroy that she could ride her bicycle to school. After finishing her secondary education, she worked in a shop but adventure was calling. When she saw an advertisement seeking ‘a companion help’ for Tenham, Wendy thought it sounded like a good place to start. ‘I was going to travel around Australia, and this was meant to be my first stop,’ she says.
John likes to tell people that he picked his future wife out of a line-up. The second eldest of the Tully children, he was given the task of selecting the successful applicant while he was visiting Brisbane on holiday. The employment section of a stock and station agency had placed the advertisement on Gen’s behalf and culled the responses to those most suitable. After interviewing the remaining candidates, John thought the quietly spoken but poised lass from the South Burnett would fit the bill admirably. On her part, Wendy thought John seemed kind, even if he was wearing unfashionably wide pants when hip youngsters preferred them narrow. ‘He was a bushy. He wasn’t modern by any means,’ she adds dryly.
Wendy arrived at Tenham in the blistering heat of January 1966. Looking back at those first weeks, she wonders why she stayed. ‘I slept in this little room, and it had windows on the western side and one door. And I remember getting out of bed and sleeping in the doorway, and wetting a towel to try and keep cool. Of course, it didn’t work.’
As a companion help, Wendy took on domestic duties such as cleaning the house, relieving some of the pressure on Gen who had three remaining children to raise and teach. The Tullys had just built a new homestead fitted with a lot of modern conveniences, but Wendy still had to contend with red dust that seeped into every room, and creek water that flowed dirty brown from the taps. Then there were the mosquitoes and sandflies that plagued her after it rained. ‘I had allergic reactions to them, and I’m a scratcher, so I had sores all over me.’
On the plus side, there was John. Within six months he and Wendy were falling in love, and by New Year they were officially engaged. They were married the following June, and their first child, Tony, arrived twelve months later. Meanwhile, they were living at Tenham, sharing a house with John’s parents. The situation was not ideal, so John took up a position managing Alaric, a station north of Quilpie owned by another branch of the Tully family.
When they arrived after getting lost on an ill-defined track that wound across two stations, they discovered an old homestead surrounded by lawns and garden beds, nestled beside a picturesque waterhole lined with large coolabah trees. The rooms were on a grand scale, with embossed ceilings and timber-panelled walls, but the amenities were basic. In a book John wrote about family life, he explains that Wendy had to contend with 32-volt power, a rambunctious diesel generator and a wood stove. To get hot water, a fire was lit under a 44-gallon drum in the backyard.
For Wendy, one of the greatest challenges in their first years at Alaric was the loneliness. There had been a reasonably active social life at Tenham, with John and his brothers and a young stationhand providing company of her own age. In a wet season, they could waterski on Kyabra Creek, and people from nearby stations would often come together for tennis parties, picnic race meetings, sing-alongs around the piano and even movie nights out under the stars. There were very few visitors at Alaric, and most of the time there were no other hired staff.
Quilpie was ninety kilometres away via a dirt road that became treacherous when it rained and completely impassable if the creeks and channels flooded. Sometimes three months would pass between visits to town.
Wendy did not like being left on her own at night, either. ‘I was a scaredy cat,’ she says, blaming her father, who was fright
ened of being outside in the dark and instilled the same fear in his daughter. ‘But I got over it. John used to take me out and show me the stars and how tranquil it was, and eventually I could walk outside without being scared that something would jump out at me.’
Her feelings of loneliness softened, too, as the family expanded. Wendy and John had five more children in the eight years they lived at Alaric. Tony was followed by Paul, Stephen, Ian, Christine and Greg. As they grew, the children became actively involved in station life, helping with musters and out in the sheep yards, except on school days. There was no need for School of the Air at Alaric, because a provisional school was set up on a neighbour’s station about seventeen kilometres away, becoming a social hub for families in the area.
The school reduced Wendy’s sense of isolation, but nothing prepared her for the day Paul died. A fearless little boy, he was always active and keen to be involved in whatever was going on. He loved helping in the yards no matter how many times he was knocked over by the cattle and sheep, and would not hesitate to put into action all sorts of schemes and adventures conceived by his older brother, including tackling wild pigs, turning wheelbarrows into boats and climbing the tallest trees.
Paul was only seven when he was electrocuted after falling on powerlines connecting the generator to the house. He had used a ladder, and then his bare feet and hands, to climb the pole supporting the wires, so he could inspect a bird’s nest at the top. Wendy discovered him in the almost dark when she went to call everyone in for dinner. John and the stationhand gently lifted him down and attempted resuscitation, but it was too late.
Writing about the tragedy many years later, John described the overnight transformation of a vibrant, happy household full of laughter, into a place that was desolate, bleak and without joy as they battled to deal with the shock and grief. ‘It was very hard,’ says Wendy. There were no counsellors to consult in those days, but she spent hours talking to one of John’s aunties who lived nearby and shared the phone line connecting their homestead to the telephone exchange at Quilpie. People were usually discouraged from talking too long, with the exchange operators interrupting every three minutes to check if they wanted to extend the call. ‘I must have been on the phone for half an hour or more, and they didn’t come on once,’ Wendy says.