To Ride a Fine Horse

by Mary Durack

  He had been working hard for some months without much luck when a telegram from Queensland warned him that his investments were in danger. He left at once for Brisbane, confident that he would soon be able to set things right and return to his mining. His brothers, looking worn and sad, met him with the news that their financial position was now not only bad but quite hopeless, for their entire fortune, like that of so many others throughout Australia, had vanished almost overnight as panic spread and banks began to close down.

  It took Patsy some time to realize that he had lost everything, even ‘Maryview’, the home of his dreams, and that he was again almost as poor as when he had arrived in Australia as an immigrant boy thirty-seven years before. His wife did her best to cheer him, saying how fortunate it was that the Kimberley property was safe, as Patsy had signed this over to his boys, and they could make a home there until times improved.

  ‘But I promised you, Mary,’ her husband said, ‘that I would never take you and the girls to live outback again.’

  Mrs Patsy smiled as though she wanted nothing more than to go to Kimberley. ‘But it will be wonderful to be with the boys again!’

  It was decided at last that the two girls should be sent for a while to a convent in Goulburn, the youngest boy to college in Brisbane, while the third son, Pat, accompanied them to Kimberley.

  Only a few of Mrs Patsy’s own possessions now remained in the family, to go out with them in the dray over the rough bush roads to Argyle. There were a few good pieces of furniture, some glass, china-ware and cutlery, a piano from Thylungra, some precious pot plants and a crate of ducks. It was not much to show for the years of toil, but Patsy was hopeful and outwardly cheerful as he met his sons in Wyndham.

  Pumpkin, in the meantime, hearing that Mrs Patsy was coming to Argyle, had found himself a young wife named Valley in the local tribe. How he managed to arrange this no one ever heard, but there she was, shy and smiling, waiting to welcome and serve the first white woman she had ever seen. Valley had relatives in the bush who soon came in to live at Argyle and help with the station work.

  Pumpkin . . . found himself a young wife . . .

  Soon the little place on the river became a real home like Thylungra. Crisply laundered sheets and pillowcases appeared on the beds, cloths on the table, curtains at the windows, and meals were carefully cooked and served. Patsy soon had a flourishing kitchen garden, and when the boys came in from mustering or from long journeys they could look forward to their parents’ smiling welcome.

  A little later Nat Buchanan brought his wife to Flora Valley Station in West Kimberley, so it could be said that there were at least two women in the district, even though some hundreds of miles apart.

  Patsy’s younger brother Jerry came next, bringing his wife and family to make a home at Rosewood with his partners Kilfoyle and Hayes, and when Kilfoyle soon afterwards brought his bride to the bush Patsy felt sure that in no time Kimberley would be as bright with family life as Cooper’s Creek. He insisted that their pioneering worries would soon pass and that they had been wise in choosing this splendid country. The rains of monsoonal summer were proving as reliable as they had hoped and swept through deep channels that kept the flood waters from spreading too far across the countryside. There was, too, exciting colour and variety in the sweeping plains, great, palm-fringed rivers, rugged ranges and spreading trees of this Kimberley landscape, while the bird life they had enjoyed in Queensland was here in even greater abundance.

  Not all, however, were as happy about the new land, for since the gold diggers had drifted away, the settlers became worried about finding markets for their beef. Cattle tick, supposed to have been brought into the Territory with imported buffalo, had begun to spread a disease among the stock. Fever raged more violently than ever and hostile tribes continued to menace the settlers and their stock. The goldfields’ population, coming so quickly on the heels of the first settlers, had badly upset the Kimberley tribes, for the prospectors, who wanted only to make money and get out, were little concerned with coming to friendly terms. Many had shot down natives without a scruple, for the slightest cause or none, so that the blacks with their primitive weapons had turned in the same way upon the whites.

  Everywhere men, black and white, went in fear of their lives and Patsy was considered foolhardy and absurd when he insisted on riding unarmed to seek out the bush tribes in their camps and try to make terms with them. Patsy had never feared that any harm would come to him from the Aborigines but he began to fear that all his efforts would be in vain if the tough methods demanded by many of the settlers were to be carried out by the police.

  Pumpkin at this time was more often than not away with the boys, droving cattle to the Territory goldfields, sleeping at night ‘with one eye open’, as he said, for fear of attack. Even when at the station Pumpkin usually slept at the homestead rather than in the native camp, not for his own protection but because he thought all white people were inclined to sleep like logs and could easily be speared in their beds.

  The wet season of 1893 was one of the worst ‘fever years’ of all for the Kimberley settlers. Whites and natives all went down at intervals and Mrs Patsy nursed them tirelessly until she herself was forced to her bed. Each day she insisted she was a little better than the last and to prove it would sometimes struggle to the verandah with her sewing. One morning Valley, when bringing her a cup of tea, had found her slumped as though asleep in her chair and had gone quietly away. It was some time later before Pumpkin, who had watched her so anxiously, realized that she was never to wake again. He hurried to find Patsy, who was at work in the saddle-shed, and sank grief-stricken at his feet as he broke the terrible news.

  Messengers were sent to family members at neighbouring stations and by evening all had gathered at Argyle for the simple burial in the garden near the house. It was hard for any to realize that the brave little woman was never again to greet them with her welcoming smile and many loving kindnesses, while for Patsy it seemed for a time that his own life had surely also come to an end.

  Like a man in a dream he boarded a ship at Wyndham and returned to Goulburn where he and his beloved had started together on their long road into the unknown. There his two girls, now grown-up young ladies, were ready to accompany him back to Kimberley and carry on the home their mother had begun at Argyle. At sight of their fresh young faces he knew that if the best of life was over for himself, for them it was just beginning, and his task was now to make it as smooth and happy as possible.

  16

  The Last Horizon

  BACK at Argyle, Patsy set to work at once on a new homestead and with the help of Pumpkin and two white tradesmen had completed it before the next wet season. It was then quite a grand place for the remote Kimberleys, being built of stone, with a galvanized iron roof, cement floors and wide verandahs paved with flat stones from the riverbed. Like everything Patsy did it was made to last and has served ever since as the station homestead.

  Argyle was now the centre of life in the bush community, for the girls were pretty and popular and carried on the tradition of hospitality set by their parents. Patsy did his best to join in their fun as of old but often he would go quietly away to muse of other days beside his wife’s grave.

  By this time the site had been selected for another station, to be known as Ivanhoe, about sixty miles from Wyndham. Pumpkin and the Queensland boy Boxer had gone there with some cattle and horses to make a start and had set up their camp beside a lily-covered billabong where the homestead was later to be built. Patsy often took the hundred mile ride from Argyle to help his old friend track the straying stock, build yards and fence in a horse paddock.

  It was soon found, however, that progress was almost impossible, for the natives were chasing and spearing cattle in all directions. Pumpkin was in despair and suggested calling the police but Patsy decided first to try his own methods. Riding up the river with his black companion he found some of the culprits in the act of loading a raft with meat cu
t from a cow they had speared on the bank. They turned threateningly at sight of the two riders but, astonished to see that they had come unarmed and were making gestures of friendship, they put down their weapons and stared.

  . . . the natives were chasing and spearing cattle in all directions . . .

  Patsy and Pumpkin then lit a fire, took some beef from the raft and signing to the tribesmen to gather round cooked it beside a billy of strong, sweet tea. Fascinated by this novel approach and also by their first taste of the white man’s delicious beverage, they listened carefully as Patsy, with Pumpkin’s help, explained as well as he could that a beast would be killed regularly and distributed at the station camp with other rations if they stopped their wanton destruction of the white man’s stock.

  People smiled when they heard of this strange interview, but its effect was surprising. There was little more trouble, either then or later, at Ivanhoe and before long many of the local natives came in to help build the new station and to remain, as their descendants after them, in the big, happy camp by the Ivanhoe billabong.

  Here, as in Western Queensland, Patsy believed that settlers should, wherever possible, act independently, and he had grown impatient of so much grumbling about the lack of a road inland from Wyndham. Perhaps it was, as his family said, ridiculous for a man of his age and position to undertake the task himself, but he was not to be put off. With the help of one white man and a black boy he started from the marsh near the port and cut a track for over sixty miles through timber, over stony creekbeds, and through a gap in the range that had previously been impassable to vehicles. Government officials and other passers-by often failed to recognize the bearded road-worker in his humble camp as the great pioneer who had not long before been considered one of Australia’s most prosperous squatters. Nor, to their later embarrassment, did Patsy bother to enlighten them for he now cared nothing for recognition and wanted only to dull the pain of his losses through constant toil.

  He had completed the road past the Ord River crossing at Ivanhoe when he received the news that his brother Stumpy Michael had died in Queensland at the age of fifty-one. This was another terrible blow to Patsy, who at once set down his tools and hurried to be of what help he could to his brother’s family.

  At a reunion in Brisbane he talked with the many friends and relatives he had helped to form stations in the Cooper district. Some had managed to hold on through the big bank smash of the early nineties and the long years of drought but they had a sad tale to tell of Thylungra, its homestead deserted, its yards and fences falling into ruin. It might well have been of Thylungra at this time that the poet Will Ogilvie wrote:

  ‘I stand by your fenceless gardens

  And weep for the splintered staves.

  I watch by your empty ingles

  And mourn by your white-railed graves;

  I see from your crumbling doorways

  The whispering white forms pass,

  And shiver to hear dead horses

  Crop-cropping the long, grey grass. . . .’

  So Patsy and his family grieved together over their lost hopes and memories of days gone by, but already there was a whisper of promise for Queensland’s arid west in the discovery of an artesian basin.

  ‘The blacks always told us,’ Patsy said, ‘that their spirits had banished a great river underground in legendary times. Perhaps it will yet bring the country to life again.’

  He left the family on a note of hope though he had less faith now in miracles. He was never to know how the warm artesian stream Was soon to save the arid inland from the hand of drought, of the prosperity that lay in store for those who remained, and of how his beloved Thylungra was one day to be regarded as the richest sheep station in the Commonwealth.

  Back in Kimberley he was a little cheered to find that markets were improving and Argyle cattle being shipped away to meet the demand of big new goldfields in the south. There was more money now to develop the stations and improve the herds, and when his sons suggested that he might take a trip to England and Ireland to purchase some good stud bulls he did not refuse. All these years he had given generously to Australia of his love and energy, but lately he had begun to feel tired and was sometimes homesick for the sight of fields and hedges lying softly green in Ireland’s quiet rain.

  He found it all much as he remembered it and wrote to his children, enclosing pressed pieces of heath and wild cotton gathered from the mountain behind his father’s farm that he had so often climbed as a boy.

  ‘ “I have seen the old home and the barn where I received what little schooling was then possible for the poor Irish,” he wrote. “. . . They would not understand here that a property in Australia may be the size of all Ireland and a single paddock the size and more of Galway and Clare. . . . The tinkers are here still with all their lies and nonsense for the tune of a coin and I believing and all as a boy. . . .” ’

  He realized that the lack of understanding was not all on the part of the Irish people for it was very little that his own family understood of Ireland and her troublous history. Nor could they ever know how his young heart had thrilled to the songs of the ancient bards telling of the heroes of Ireland’s past and the days when his own ancestors had fought beside the great Brian Boru. How could they know that to the Irish those days were only as yesterday and even Boru himself was a living memory?

  ‘Gold silver and jewels were only

  As dust in his hand,

  But his sword, like a lightning flash blasted

  The foes of the land. . . .’

  He went on then to write of Mr Healy, the old tutor who had returned to Ireland to die some years before but who was still alive to greet and embrace the visitor. He and Patsy had wept together over the past and talked far into the night of the Thylungra children, now grown up and pioneering another part of Australia.

  Revisiting old scenes, Patsy thought back on the fancies that had comforted him in the cruel poverty of childhood years and his belief in finding that pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. Everything had not turned out just as he might have wished it, but one way and another his had been a grand life for one whose greatest ambition had once been to ride a fine horse.

  It was not long, however, before he felt that he had gazed and brooded enough and he began to look forward to returning to Argyle with his purchase of splendid bulls.

  For the second time in his life, but under what different circumstances, he stood at a ship’s rails watching the sky for the first sign of the Southern Cross. He was feeling better for his holiday and already beginning to plan the things he would do when he returned to Kimberley. There was a house to be put up at Ivanhoe, the road pushed through to Argyle. Perhaps he could persuade his sons to make a town house for the girls and to open a stock route from Hall’s Creek to the new goldfields at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie.

  An affectionate welcome awaited him and also the news that his sons were going into partnership with the holders of other stations in the Territory adjoining Argyle. This, they said, would make them a powerful company, leasing some seven million acres or about twelve thousand square miles of country. To their surprise Patsy disliked this idea. He said that all his troubles had started with a similar partnership in Queensland, but his arguments were of no avail. He realized that his sons had grown to manhood and must make their own decisions wherever they might lead.

  Again a great sadness and loneliness began to press upon him, and try as he would he could not recapture his old energy and zest for life. He was still no more than sixty-four years old and did not appear really sick when early in 1898 his eldest daughter went with him to Fremantle, hoping that the cooler weather would revive his spirits. No one except Pumpkin could believe that he would never return to Kimberley, for only the native who loved and understood him so well knew, as Patsy knew himself, that his work was done and his life was over.

  Not long after his arrival in Fremantle he became unconscious and remained so until the anniversary of his wife’s de
ath five years before. That morning he sat up in bed and called his daughter.

  ‘Tell Pumpkin to fetch up the horses, Mary,’ he said, with an echo of his old spirit. ‘I am ready now.’

  And so Patsy Durack rode quietly out of life to his last horizon and an immortal place in the history of his adopted land.

  THE END