Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  My great-great-grandfather, in accordance with the homely advice to ‘choose your wife and cow from your own county’, married a Connemara lass named Amy Forde in 1806 and they reared a large and sturdy family. ‘Himself’ found compensation for the bitter restrictions of his tenancy in the production of a fine, fiery brew of ‘potheen’, the proceeds of which he gambled on the turf or put to the breeding of hunters that he rode to hounds and sometimes sold to English squires.

  The head shaking that had accompanied the recital of the exploits of ‘Daddy Jack’, as the old people called him, was mingled with pride of his wit and daring and the popularity clearly shown by the memorable success of his wake. He was killed (the vindictive ‘Red Mac’ again!) in the hunting field shortly before the birth of his tenth child in 1829, and his funeral rites ended only with his supply of ‘the crathur’ that was cannily cellared in the mountain turf. His widow, ‘Mammie Amy Forde’ as they called her, was of sterner stuff, though she had a weakness for fortune tellers and a strong belief in omens and signs. She had lain each of her babies, naked, in the furrows of the newly tilled soil in a ritual as ancient as the pagan Celts, while she prayed to the Mother of God that they might draw strength from the good earth to withstand evil and adversity. After their father’s death no more ‘potheen’ was brewed that side of Slieve Aughty Mountain and her children minded their business when the huntsman’s horn echoed across the countryside. They grew up with their hands on the plough but steeped in the traditions of their Gaelic ancestry, attending, whenever possible, the forbidden ‘hedge schools’ where fugitive Irish scholars passed on at least a love of the learning for which their land had once been famed.

  When the eldest son, Michael, married Bridget Dillon of Cappabaun in 1831 he took up a farm near the village of Scariff, on the Clare side of Loch Derg, which, like the Slieve Aughty land, had been part of the original family holding of Ogoneloe. My grandfather, Patsy, the second of their eight children and the central figure of this story, handed down to us a few glimpses of their life in Ireland, of how their small black cattle and thin, black-faced sheep had grazed on the slopes of Mount Bernagh, finding pickings among the heather and bog cotton and after harvest among the stubble of the thin crops in the fields below; of how the soil, worked out in the tilling and reaping of centuries, still yielded generously an unending crop of bald, grey rocks to be levered out and added to the long crisscross pattern of stone walls. Between the tasks of shepherding, milking, sowing, harvesting and cutting the wet turf slabs from the hillside to be stacked and dried for fuel, young Patsy and his sisters went to school. Their letters, although not lacking in a natural fluency, indicate that they received no more than the rudiments of learning but they had from their parents a sound practical training in the use of tools, the art of thatching and of devising all manner of things from limited resources.

  There had been the joy of trout fishing in the Shannon or at the salmon leap beyond Lough Derg where the river tumbled in foaming cataracts; visits to the ruined shrines of Ireland’s monastic past, where like his people of ancient times Grandfather had looked down from the mound of Dun Brian to where his river narrowed from the Lough on its last stretch to Limerick and the sea. He would tell of the excitement of market days in Gort, the men with their ashwood sticks, their peak caps and gay home-knit mufflers, driving their cattle through the mud, bumping and lurching in their donkey carts, calling the time of day, bargaining, brawling and exchanging ribald jests. He would live again the heated political discussions, issues of awful moment that had little meaning for his children—Daniel O’Connell and Young Ireland, moderation or ‘blood and iron’. He would talk of the tests of skill and strength, wielding the cudgels, the sport of hurling, of dancing ‘The Walls of Limerick’ in the market square; and, dearest of all, the Galway Blazers, the great Irish hunters with yapping hounds at hoof that flashed through soft grey mornings across misty fields taking walls and hedges in their splendid stride.

  During his childhood there had been a steady exodus of friends and relatives to America, for there were too many people in Ireland when, having previously subdivided the country into small lots to multiply their rents, the landlords found that tillage no longer paid and they must again restore the land to pasture. The small tenants must be cleared, they said, and the land ‘consolidated’ or Ireland would be ruined, but no one took into account the ruin of the poor Irish through this saving policy. Evicted tenants, their cottages razed to the ground, came crowding in around what little soil remained to them until there was no option but to thin themselves out by emigration, hoping that some further change of the wind would restore the land to the idle ploughs. But it was an ill wind after all that next turned the course of history, for the bitter blight of ’45 that struck at the potato crops struck deeper still at the roots of Irish life. There had been famines in the past when the death bells had pealed incessantly and funerals were black upon the roads, but never before were the people so dependent upon potatoes as their staple diet. Now there was starvation in the midst of plenty, since cattle and other produce must be sold to meet the crippling rents and ‘famine rates’ that were ‘squeezed out of the very blood and vitals and clothes and dwellings of the tenants’. Three successive years of hunger, bitterness and pestilence, when dead and dying lay huddled in doorways and ditches on the frozen highways to be buried in common graves, divested the people of the laughing spirit that had stood to them through all the troubles of the past. Emigration was on everyone’s lips. ‘You cannot live in Ireland. To get up you must first get out.’ This exodus was no ‘flight of the wild geese’, that flocking of Ireland’s finest sons to the battlefields of France, for now the women, children and old people were going too until the English press rejoiced that ‘So complete is the rush of departing marauders…a silence reigns over the vast solitude of Ireland’. The steady stream that had been flowing away for half a century swelled to a flood of desperate people who must needs get out or starve.

  Mammie Amy lost four of her ten children in the famine years, and the rest, except for a married daughter and a son, set sail for other lands. Her boy, Cornelius, attracted by the romance of the diamond fields, hied himself to South Africa about the same time as three first cousins, the brothers Michael, William and Walter Durack, left for America. My grandfather’s Uncle Darby, Mammie Amy’s tenth and youngest child, was the first of the family to leave for Australia, which up to this time had been eschewed by most emigrating Irish with any choice in the matter as a destination of felons and paupers. During the late forties it had become known that the colony of New South Wales had succeeded in capturing England’s wool market and that a wealth of new pasture land had been opened to the settler. Assisted emigration schemes that had flourished after the suspension of convict transportation in 1840 almost ceased during the depression of the following years, to burgeon again as the clouds lifted and the story spread of expanding possibilities in the new south land.

  In 1848 Darby Durack married a handsome colleen named Margaret Kilfoyle whose family had recently migrated to New South Wales. Darby, having scraped together, therefore, the princely sum of £5 10s and agreed to pay the remaining £35 from wages earned under a system of indentured labour, the couple set sail from Plymouth on the Duke of Roxborough in May 1849. Most of their two hundred and twenty fellow passengers, carefully listed in the emigration files, were English people, including forty-eight agricultural labourers, seven shepherds, three blacksmiths, three gardeners, two carpenters, two shoemakers, two bookbinders, one wheelwright, one shipwright, one coachman, one clerk and one miner.

  Out of this fairly typical mixed bag it is to be hoped that the single, unknown optimist at the end kept faith with fortune to rise in two years’ time on the colony’s golden wave. More likely he joined the ranks of earlier settlers, who, as the Duke of Roxborough arrived in Sydney, were leaving for the gold rush to California, shouting disparagement of the colony from the ship’s rails.

  Darby and Margaret D
urack, nursing their infant Bridget, born upon the voyage, looked on in bewilderment. They had been told that the colonial depression had lifted and that opportunity awaited any with a will to work in this great country. Why, then, should these earlier comers appear so eager to try their luck elsewhere? It would be understood only when background came into focus and the topsy-turvy world of strange stars and seasons in reverse turned slowly right-side-up.

  2

  COLONIAL BACKGROUND

  The year 1849. Darby Durack, his wife and infant arrive in New South Wales. A brief background of progress in the colony, limits of penetration, the manner of early settlement. The work of John Dunmore Lang and Caroline Chisholm for immigration. Suspension of convict transportation. Depression of the forties. Revival of immigration and rise of the smaller settlers. Departure of the new arrivals for Goulburn.

  Darby and Margaret had promised with simple confidence to write home the truth about the colony. ‘Sure, and we’ll be letting you know just the way it is.’ But what were they to say when contradictions faced them at every turn and they could form no picture whatever of this vast continent, roughly the size of the United States and into which the British Isles, complete with Ireland, would have fitted comfortably twenty-five times over? The colony of New South Wales, still unshorn of Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory, sprawled between the tropical Arafura and Coral seas and the cold waters of Bass Strait for over one and a half million square miles and yet contained, in the year 1849, no more than 400,000 people.

  The shape and area of settlement was still largely undefined, the boundaries of occupation blurred with the straying feet of sheep and cattle in a fenceless land. The story of Australian settlement was yet to be written, and the inland penetration of the squatters and their herds could be traced only with uncertain fingers on the unformed maps. No one knew how far a man was going when he set out from the nearest depot with his loaded bullock waggons and his stock, nor did he know himself. He was off in search of good grazing and good waters for his herds, like as not beyond the last man out before, who would indicate to him the arbitrary boundaries of his ‘run’—a blazed tree, a ploughed furrow, a range or a river.

  When the Duracks arrived in 1849 the process had been going on for thirty-six years, since 1813, when men had at last crossed the Great Dividing Range that had held settlement in check for twenty-five years after the arrival of the first fleet. Later Australian bushmen, reflecting on the tremendous obstacles they themselves had overcome, would wonder that the pioneers had remained daunted for so long, but the mountains had been a psychological as well as a physical barrier to settlement. Beyond had lain the great unknown believed by many to be an arid, wind-swept waste inhabited by wild cannibal tribes, and it was even thought among the convicts that if a man crossed the range and kept walking he might reach China or Tibet. When a pass was found at last and the explorers gazed enraptured on the vast sweep of the rich Australian prairies there appeared the first symptoms of a land fever that was to burn in men’s blood, driving them into the remotest and most forbidding wilderness.

  The government had done its best to satisfy this urge in an organised way by issuing land grants to approved settlers within surveyed areas, but by the early twenties when the surveyors could no longer keep pace with the demand for land the flood of settlement had broken through. The land takers, with their herds and assigned servants, were over the hills and far away, past the reach of the law. Breathlesslv the authorities set about the establishment of nineteen counties where, it was declared, settlement must be contained. With the vision of tidy farms and patchwork fields, of county squires and a sturdy, respectful yeomanry they named their counties nostalgically—Gloucester, Cumberland, Glamorgan, Buckingham, Argyle, Durham, Northumberland—but only in name were they to resemble those of the old land. Fast as they worked, the pioneers on their indomitable westward march were even faster, pushing out the boundaries of settlement in a policy of their own. Undaunted by the government challenge that no police protection would be provided outside the authorised limits, they made their own rules, fighting out the battles of their boundaries with rifles, stockwhips and stirrup irons.

  The Home Office was outraged, demanding that the colonial government recall these ‘self styled pastoralists’, these ‘lawless gypsies’ to within surveyed limits. Little they knew the conditions of the country or the fibre of the ‘gypsies’ they would have brought to heel. ‘Not all the armies in England,’ replied Governor Bourke, ‘not a hundred thousand soldiers scattered through the bush could drive back those herds within the limits of the Nineteen Counties.’ And so the tide of settlement, pressing on the tracks of the explorers, followed the rivers and tributary creeks, spreading fanwise across the countryside.

  Provision depots became stores and shanty hotels that in turn burgeoned into dusty little towns. The settlers cut the tracks between them with their waggon wheels, and in time, as the centres grew, the convict gangs came out and built the roads. Within a decade the squatters, rising on the success of John Macarthur’s experiments in pure merino fleece, and the toil of their assigned labourers, had become virtually the ruling voice in the colony and were clamouring for title to the land they had commandeered. The term ‘squatter’, in its first Australian application, had referred to an illicit occupier of Crown land who plundered stock from legal holders. A squatter was then a common thief, ‘a bushranger with a base’, but the term became confused when robust and otherwise law-abiding pioneers broke bounds and ‘squatted’ where they pleased, wresting their little kingdoms from the virgin bush. In time, as their status became recognised and their demands for security of tenure were granted, the term lost all its earlier implication and tooth on the respectability that they had won for themselves.

  They were the big men now, and governments were swayed by their insistence that what Australia needed was not more free settlers but more labourers, the cheaper the better, and convicts for preference. For the first fifty years free emigration had been discouraged in the colony, but during the thirties public conscience began to stir about ‘the system’ whereby men were reduced to the status of beasts and it was realised by the more far-seeing that, however the wool industry might prosper, Australia could never progress to nationhood without a healthy population of free settlers.

  Among the most zealous advocates of family emigration were Dr John Dunmore Lang, a radical Presbyterian minister, and Mrs Caroline Chisholm, the English-born wife of an officer of the East India Company who had come to Sydney with her husband in 1839, ten years before the arrival of Darby and Margaret Durack. Mrs Chisholm, appalled at the miserable condition of many destitute women and young girls shipped out in a crude attempt to balance the colony’s largely male population, at once established a home for them, set up a labour exchange and soon a colonisation bureau. Realising the desperate need for family life in the outback, she personally escorted groups of young girls to the scattered inland settlements. A pretty little woman on a big, white horse, she had ridden before her cavalcade of bullock drays on one of the most remarkable match-making campaigns in history, teaching her timid charges how to live and like it in the Australian bush, prompting the squatter with his duty to his employees.

  Only Dr Lang’s violently sectarian bias separated his aims from those of this Catholic woman whom he described as ‘an artful female Jesuit’ whose sole object was ‘to Romanise this great colony by means of a land flood of Irish popery’. Like others before him, Lang had striven hard to preserve Australia as a strictly Protestant dominion and was outraged to observe how the Catholics were quietly consolidating themselves in the colony with a growing network of churches and schools, and—worst of all—an Archbishop named John Polding who was as zealous and hard-riding as himself. His antipathy to Caroline Chisholm was, if not unfounded, at least unjust, for her message was quite unpartisan and carried no less to the poor crofters of Scotland and the struggling industrial workers of England and Wales than to the destitute of
Ireland. Nonetheless, the combined voices of these two forceful personalities contributed largely to the suspension of convict transportation in 1840 and to the furtherance of a policy that in fifteen months brought over 26,000 assisted emigrants to New South Wales.