by Mary Durack
This triumph of reason and humanity over the viciousness of an inhuman policy was not, however, without its reverse side. ‘The bounty system’ and other schemes, too hastily devised, had brought out the undernourished and backward overflow of workhouses, orphanages and depressed industrial towns. People long since sapped of the qualities needed in a pioneering land had clung to the outskirts of Sydney town, living squalidly in bark huts, eking out a meagre living from their little plots. Timid and suspicious, confident only that ‘the lordly men’, ‘the squatters’ as they called them here, would somehow contrive to have all the good things for themselves, they believed nothing that had been told them of opportunities outback. Even the venturesome spirits, disillusioned by conditions not yet reassessed in terms of free labour, came flocking back, some to enter trades and build up little businesses, most to swell the ranks of the unemployed about the port.
The sale of Crown lands for the financing of immigration had encouraged land sharks to buy up tracts of country for the fleecing of small settlers, and the government, its funds ‘completely deranged’, was forced to suspend further assisted immigration. Drought struck the colony. Agriculture made no progress. The price of wool dropped and sheep were hardly worth the price of getting them to market. The pastoral industry, suddenly bereft of convict labour, hard hit in other ways, teetered for half a decade on the edge of ruin. Many pioneers walked off their properties. Others clung on, pinning their faith to a turn of the tide. Someone hit upon the plan of rendering down the sheep for their fat and reeking ‘boiling-down works’ sprang up in the outback towns.
When the price of tallow, mutton hams and hides rose from next to nothing to 16s a head, and good rains revived the land, salvation was in sight. The depression was already lifting by ’43, but it left behind it empty pockets and heavy hearts. It was none so easy to start again, and the call to gold and easy money in California fell upon eager ears. Now that the shackled mutes were no longer there to cushion the impact of men against the land Australia was seen for the hard precarious virgin country that she was.
Without labour, progress was impossible. Convicts were no more and free emigration seemed patently to have failed. Yet through all the chaos and seeming contradictions Dr Lang and Caroline Chisholm had plugged on. By 1846, having failed to enlist the support of a disillusioned government in her own improved colonisation scheme, Mrs Chisholm had personally settled 2,000 men and women in the colony and had returned to England to establish her own Family Colonisation Loan Society and charter her own ships, properly equipped and supervised. The first of these, the Slains Castle, was not to leave England until 1850, by which time many like the Durack couple and their Kilfoyle relatives, influenced by her propaganda for emigration to New South Wales, had already come out.
How much of this great continent, they asked, was still unexplored? A simple question, but no one could answer it precisely. The landseekers, moving swiftly out along the big westward-flowing streams, had left untouched wastes between, and all the while explorers had been slowly solving the mystery of what lay in the unmapped emptiness beyond. In 1840 a valiant Yorkshireman named John Eyre had forced his way towards the centre of the continent in search of a fabulous inland sea, but finding nothing more promising than the great, shimmering salt lake that bears his name, struck west along the blighted southern coast towards Swan River Settlement. Although he did not succeed in reaching his objective over land, the desert miles he covered threw another shaft of light into the unknown.
In ’44 Charles Sturt had penetrated to within 150 miles of the centre of the continent, and in ’48 the German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt, who had previously made his way from Moreton Bay over three thousand miles of hitherto unknown country to the central northern coast at Port Essington, disappeared for ever with his entire party when attempting to cross the continent from his previous starting-point to Perth on the far west coast.
By ’49, the year of the Duracks’ arrival, the more fertile river tracts as far south as Port Phillip were occupied and pioneers had pushed up the Darling in the far west of New South Wales almost to Menindee, but still the ‘great grey lands’ to the north and west lay largely unexplored. From Moreton Bay Settlement, six hundred miles up the coast from Sydney, pastoral occupation was spreading more slowly west to the Condamine River and north to the Burnett, but the remainder of that vast land, to be declared the independent colony of Queensland ten years later, lay empty and challenging. Scattered groups of ‘shepherd kings’ were expanding in the colony of South Australia with as yet little evidence of permanent occupation, while on the western side of the continent settlement clung sparsely to the southernmost corner between Swan River and the little port of Albany. For the rest, nomad Aboriginal tribespeople were still the undisputed occupants, those furthest from the line of settlement only half-believing the rumours of a new race, part human and part animal, like the tribal heroes of olden time, who strode upon four legs with long tails blowing in the wind.
The newcomers could not yet write home to Ireland of a land of opportunity for the little man, but it could not be said that the big men had it all their own way here. They had been defeated only a few weeks before in an issue that was still being much talked about. The pastoralists had kept appealing for the revival of transportation, but public opinion had been so loud in its disfavour that their requests had been reconsidered only when the gaols at home became full to overflowing. The humanitarians had their point, but there was another side of it. Not only would transportation put the colonial wool industry again on its feet but would give hundreds of lost men, rotting in overcrowded cells, a chance to reprieve themselves as had so many ‘emancipists’ or ‘ticket of leave men’ now successfully established in New South Wales. When news came that a shipload of convicts had been despatched to Sydney such a hue and cry broke out as had not been heard before in the colony. By this time the protests of disinterested idealists were joined by a chorus of thoroughly interested small people—shopkeepers dependent on the custom of free men, immigrants who could not compete against slave labour. Each side couched its arguments in high-sounding phrases. The big men talked of the ‘ideals of national development’ and of ‘giving the unfortunate convict a chance to redeem himself’, so the little men had talked back in the same coin. The transportation system was a ‘menace to the slowly emerging ideals of a young nation’ and a song of freedom had rung out in the streets:
Sons of the soil arise! Let this your anthem be,
Shout ’til it rend the skies—‘Australia shall be free!’
It was a crude strain but with a ring of triumph so different from the yearning songs of the Irish, conditioned to the unrequited wrong, protesting always, but with little hope of redress. It seemed that in this country the small men stood as much chance of gaining their point as the proud and powerful. They had laughed to scorn the suggestion of establishing a hereditary Australian aristocracy and, shaking their fists as the convict hulk Hashemy sailed into Sydney Harbour in June ’49, they had again won the day. The passengers were let ashore, quietly, as work was found for them, granted immediate ‘tickets of leave’ and let go their way as free men. It was the end of an epoch, for transportation was never to be revived in New South Wales.
By 1849 reception depots for immigrants were an established feature and bewildered newcomers were now met and organised. Immigration lists were published in the Sydney Morning Herald for the benefit of intending employers, and on August 14, 1849, the arrival of the Duke of Roxborough was duly noted with the information that:
Tomorrow the hiring of immigrants will be proceeded with…Besides the above there are about ten unmarried females by this vessel who will be lodged in the depot at Hyde Park where they can be hired between two and four o’clock tomorrow and on succeeding days.
Darby Durack, who had signed up for farm work, was forced to await the departure of immigrant coaches for inland, an irksome two weeks’ delay, since the raw and rowdy port of Sydney was hardly
to the taste of these Irish country folk. The overcrowding of the town served only to stress the emptiness of the vast colony. The ill-sewered, dray-made thoroughfares were noisy with swaggering sailors, red-coated soldiers brawling with the native-born ‘currency lads’, hucksters, jugglers, street dancers and gaudy prostitutes. Chinese coolies—another unsuccessful experiment in servile labour—shuffled past with poles of fish, black men in tattered clothing sold wooden props, rush-made brooms and wild honey. Bullock-drawn waggons swayed through slushy wheel ruts with their top-heavy loads of wool and hides from far inland. And on everything the light, even in winter, fell hard and harsh.
On August 28 it was further announced in the press that thirty-seven immigrants per ship Duke of Roxborough were that day sent from the immigration barracks at Parramatta to the town of Goulburn, and Darby with his wife and infant faced their first inland journey with mingled sensations of relief and apprehension.
3
THE GOLDEN YEARS
The years 1849 to 1853. Journey to Goulburn, where Darby Durack finds employment with James Chisholm of Kippilaw. Impressions and conditions of labour. The discovery of gold in ’51 and its effects upon the colony. Michael Durack and his family leave Ireland for New South Wales.
The carriages, overloaded with passengers and luggage, jolted and bogged on their way, over Razor Back Mountain, a two-day stage from the smokes and clamour of the town to where the old road swung south so that the ranges lay upon the west and rolling hills subsided to the coast.
Prepared for a land of perpetual sunshine, the immigrants found themselves exposed to wild rains and winds blowing bleakly from mountain snows, as cold or colder than any they had known. They found it no land for loving at first sight. Only time would make friends of the unbending gums whose branches with their thin perennial leaves spread stiffly above the reach of man. Familiarity would give shape and meaning to the twisting, tattered paperbarks and confusion of the lesser forest as it would bring joy of its bright, hard flowers and bright, harsh birds. A journey of 130 miles inland had seemed a great distance to the newcomers, not yet adjusted to the vast perspectives of this empty continent.
Incidents, soon to become the commonplace of everyday life, seemed perilous adventures—floating coaches on empty hogsheads across swollen streams or easing down steep inclines with logs hitched on behind; unharnessing the horses in drenching rain, the women and children sleeping, if sleep they could, inside the carriages, the men underneath on beds of canvas laid over heaps of bark.
The arrival of the immigrant coaches, rattling through the unmade streets, caused some stir in the little bush town on the edge of the great plain. To Darby Durack and his wife, Goulburn had seemed at first flat, crude and ugly with its slab-built, bark-roofed humpies and shanty hotels, its roads that were no more than winding waggon ruts, noisy and congested with creaking drays and bullock teams and herds of sheep and cattle being driven to the boiling-down works, whose pungent smell pervaded the atmosphere.
They could hardly have believed with what affection they would watch the little frontier town grow to a centre of importance and dignity—Goulburn, city of the big plains. Already it had become a lively focus for the roads of the south and south-western districts and for the surrounding bush community. Since its foundation in 1820 it had seen the growth of a great pastoral industry as well as some of the worst evils of the convict system, since the chain gang had been stationed for thirteen years at the Towang stockade, only six miles south. Public executions had been frequent during the twenties and thirties when corpses had been left to blacken on the gibbet on Gallows Hill. The triangle could still be seen in the town where Billy O’Rourke, ‘The Towang Flogger’, and the vicious negro ‘Black Francis’ had flaked the flesh from men’s backs so that if they lived to be free men they were branded as ‘shellbacks’ who had worn the yellow garb of misery and shame. Desperate men, goaded beyond endurance, had escaped into the bush and formed themselves into lawless bands that infested the southern roads, sticking up the mail coaches, robbing isolated settlements and molesting travellers. The hanging of Whitton, leader of the local outlaws, in Goulburn in 1840 had marked the end of that first era of bushranging, and it seemed then that the menace had been finally dealt with and the roads made safe for travellers. Its recurrence from another strata of society was not then foreseen.
So keen was the competition for labour at this time that a crowd had gathered at the immigrant reception depot for the arrival of the coaches. Squatters, for the most part big, bearded men in broad-brimmed cabbage-tree hats and moleskin trousers, smoking heavy pipes, flicking at the flies with the crops of their stockwhips, appraised the newcomers descending stiffly from the muddy carriages. The man who at once drew Darby and his wife aside was hardly typical of the early ‘squattocracy’, being tall, spare and clean-shaven except for side-whiskers, and of a quiet, considerate manner that contrasted with the bluff heartiness of the majority. In Darby he would have seen a strongly built young fellow, also clean-shaven at that time, with dark curly hair and clear-cut features, while his wife was a fresh-faced, capable-looking girl with a quirk of unfailing good humour about her mouth. A few formal questions and the couple found themselves engaged in the service of James Chisholm, clipping along beside him in his smart four-in-hand on the road to his Kippilaw estate.
They learned that their employer was not, as far as he knew, related to Caroline Chisholm, the Emigrants’ Friend, but he knew her well and proudly claimed her as a kinswoman. Unlike most big landholders of the time, he admired and approved her work, even her encouragement of small settlers, and did all he could to assist her, acting as treasurer of her fund for the Emigrant Friends’ Society in the Goulburn district. As time went on they would know much of the kindness and generosity of this man with whom they had been lucky enough to find a home. His father had come to the colony as a member of the New South Wales Corps but had avoided the disrepute of many members of that body during the years when rum, in the control of the army, was colonial currency. In the same way his son James had never earned the opprobrium attached to so many employers of convict labour. He had publicly denounced the flogging of minor offenders and the laying of trumped-up charges against more useful assigned convicts in order to prolong their servitude. Fortunate indeed had been the bond men and women assigned to Kippilaw, for Mr Chisholm and his good wife had helped many a lost soul to a new start in life. No bushranger ever molested his property or those belonging to it. Sometimes they had been held up on the road but when recognised had been allowed to keep their money and valuables and go on their way.
The estate of Kippilaw, spread about the fertile valley of the Wollondilly River at the head of the Hawkesbury, had begun as a cattle station in 1832, but was soon growing also wool, wheat and maize. The homestead enclosure, its lawns and gardens stretching to the river banks, was like a little village with a two-storey ‘Government House’ of white stone, its four wings surrounding a courtyard, convict-built with shingled roof, gables, long shuttered windows and creeper-shaded verandahs. Other buildings included a small stone church, stables, a store, a butchery and a blacksmith’s ‘shop’ and a long barracks that had housed assigned servants of earlier years and now accommodated free labourers. Married couples and their families occupied smaller stone buildings, each with kitchen-living-room below and loft above, equipped with straw palliasses for sleeping. It was one of these that became for some years the home of Darby and his Margaret and the birthplace of their first three Australian sons. James Chisholm had chosen wisely, for Darby was not one to break his contract and return to the huddle of the port town. He knew the value of these years at Kippilaw, learning how to work stock under Australian conditions, becoming accustomed to the climate and seasons of the southern hemisphere, saving from his princely wage of £40 a year, against the day when he would follow the advice of the solid old hands and ‘put everything into four legs’ and a good piece of land. Out of this wage he also managed to send home a regular rem
ittance, at the same time urging his family to emigrate, but an underlying note of sadness in the letters did not escape his people. He felt obliged to explain that the young colony was in many ways a strange, harsh land where men and manners were very different from those of the old country. It was an uphill struggle to become one’s own master, and for this reason the would-be settler, fighting for a place in the sun, was aptly dubbed ‘a battler’. Agriculture was backward in the colony, for although most properties had their cultivated plots of barley, maize and vegetables, large-scale cultivation was difficult. Labour was not only short but expensive because every acre must first be cleared of heavy scrub and trees. Therefore men became graziers, using the unfenced virgin country for their stock in a free and easy style that was difficult to understand. Many of the big squatters and merchants, early on the scene, had become rich, but newcomers, without capital, could succeed only through great patience, hard work and the long-range plan.