Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  Darby had been almost two years at Kippilaw when the colonial picture changed with dramatic suddenness. In May ’51 gold was discovered at the Turon and the tough, prosaic outpost of empire became a continent of fabulous romance.

  In convict times Australian gold had been a whisper and a fear. The wealth of the colony was the golden fleece of her sheep and woe betide it if their shackled tenders should break to dig for treasure among the tumbled hills. A man who was warned to put away the nugget he had found lest the free men of the colony had their throats cut had prudently complied. When transportation ceased, Australian settlers, in their slough of despond, were too intent upon scanning the skies for rain and the press for news of better times to seek a glint of gold about their feet. Colourful stories of gold rushes in America had seemed a far cry from this humdrum south land until a man who had walked off his bankrupt property in ’48 and sailed to California one day looked up from washing dirt in the bed of Sacramento River and was reminded of the Bathurst scene he had left behind. If this was gold country—why not that? A simple-hearted fellow, he told everyone he met, all the way back to New South Wales and out on horseback across the mountains. Nobody paid much attention to his naive talk, but his hunch had not played him false. He found his gold in the first dishful he washed and the next and the next. And so a merry chain of campfires swung out from Sydney across the mountains to the plains beyond, the mushroom roaring canvas towns sprang up and the gold fever mounted to delirium. There was buried treasure in the river beds and among the sunbaked hills and valleys of this old-new land and quick as news could travel the word went round the world.

  Darby Durack, coming in from Kippilaw for stores, saw men near mad in Goulburn the day the news came through. The big Scot McKensie, blowing on his pibroch like some outsize pied piper, had led off the first lot of diggers to a wild accompaniment of singing and shouting and waving of hats, leaving Goulburn like a plague spot, shops closed, houses deserted, the bootmaker’s bench unoccupied with a lady’s shoe upon the last, bread in the baker’s oven left to ruin. What a crazy march that had been—men and women, even children, goods and equipment piled into any sort of vehicle from a four-in-hand to a gin case on wheels!

  It was not easy, in that moment of infectious excitement, when all over Australia men were exchanging their tools of trade for miner’s shovels and picks, and in Sydney entire crews were deserting their ships, to resist the temptation to join the rush to the Turon, but Darby, prudently weighing the risks against the value of a steady job and a good home for his family, carried on at Kippilaw. More than half Chisholm’s other labourers made off, and every shepherd on the place rolled his swag, whistled up his dogs and went on his way. All over the countryside the squatters met in frantic consultation. How to carry on? Optimists declared it a flash in the pan and predicted that before long the importunate fellows would be back again, caps in hand, begging for their old jobs. Others felt that a great tide of change had turned in the colony and that landholders must think up other ways and means of holding their flocks and working their runs.

  In Goulburn excitement ebbed and flowed. Many after only a few weeks returned from the diggings, disillusioned, but there was scarcely a day without fresh rumours of gold in some new place that kept a section of the populace rushing from place to place like shuttle-cocks. Darby observed that, of them all, but a few made good: the majority would have done better to stay at home and attend to their ordinary work. He saw the gold rush as a madness that would pass and, sensitive of the Irish reputation for rashness and instability, took pride in keeping a cool head until things returned to normal. Some said, ‘He’s a steady fellow, that Irishman at Kippilaw. Chisholm’s lucky to have a chap like that,’ but many squatters were suspicious of a saving, steady labourer. ‘Give me the improvident fellow—the man who gambles or hands his cheque over the bar counter,’ they would say. ‘As long as he’s broke he’ll stick to the job, but once he has a few pounds put by he begins to fancy himself as a landholder.’

  Pastoralists had talked big about Australia’s need for more people and more capital to swell the labour pool and raise the price of meat, but with the gold rush their wish came true with a vengeance. It was some twelve months after the discovery of gold before the first mining immigrants could reach Australian shores. By this time the southern portion of the colony, comprising about 87,900 square miles, had been declared the separate State of Victoria and more sensational gold finds around Ballarat had sent the gold seekers rushing in that direction. Rising 95,000 people flocked to Victoria from other parts of Australia in ’51 and 20,000 from overseas surged into Melbourne in September ’52. Thereafter immigrants swelled from a previous average of 500 to many thousands a month. The money and the population had materialised. Meat soared to the dizzy height of 5d a pound and all the produce of the land was in keen demand. So far so good, but where was the labour to replace the stockmen and the poor, rum-besotted shepherds who had rushed off at the first clarion call of gold? Soon it became apparent that what the landholder had gained on the roundabouts he had lost on the swings. The money he made he must now put into fences, since it soon became obvious that shepherds would be from henceforth an extinct race in the land, while an ever-hungrier pack of small men clamoured about the borders of his run.

  Conflicting though the situation was, it emerged clearly enough that the day of the little man had dawned in the colony. Unable to realise the vastness of Australia and the potential of her still unopened wilderness, it seemed to the newcomer that all unclaimed land must soon run out in this latest scramble, and Darby Durack wrote entreating his family to delay no longer. Mr Chisholm had promised them all employment, but he was not one to stand in a man’s way when he wished to branch out for himself. In two years they might, between them, have saved enough to secure a small block and sufficient stock to make a modest start.

  Up to this time Darby’s elder brother, Michael, shocked by stories of entire families dying on ‘coffin ships’ on the long voyage to the colonies, had been reluctant to leave his native land. Although his family, then numbering five girls and two boys, had survived the rigours of famine, some of them had been left far from strong. The fifth child, Sarah, seven years old when her uncle migrated to Australia, could not, they believed, have survived even a reasonable voyage and although ‘Mammie Amy Forde’ urged them to go, leaving the sickly child in her care, they clung on in the desperate hope of better times. The hope proved vain, for although the famine had lifted by ’48, its main causes—the wholesale evictions and land clearances—went on. Ireland sank deeper in the mire of pessimism and bitterness, the hatred of England and the landlords stronger than ever before. ‘To get up you must first get out,’ and everywhere deserted fields and the ruins of little homes betokened a broken-hearted land.

  By the end of ’52 Michael Durack also faced the fact that he and his family must emigrate or starve, but they had virtually nothing with which to make even a small down payment on their fare. My grandfather Patsy, already introduced as the eldest son, who longed to join his uncle Darby in the golden colony of New South Wales, often told his children how chance had come to their assistance. The great Lord Dunraven of Adare, probably the father of the man who, some forty years later, was to join forces with other fighters in the cause of Irish liberty, was travelling to Limerick when his coach became embedded in the mire. Patsy, seventeen years old and deceptively strong for his light build, had put his shoulder under the hub of the vehicle and quickly had it free. The great man had called him back as he turned away and asked whether he was so rich that he had no need of a reward. Blushing with confusion, Patsy had declared himself the eldest son of a large family hoping soon to emigrate to Australia and dig for gold.

  ‘Then here’s a piece to go on with,’ said his Lordship, pressing a sovereign into the boy’s hand.

  To one who had counted a few pence handsome payment for a day’s toil this was riches indeed, and it was not long before he had translated it into two
hens, a sow and the present of a holy picture for each member of his family. He told his children in later years how that sovereign had proved a magic coin, for the hens laid well and the sow brought forth a fine litter, so that in twelve months there was enough money to bring them all to Australia. Besides this, little Sarah seemed stronger by the autumn of ’52 and the die was cast.

  A prospect of exciting change and adventure for the young people, for their parents the leave-taking was fraught with grief and anxiety. Mammie Amy at the last refused to leave the now impoverished farm at Scariff. She would not desert the graves of her dead but would pray out her life for their souls and for those who had been spared to start life anew in distant lands. She had good friends left who would visit and care for her, and someday perhaps there would be a letter to say that one very dear had found that pot of gold she had dreamt of at the rainbow’s end.

  So they were gathered at last, with a host of other migrating families guarding their bundles, the spinning wheels and wooden cradles and rocking chairs tied up together with their patched and homespun clothes, waiting in the cold for the sailing packet that would carry them to Plymouth on the first stage of their 13,000-mile journey to the strange south land.

  4

  DIGGING IN

  The years 1853 to 1855. Michael Durack and his family arrive in New South Wales. Arrival and death of Michael at Kippilaw. His son Patsy makes £1,000 at the Ovens goldfields.

  ‘The good ship Harriet’s three and a half months’ voyage was shadowed by the death of eleven children in an epidemic of measles, an ordeal the Durack family managed to survive intact. The vessel, which arrived at the end of May ’53, was held in quarantine until the middle of June when the passengers gathered at the immigration barracks at Parramatta where an officer recorded a few brief details of family history.

  Michael Durack, born at Magerareagh, County Galway, aged forty-four, eldest son of John (deceased) and Amy Durack (living), of the same county, had been nominated as a farm labourer by Mr James Chisholm of Kippilaw, Goulburn. He had paid £8 passage money in all for himself and eight dependants and undertook to refund the remaining £115 within two years.

  No doubt the recording officer took this guarantee with a grain of salt, as the colonial balance sheet was clear proof of the frailty of migrant promises. In no time at all newcomers found out that Jack was as good as his master here and they need not be pushed around by anyone. Forced labour in the colony had gone by the board with the transportation system and the high-sounding ’52 Bill of Indenture with its dire threats of legal action for failure to fulfil contracts and refund passage money stood precious little chance of catching up with elusive defaulters in so vast a land. Even the humble Chinese coolies soon went their own way here: those who braved the outback made a beeline for the goldfields, while the rest lived huddled together in a little China at the far end of the town, with joss-sticks, opium dens and all the trimmings of Oriental life.

  It was officially stated that the seven Durack children, all described as ‘farm servants’, could read and write and were in good health, although, probably undernourished and still suffering from the after-effects of measles, they would have been a wan-looking little group. Strangers often expressed surprise at the mixed appearance of this brood, black Irish and red Irish from the same tree, though others declared that apart from obvious differences of colouring and character they were stamped with an unmistakable brand of family. The dark strain had come down from Mammie Amy’s side, a throwback, some said, to the survivors of Spain’s wrecked Armada whom many a west Ireland family had taken into their hearts and homes; though Mammie Amy herself said her forebears had been ‘Claddagh folk’, survivors of the oldest race in Ireland who had built the great dun of Aran—a dark, wild people, but good builders and extremely proud of their great antiquity.

  Mary, aged twenty, had the gaunt, anxious features and the too-large, grey eyes of one grown to womanhood in hungry years. Because she had always borne the brunt of eldest girl in a large, struggling family they called her ‘Poor Mary’ even then, and as though it set the seal on her hard and ill-starred life, she was never known as anything else but that. Her brother Patsy, my grandfather, then eighteen years old, was blue-eyed with a mass of dark, curly hair, a thin boy, nimble on his feet, who loved to dance and could play by ear any instrument from a tin whistle to the fiddle he had inherited from his rollicking grandfather ‘Daddy Jack’ and that he guarded like his honour. Fifteen-year-old Margaret was pretty as a wax doll, but her long, fair plaits seemed too heavy a frame for her wistful face. Bridget, at thirteen, was an undersized waif with reddish hair, while the eleven-year-old Sarah, small too, was gypsy dark with lively, bright eyes that shone from a face of transparent whiteness. Then came little Anne, nine years old, blue-eyed, auburn-haired and even then inseparable from the seven-year-old Michael. This last boy, like his sister Sarah one of ‘the black Duracks’, was later to be known as ‘Stumpy Michael’ to distinguish him from other, Australian-born ‘cornstalks’ of the same name, and as such, to avoid confusion, I must refer to him from the beginning.

  Young Patsy, his precious fiddle tucked under his arm, viewed the pageant of life in the raw young colony with eager eyes. He was a little awed by the immigration formalities and the sight of his father in his Sunday clothes, the bowler hat, the long dark coat, the striped, stove-pipe trousers, coloured waistcoat and cravat, his long hair sleekly brushed and curling decorously about his ears, his lean, clean-shaven features portentously solemn as he answered the sharp barrage of personal questions. The boy sensed that life in a new land would not be easy for the proud, conservative Galwayman who had seemed at times over-stern with his family, over-insistent on mannerly deportment, over-meticulous about details that seemed of little importance, and who stiffened now as he replied that his good wife, aged forty, could neither read nor write. What did they know of this woman who had been ‘The Rose of Cappabaun’? What was it to them that she was an exponent of Irish lore and of her native Gael, learned of a scholarly priest who had said Mass in the barn of her parents’ farm, or that she was a sweet singer and had dancing feet and was known throughout two counties as a woman with ‘the healing hands’? Bridget Dillon had been well schooled in many things, but the eldest daughter of a poor farming family stood little chance of formal learning in the erratic ‘hedge schools’ of her youth.

  Difficult though it might prove for his parents to adjust themselves to colonial life, young Patsy had felt himself at once a part of it, thrilling to every unaccustomed sight and sound, to the fine horses that even working men rode here as a matter of course, to the varied and colourful people, European, Oriental, Kanaka, that had figured only in the legends and stories of his childhood.

  Also at the barracks this day was a shipload of bearded, Gaelic-speaking highlanders and Skye-men who, the newcomers learned, had been brought out under the auspices of John Dunmore Lang as an antidote to the weakling Irish, many of whom had been encouraged to migrate by the incorrigible Caroline Chisholm. Disappointment awaited him in this, for many of the Irish ‘marauders and malcontents’ he so reviled and distrusted were to prove among the finest and hardiest pioneers of the land, while most of his own bluff peasant Scots who were to have provided the backbone of the nation went flocking back to the mists and rigours of Highland winters before they had learned to love the sun or had discovered that unremitting poverty and toil was not necessarily the lot of man born of woman. Ironically the Irish, whose low standards of living had been so deplored and who had nothing to return to but destitution, remained to blend in the making of a people some day to enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world.

  Darby Durack had come to Sydney from Kippilaw with a waggon-load of wool to meet his family, but since the ship had been quarantined he had perforce returned without seeing them. The good Mr Chisholm, however, had arranged for him to come a second time and the family found accommodation meanwhile at a modest inn on the outskirts of the town. Years
later Grandfather Patsy would point out the spot and wonder at the changes he had seen in his own time, telling how before these buildings and pavements it had been a swampy place where teamsters and drovers pastured their animals while they regaled themselves at the Woolpack, the Square and Compass or the Dog and Duck.

  Two years of gold had already made a mark on the sprawling settlement of Sydney town among the hilly coves. The business premises and homes of the newly rich were dwarfing humble shops and cottages and there were breathtaking signs of easy money and wanton extravagance. Although excessive drinking was no new sight to the Irish, it shocked them to see fiery Bengal spirit swilled neat from wine glasses in the foetid grog-houses that throve in every street. Successful merchants in smart phaetons and gentlemen squatters in carriages went clattering past with their families, shut off by their prosperity from the harsher aspects of colonial living. Their homes, glimpsed through stately wrought-iron gateways past curved carriage drives, were little islands of orderly Victorian life, where ladies plied their gentle accomplishments and men in velvet smoking-jackets sipped old brandy from fine-cut goblets and discussed such weighty colonial topics as the iniquities of free labour, the bad effects of easy money on the masses, the shiftlessness and audacity of the ‘currency’ and the benefits of educating their own sons abroad.

  ‘How soon you have become a colonial!’ Michael told his brother when they met at last amid all the tears and embracings of Irish reunion. The fresh-faced young man of three years before was weather-beaten and wore a beard, moleskin trousers, stockman’s boots and broad-brimmed hat. He was besides, he proudly told them, now the father of three children, the girl Bridget and two sons whom they had called John and Patrick, both born at Kippilaw.

  Plans were made to divide the family for a time, since an invasion of nine newcomers was felt to be too great a strain even on the well-known kindness of the Chisholms. Bridget Durack with the younger children was to remain with friends in Goulburn until after the birth of her eighth child. Poor Mary and Margaret were to take positions as farm servants on a nearby property while young Patsy and his father returned with Darby to Kippilaw. Even temporary separations were always painful to my grandfather and the idea of working steadily with the hope of acquiring land and a home of their own in the remote future chafed his impatient spirit. With the glorious optimism that was to stand by him through the bitterest reverses he believed that he had only to take a pick and shovel to the goldfields and he would have them all set up in no time at all. His father and uncle, however, dismissed his ambition as romantic nonsense and said he must get a good grounding in the working of sheep and cattle under Australian conditions. He liked the life well enough at Kippilaw, delighting in the splendid horses and other stock, feasting his eyes on the rolling natural pastures of the Wollondilly, on the blue Australian hills and the tall gums, but always with a restlessness in his heart, dreaming of gold that would buy him land of his own. As it happened he was not destined to spend more than a few weeks of his life working for a master, for in one swift stroke of fate his status in life was changed from that of a dutiful son to head of his family.