Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  He and his father had been set to work felling timber for a fence near Rose Lagoon, a picturesque part of the property abounding in wild game. The older man had been holding open a gate while the boy drove through with a dray-load of wood, when a kangaroo, bounding from a patch of scrub, had startled the blinkered horse. As the animal jibbed a piece of timber slipped to one side hitting Michael a stunning blow. He fell across the track, the dray lurched backwards and jolted over him with its crushing load. There was no cry, only a sickening bump and silence and the boy on his knees in the sand, his arms around the broken, lifeless body.

  The Goulburn Herald of August 27, 1853, made a note of the inquest:

  …held at Gatton Park, near Mummel, on the body of Michael Durick [sic] who met his death on the previous day, by a cart and horse running over him at Rose Lagoon. The deceased had been only two months in the country and has left a widow and eight children to deplore his loss…

  So it is that great-grandfather Michael remains only a shadowy figure in family memory, a proud, prudent, hardworking Galwayman who made the few, strong, simple pieces of household furniture that were to travel many thousands of miles to the lonely outposts he did not live to see. The only photo we have of him is a faded tin type in a plush-lined case, taken before he left his native land, but in which we can discern the Irish features and fine-boned hands with the crooked small fingers that have come down through the generations. A poor farmer, he clasps in his right hand a gold-tinted quill like a symbol of the learning he revered.

  To the simple Irish widow the cry of the Australian curlew was always the banshee wail of her native bogs. She had heard it on the eve of her husband’s death and had known then, she said, that the wrath of ‘Red Mac’ had followed them to the end of the earth. It was a tragic start for their life in the new land, but had his father lived Grandfather might never have become the man he was or have done the things he did. He would no doubt have remained to work out his apprenticeship at Kippilaw and perhaps after some years, his ambitions clipped to modest proportions, gone into land under the prudent guidance of the elder man, to become a quiet, steady fellow of the same mind. As it happened he plunged headlong at eighteen into the swift current of his times so that in surveying his life one is constantly amazed at the speed at which he travelled and the zest with which he lived.

  ‘I had no boyhood,’ Grandfather told his children. ‘I was a child one day and a man the next, with the cares of the world on my shoulders.’ But although given to these occasional flashes of self-pity, that was the way he must have wanted it or he would not so consistently have gathered troubles to himself.

  He quickly organised his family, the older girls in jobs not far from Goulburn, his bereaved mother with the younger children, including the new-born Jeremiah, boarding in that town; and with the warmth of Mr Chisholm’s blessing and the chill of his Uncle Darby’s disapproval he set out for the goldfields. He had acquired a horse, covered cart and merchandise on commission basis from Mr Samuel Emanuel of Goulburn, little knowing this to be but the beginning of a long and far-reaching association.

  The Emanuels belonged to a prosperous Jewish community that, with uncanny business instinct, had gathered around Goulburn in the depressed forties. The Sydney Morning Herald summed the situation up by saying that ‘the ten tribes had not been lost, only mislaid into Goulburn’ and a successful man of the time was often said to be as ‘solid as a Goulburn Jew’.

  This family, long established in the legal profession in Southampton, had immigrated during the thirties and had sold out of what was bluntly described as ‘a slop clothing business’ in Sydney to take on a variety of new interests in the centre of the rich pastoral tablelands, and were prominent in the far-seeing group that financed and organised the Sydney Gold Escort more than a year before the great discovery. Some said it was intuition, others that they had ‘been in the know’.

  They had seen Goulburn grow from a little frontier village of slab-built, bark-roofed humpies and shanty hotels to a sizeable and prosperous town. The roads were still no more than the winding waggon ruts, always noisy and congested with creaking drays and bullock teams, and herds of sheep and cattle being driven to boiling-down works or saleyard, but business premises and hostelries were now numerous and flourishing. The Emanuels had a finger in many pies. They were gold buyers, bankers, shareholders in the Gold Escort, proprietors of the Steam Flour Mills, the Beehive Store and the Beehive Hotel, whose swinging sign sported an appropriate ditty:

  In this house we’re all alive,

  Good liquor makes us funny.

  If you are dry, come in and try

  The virtue of our honey.

  It was from the Beehive Store that Grandfather stocked his vehicle for the fields, having been assured that, although past the first flush of excitement when fabulous fortunes had been made, the Ovens diggings, some 220 miles south of Goulburn, and about 25 miles below the border of New South Wales and Victoria, were still flourishing enough and that, while covering himself with the sale of his goods, he could equip and work a claim of his own. Emanuel advised him that with the credit he could raise on, say, £1,000 capital, he might set himself and his family up with land and stock, though if he stayed on in the hopes of making more he might well find himself back where he started.

  Already thinking in figures and distances that would have staggered him on arrival in the colony only fourteen weeks before, young Patsy went on his way south through the straggling, dusty country towns of Tarago, Collector, Gunning, Yass and across the Murrumbidgee at Gundagai.

  Life at Albury, the border town, and Beechworth, the miners’ centre on Ovens River, seemed wildly exciting and extravagant to the newcomer, though the old hands remembered even livelier times.

  ‘You should have been here last year, when we played skittles with bottles of champagne and a crowd of Yanks spread butter between pound notes and fed them to their dog!’

  Since the first rush to the district in ’52 mining had sown a wide, sporadic growth of calico tents, windlasses, ventilators, shafts and mounds of earth about the once lonely countryside. The roar of the diggings—Mopoke Hill, Chinaman’s Lead, Wooragee, Napoleon’s Flat, Snake Valley—ominous as the noise of a tidal wave, could be heard for miles on a still day. Later Patsy would come to know each separate sound, to distinguish the busy rattle of the ‘Long Toms’—the cradles that sifted dross from gold, the ringing of anvil and pick, the thud of shovel, the bang and jangle of tin dish and bucket. He would know the groan and creak of the waggons and the bellowing of the teams under the sharp crack of whips, the raised, urgent voices, the trundling of barrows and the clatter of horses’ hoofs.

  Never had he seen such a motley crowd, faces and beards heavily begrimed, an impression of red shirts and blue dungaree trousers under a spattering of caked mud and dust. Nets, and here and there a dancing circle of corks, dangled from the brims of cabbage-tree hats to disperse the persistent flies. Most of the women, in poke bonnets and faded dresses, were as grimy and weather-beaten as the men, but they became animated at sight of the goods in the dray and eager fingers tested the quality of tarlatan, of ribbon and lace, while the men clamoured for picks and shovels, tin dishes, billycans and camp ovens.

  Patsy’s trade was brisk, and payment came in gold dust and raw nuggets, one in the shape of a horseshoe which he had set as a brooch for his mother. For the first time he fingered and knew the fascination of raw gold and realised something of how men could grow to love even the pursuit of it.

  In a short time he was a miner along with the rest, at home with the vernacular, the nicknames, the passwords, the grievances. He shared resentment of the ‘miner’s fee’, now increased out of all proportion to £3 a month, burned with indignation at the sight of diggers who had failed to produce their licences on demand chained to logs like felons. He learned the password signalling the coming of the police, remembered how the single warning syllable would echo round the diggings from claim to claim and down into th
e shafts—‘Joe! Joe! Joe!’

  Many things he saw in those days—violent death, men killed in greed, in anger or in drink, men crushed or trapped and smothered in the shafts. He saw men prepared to give up the chance of a lifetime for mateship, quixotic deeds of unselfishness and courage. He worked beside ex-convicts and immigrants from many lands—English, Scottish, German, French, Afghan and Chinese—rubbed shoulders with Anglican, Lutheran, Jew, with followers of Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad or simply the god of gold. He learned a wide tolerance and a respect for the beliefs of all men of good faith.

  On Saturdays he joined the diggers who flocked into Beechworth to quench their thirsts at nineteen shanty pubs. What went into the miners’ liquor was nobody’s business. Wood spirit in casks was coloured with tobacco and livened up with a dash of vitriol. They drank Bengal and Jamaica rum and ‘barley bree’, and sometimes, to celebrate some great occasion—champagne.

  Irishmen gathered in hundreds at the Harp of Erin, the Shamrock, the Albion to swap yarns, sing and dance to the wheeze of accordion, fiddle, gum-leaf or tin whistle, but there were no great national distinctions drawn. Irishmen were as likely to barrack ‘The Tasmanian Bruiser’ or a Scotsman in a fight, as Tom Coughlin, ‘The Freckled Irishman’, famed for his ‘hit wid the left’.

  All his life Grandfather would speak of the personalities of these impressionable days—Wallace, ‘The Golden King’, who made his pile at Beechworth store, ‘Sandy’ Cameron his clerk, Will Quinlan who died at Eureka Stockade in ’54, Charles McAlister and his brother George, whose rough-hewn ballads of current happenings were among the first folk songs of the land. Then there was Don Cameron, boss sluicer of Woolshed Creek, candidate for the Ovens electorate, whose supporters contributed a matchbox full of gold apiece to his campaign, and whose victory march, beginning with the ceremonial fitting of his horse with golden shoes, was a highlight of Ovens history. Tip-drays hitched to heavy miners’ horses, fours-in-hand, dog-carts and waggonettes were filled with cheering, singing diggers who followed their hero across the red carpet spread in the main street.

  Cameron’s mate ‘Woolshed Johnson’, two years before a shepherd earning 7s a week, now sluicing £600 a month, shouted champagne for the town, and at the banquet that followed the successful candidate was presented with 2,000 sovereigns in expectation of his political services. The confidence was misplaced, for the popular member had mistaken his obvious vocation as a showman for that of politician and it was not long before the miners were complaining of his ‘poor effort on behalf of the Ovens electorate’. Faithful supporters joined his detractors in a brawl that Superintendent Robert O’Hara Burke at the head of twenty mounted police was called upon to quell. Soon afterwards Cameron resigned, leaving as the only glorious memory of his political career the time he rode through the diggings on a horse shod with gold—and even that was disputed, for some declared the shoes as bogus as his promises, that they had been appropriated from a circus then on tour of the diggings and were made of brass!

  Robert Burke, late of the Irish Constabulary of County Galway, was one of the few policemen who managed to remain reasonably popular with the miners. Grandfather was proud, in after years, to have known the man whose tracks he was to follow into the unknown of a new State. They hailed from much the same part of Ireland and shared a passion for horses, but when they discussed the Irish hunters Burke spoke as a man who had ridden them and Grandfather as a wistful spectator. For all that, Burke was a modest fellow, as Grandfather remembered him, neither officious nor class-conscious—rather an odd man out in the Force with his informality of dress and manner, his love of literature and his romantic talk. Hardened bushmen had smiled in their beards when the fresh-faced Irish youth, who could ‘lose himself in a paddock’, they said, spoke of his longing to lay bare the mysteries of the interior.

  There, too, Grandfather met two young Irishmen, Dinny Skeahan and Pat Tully, who were to become his brothers-in-law. Dinny was a young miner who had sought his fortune ‘with more optimism than encouragement’ on every goldfield in the country. Patsy enjoyed his rollicking stories and his scurrilous topical songs, but was apparently none so pleased when the unstable fellow turned up at a later date to capture Poor Mary’s sentimental heart.

  Pat Tully, although also an incorrigible miner, was a very different kettle of fish. A thoughtful, gently mannered Galway youth, he and his brother had come to the Ovens after battling their way through all the fields from Adelong to Bendigo and Ballarat. Their people too had been farmers on the banks of the Shannon and had fought the cause of Ireland in every battle back to Clontarf and beyond. From Sydney the brothers had carried their swags over the mountain roads to join their uncle on a little property near Goulburn, but a few weeks later the gold fever broke out in the colony and all three had taken the road to the diggings. Somehow nothing had gone to plan. Their horses were stolen and in eight months they scratched no more than a meagre living while some men, working alongside, had grown rich. But therein lay the fascination of the golden years that were to leave an indelible mark on the Australian character. Long after the big rushes the restlessness would remain, the yearning for change, excitement, independence and wider opportunity, a love of wager and hazard—the fall of a coin, the form of a horse.

  Grandfather made £1,000 in eighteen months on the goldfields. It can hardly be imagined that he was ‘satisfied’ (for what digger ever was?) or that he was not sorely tempted to go on, but it was the sum he had fixed as his goal and he stuck to it. No doubt, too, he saw that the day of the individual miner was drawing to a close, for already the shallow shaft and the tub-and-cradle of the little man were giving place to the horse-drawn harrows of parties with capital. Soon these, too, would go under before the crushing machines and steam batteries of the big companies, and the independent prospector must either give the game away or hump his bluey and move on—to Queensland, Kimberley, Nullagine, Kalgoorlie, on the fugitive trail of ‘the alluvial’.

  Grandfather never quite lost his nostalgia for the mining life. These eighteen months in which he had grown from a smooth-faced boy to a bearded man had been formative ones for him and he would always look back to them as happy and exciting times. Nor would he ever lose hope, in later years, of retrieving his fortunes as he had founded them.

  5

  LAND OF THEIR OWN

  The years 1855 to 1857. Patsy and Darby Durack obtain land on Dixon’s Creek in the county of Argyle and settle into farming life.

  During the fifties in New South Wales getting information about unoccupied land amounted to something of a fine art. There were still no fences to mark the boundaries of the runs, nothing to distinguish private from Crown land and sheep as well as horses and cattle now roamed where they would. When shepherds faded from the picture the landholders, desperate at first, soon discovered that sheep did very well in this country left to their own devices, so with his stock roaming at large it was not hard for a settler to give the impression of owning all the country in his vicinity. Grandfather knew that a landseeker naive enough to announce his intention was likely to be sent on a wild-goose chase from run to run, so, like many another would-be selector of his time, he rode the countryside ostensibly on business of another kind, keeping his eyes and ears open. He had been warned by shrewd oldtimers that he would learn less in a week at a comfortable homestead than in an evening spent in the men’s hut, joining in a game of ‘all fours’ played for plugs of tobacco and listening to the brisk exchange of local yarns and gossip.

  More than ever now the squatter had reason to fear and resent the up-and-coming little man. From the beginning it had been a country of ‘every man for himself’ but before the golden year of ’51 the squatters, representing one-tenth of the community, wielded more power than all the rest—labourers, small farmers, merchants, shopkeepers and professional men—put together. In a series of heated battles they had won the purchase rights to the plums of their districts and by buying up all permanent waterholes and river frontage
s for a few pounds, could tie up hundreds of acres of grazing land. If, however, a big man, either through negligence, good nature or over-confidence should leave a waterhole unclaimed the small settlers would be on to it like a flock of thirsty cockatoos and sometimes, having got a toe in, one of these so-called ‘cockies’ would succeed in worming himself into the original owner’s shoes. To protect himself, therefore, the wary squatter made haste to purchase every likely watering place until he had spotted the map like a peacock’s tail.