Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  With righteous indignation these ‘peacockers’ now found the whiphand slipping from their grasp. No longer a tenth but a mere fortieth of the swiftly rising population, the rights the pioneers had won in the days of their ascendancy were being filched from them by a new influx of ever more confident little men. Was it fair, the squatters demanded, that this marauding horde, without capital or experience and not willing to serve an honest apprenticeship to gain either, should be allowed to sabotage the industry that had been the backbone of the colony? How could men who had pushed out the frontiers of settlement, subdued the forests, dealt with the savage blacks and marked out the roads with their waggon wheels, be tolerant of the shiftless scroungers on the borders of their runs, killing their sheep, laying claim to their unbranded calves and tampering with the earmarks of their other stock? ‘Faking’ had become an art in the colony. Earmarks were easily disguised, if necessary by docking the whole ear, and if there was a stamp devised that could not be changed by the overlaying of crosses, bars, half circles or figures of eight, the branded hide could be flayed off in the flash of a jack-knife. Most butchers and ‘cattle-jobbers’ were connivers too, receiving cross-branded stock at cut prices, and newspapers were full of bitter indictments against such as the Goulburn pound-keeper of ’52 who acquired a run and suddenly jumped up the owner of 1,000 head of prime stock.

  But the small man had his case too, and was voicing it to good effect, for some of the best radical blood of the English Chartist Movement and the European revolutions of ’48 had been swept to the colony on the golden wave. The squatters had spoiled things for themselves and everyone else by greedily ‘peacocking’ the countryside, ‘locking the land’ far beyond the requirements of their herds, merely to keep others out. The government, alarmed both by the inordinate claims of the squatters and the threatening voices of the little men, compromised by reserving large tracts of land ‘in the general interest’, its policy being to let them out by degrees to smaller settlers. Meanwhile, however, the squatters’ herds still wandered at large as before on the reserves, eating out the pastures around the waterholes.

  So on all sides rose a perpetual chorus of ‘Unfair! Unfair!’ Nobody was satisfied. Big holder, small holder and landseeker each pushed and jostled the other, loudly stating his grievances while the lawmakers clapped their hands to their ears thinking up the next move and vainly seeking precedents. Try as they would, through much familiar claptrap of ‘ideals and principles of true democracy’, ‘rights of the individual’, ‘progressive thinking’, and ‘nation planning’, the Australian land settlement policy was being built upon jungle law.

  In December ’55, some months after his return from the goldfields, Grandfather discovered that blocks of Crown land were open to purchase in the vicinity of Dixon’s Creek that ran between the parishes of Mummel and Baw Baw in the county of Argyle, about twelve miles north-east of Goulburn. This information he shared with his Uncle Darby and his aunt’s relatives the Kilfoyles who were then also looking out for land and who in turn shared the good news with other friends and relatives so that a flock of Irish cockies, all connected in some way, came noisily flapping down around Dixon’s Creek Meadow and proceeded, to the consternation of neighbouring big holders, to make themselves at home.

  Grandfather purchased 273 acres at about £1 each in blocks of 30 to 50 acres in this vicinity and about the same time registered in his mother’s name another 240 acres for the same price on Lake Bathurst near Tarago, some twenty miles south of Goulburn and about thirty-two miles from his other holding.

  Having obtained the land the next step was to procure stock and equipment, building materials, a buggy, dray and stores and to hire a teamster and a couple of stockmen. Grandfather’s £1,000 would not have gone far without further finance from Samuel Emanuel. At first the sound of the word ‘mortgage’ had frightened him, but he quickly learned that few had been able to make a start in New South Wales without some such help.

  The Dixon’s Creek property, to be the family headquarters, Grandfather planned as a mixed farm where they would run a small herd of good dairy cows, rear pigs, poultry and a few stud horses. The Lake Bathurst country, still surrounded with a few thousand acres of Crown land, he saw as the nucleus of a cattle run.

  That he had always concentrated on cattle his family thought a matter of temperament, but Grandfather would no doubt have gone in for raising performing seals if this had seemed the most practical way to success. A man who let himself be ruled by preferences or sat back expecting the slow evolutionary processes of older lands would find himself run over the top of in no time at all. Success in Australia depended largely on one’s talent for quick adaptability and rapid summing up of the implications of changing times. Where cattle had long been subservient to wool-growing, the sudden influx of population during the gold rush had greatly increased the demand for beef. Cattle needed less handling than sheep, therefore less labour. They required more country but once a man had built up some capital in a restricted area he could look further afield to newly opened country in the far west or north that, while not then considered suitable for sheep, had been recommended for cattle. Here a new generation of pioneers, no less tough and determined than the last, would have scope for their ambitions, and avoid for many years to come the problems and expenses of closer settlement.

  Apart from all this, one could at that time build up at least the basis of a herd for very little outlay. Stock could be bought for a song from the Goulburn pound, and though it might look fit only for boiling down, a shrewd observer could see that much of it was well-bred and needed only a spell on good grass to treble its purchase price.

  Grandfather also took advantage of a policy by which landowners, in an effort to clear their holdings of cattle and horses that had been let run wild during the depression years and were now menacing their herds, issued ‘musterers’ licences’. This they hoped would not only clear up the menace of outlaw stock but might remove from some of the smaller men the excuse of being unable to obtain a herd by honest means. Whatever they mustered they could keep for themselves and there were some good young breeders among the wild cattle, as well as horses of good strain gone brumby in the ranges. Grandfather often spoke to his family of the days when he had ‘mustered the wilds’ around the Lachlan and the Murrumbidgee Rivers.

  ‘I learned in a hard school,’ he told his sons, ‘and with some of the best stockriders in Australia. None of the young fellows these days could hold a candle to them.’

  When he became known as a breeder of fine horses he would tell how some of their progenitors had been the sturdy Arab strain brumbies he had mustered in his youth. For these expeditions he had joined forces with groups of experienced stockmen whose exploits have been recounted in song and story.

  We picture them as they rode, bewhiskered and bearded, all in their cabbage-tree hats, blue Crimean shirts and tight-fitting moleskin trousers, pouches for tobacco, pistols and knives in heavy belts, and elastic-sided boots with high ‘larrikin heels’. Among them were ‘old lags’ and sons of squires, remittance men, ex-army officers from Indian regiments, Highland Scots and madcap Irishmen, some in the game of hard necessity and some for the sheer thrill of breakneck rides after the ‘Rooshian’ cattle of scrub and range, wild as hawks, with sweeping horns and shaggy hides. Their passion for horses amounted almost to a cult. Their conversation was mostly of horses and of how they came into possession of the brave mounts they rode—one from a brumby mob mustered along the Murrumbidgee, another a thoroughbred that had belonged to a bushranger, another bought, near perishing, from a pound.

  With horses trained to ‘turn on a plate’, to wheel and dodge, they mustered cattle in hundreds from gully to scrub. Many animals, reverted to their hump-backed, long-haired progenitors, were of use only as working bullocks. The older, fiercer bulls were shot down and the better animals tailed to hastily erected trap yards and drafting crushes. There, with horns lassoed by greenhide ropes, the bellowing animals went d
own in the dust to rise enraged, branded, earmarked, emasculated. It was here, among the plains and ranges of the south, that those methods and mannerisms were developed that could be traced a century later on an overland trail from the Lachlan to the Ord.

  Great-grandmother Bridget had remained in Goulburn with her three youngest until the Dixon’s Creek house was built. The younger boy, Stumpy Michael, who was to be a tower of strength in years to come, was still hardly more than ten years old and then attending a bush school, for Patsy insisted he should not be ‘unlearned’. It didn’t matter so much about the girls. They could already read and write. They told their children how they had worked with Patsy like men to build the houses and the yards both at Dixon’s Creek and at Lake Bathurst where an overseer remained in charge when Grandfather was not there.

  Each homestead was of slab timber and stringybark, with thatched roof and shutters swung on greenhide hinges. One room served as sleeping and dressing quarters for the women and little ones, the other as living room where the men slept at night in their swags on the floor. The kitchen was an open lean-to. Floors were of hard beaten mud and strewn with hides. Furniture was rough-hewn and the barest minimum—table, chairs, one or two bedsteads with timber framework interlaced with greenhide and covered with sheep and possum skins. Bed coverings were the pelts of furred animals, often pieced together from the skins of koala bears, so plentiful in those days. It was a makeshift dwelling of a makeshift age—a generation in a hurry. Someday they would build a fine house—a mansion indeed—and there would be time for the proper husbanding and cultivation of the land. For the present, as was the custom in this country of prodigal, fenceless acres and labour shortage, they would turn their stock loose to pasture on the virgin land and would ‘tail’ their cattle until they became accustomed to their legitimate boundaries. After that any ‘boxing up’ of stock could be adjusted at regular boundary musters, which, so long as one kept in with one’s neighbours, were fine fun.

  Grandfather’s Uncle Darby was of a different mind and considered his nephew reckless and improvident in having raised a mortgage and purchased more land and stock than a man could reasonably keep under his eye. For himself Darby was satisfied with the modest eighty acres and the little herd of dairy cows he had purchased, cash down, from the hard-earned savings of seven years at Kippilaw. He planned to fence his property and clear twenty to forty acres for the cultivation that was so wantonly neglected in the colonial haste to get rich quick. He would have his sons good practical farmers, not afraid to put their hands to the axe, the spade and the plough, not like so many of the younger generation, for ever galloping about the countryside after wild stock or hell-bound droving into some waterless wilderness. Alas for the irony of fate that was to mould the sons of this careful farmer into some of the most daring and dedicated stockmen ever to trail cattle over trackless country.

  Grandfather, however, was far from scornful of his uncle’s respect for the plough, his delight of tilled fields, his thought for the rotation of crops and the proper use of God’s good soil. A knowledge of land husbandry had been part of his Irish heritage but in dealing with hard, virgin country, it must, he felt, be laid aside for another, more leisurely day. In a sense he never lost it, for he always loved his kitchen gardens and cherished his little crops of lucerne, barley and maize, but any thought he may have entertained of agriculture in a broader way was overridden in the haste and urgency of his growing hunger for land. Already the outlook of the cowherd was becoming that of the pastoralist, the dream of acres swelling to a vision of square miles.

  A landmark in their new lives had been the day that Grandfather and his Uncle Darby registered their brands. Darby used his wife’s initials cunningly placed to make them more difficult to fake. Grandfather chose his lucky number 7 followed by his initials PD and at the same time had a goldsmith cast the brand from a nugget as a brooch for his mother.

  After this transaction, as his buggy jogged home across the great Goulburn plain Grandfather saw seven crows in a tree which he took to be the sign of a wish.

  ‘I make a wish to see stock with the 7PD brand grazing over plains like this—as far as the eye can see,’ he told his mother.

  ‘And you will, Patsy boy,’ she said. ‘God help you, so you will.’

  When the dairy was finished the women began making and selling butter and cheese and Great-grandmother Bridget was able to teach her daughters many of the frugal household skills of her homeland. The family had not been long established at Dixon’s Creek before this Irish widow’s fame as a midwife and a doctor of sick animals had spread about the district. Although some of her remedies savour quaintly of witchcraft they were mixed with a deal of sound sense and practical skill, even, so they say, to turning a misplaced calf in the mother. People came from miles around seeking her advice about fowls that would not lay, cows that would not give milk and ills that beset their pigs, their horses, their dogs and cats. As sprightly as a girl at forty-three she received so many proposals of marriage from lonely bachelors that her daughters complained they stood little chance of gaining attention from the men while their mother was about. That was family banter, for like most unmarried girls in a predominantly masculine population they were courted from a very early age, and might have married even earlier but that most Irishmen who presented themselves were not, in Patsy’s eyes, fine enough for his sisters, while the more eligible English and Scottish young bloods of the district were not of their faith.

  Of these crowded and eventful years, however, most of the actual incidents handed down were trivialities.

  ‘Oh yes indeed,’ the great-aunts would say, when pestered for their memories, ‘there were some exciting times in those very early days. We had to wash our clothes in the creek and spread them over the bushes and were always having to keep watch for fear the men would see our underwear!’

  ‘Were you never bothered by wild blacks?’ they were asked.

  ‘Oh dearie no,’ they replied, ‘there was no fight in the poor things by that time—not in those parts,’ and they would tell how the wandering bands would appear from time to time, offering to lend a hand in exchange for food, clothing and tobacco. A few were clad in cast-off rags, others in flapping possum-skin cloaks, sewn up with fibre of the stringybark tree. Remnants of the proud old tribes of the Tablelands—Mulwarrie, Tarlo and Burra-burra—they watched the ‘dreaming’ of their forefathers lose shape and meaning under the axe and ploughshare of the new people. Gone were the days when they had thought to discourage the newcomers by attacking their shepherds and spearing their stock. They knew themselves beaten now, and the dreamy, changeless philosophy of the old tribes was superseded by a vigorous new way of life of which change was the keynote. A few men who had been responsible for a mass destruction of the tribespeople had been hanged for their deeds in accordance with a capricious whiteman sense of justice, but this did not bring back life to the dead nor spirit to the living. Even the cumbersome half-moon brass plates given as marks of special favour from the ‘big fella gubberment’ were soon found to possess no magic nor special virtue but were worn with a smile to please the givers.

  The new settlers found their dark-skinned visitors good-humoured and amusing, even helpful in a desultory fashion, until a whim seized them and they were on their way.

  6

  GOULBURN DAYS

  The years 1857 to 1862. Social occasions, family courtships and marriages. The beginnings of the ‘Free Selection Act’.

  Time no doubt glamorised those early Goulburn days for Grandfather but others have had much the same tale to tell of the brisk community life, the gatherings for big general musters and race meetings with dances that ended at dawn. In an age of recorded music, professional entertainers and dance bands it is hard to recapture the spontaneous gaiety of these occasions when young and old entered with such zest into the lively folk dances of older lands, self-taught musicians making brave accompaniment on concertina, fiddle, tin whistle or flute and willing songster
s rendering traditional airs often set to ballads of their own making. Local bards flourished in Goulburn in the ‘sporting fifties’, and some, like George McAlister, continued all their lives to write nostalgically of this lively decade:

  Our fathers then—brave optimists—upheld the sport of kings,

  And Goulburn had three meets a year—Summer’s, May’s and Spring’s,

  When bushmen bold in legions came and many a famous horse

  O’ertook his fated Waterloo on Blackshaw’s ancient course…

  Some speak of them as hard drinking times. They were the heyday of grog-house or shanty hotel and the effects of poor quality spirits were certainly deplorable, but the old folks declare there was little hard drinking then at dances and parties.

  As life became established so the family’s social activities expanded. Where in Ireland they had gone ‘keating’ on foot with their spinning wheels on their heads, here they rode fine horses in side-saddles made by their brother, whose favourite hobby was his saddle-work; and here, instead of the simple home fare of potatoes and milk, hospitality was of a comparatively lavish kind. In these outdoor days of healthy appetites where produce was all home grown, friends to dinner meant big tureens of soup, whole roast pig or poultry, large batches of cakes rich with butter and eggs. There were scones and home-baked loaves, their own cheeses and spiced meats, and guests went on their way with baskets of preserves, pickles and samples of this and that. Often, when some special dish or cake was produced by Aunt Sarah’s daughters in later years, they would tell how it was one of their mother’s recipes from her early Goulburn days.

  Besides heavier work in the dairy, the stockyards or on the run with their brother, they managed to produce elaborate trousseaux of fine embroidery, lace and crochet work, some of which survives today. The third sister, Margaret, was an especially clever needlewoman and was in great demand as a dressmaker with friends and relatives. She made elaborate wedding gowns for the brides and in due course exquisite layettes for the little ones.