Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  Even Poor Mary was gay in these expansive years between the bitter memories of her childhood and the hard knockabout life that lay before her.

  It had been a great solace to my widowed great-grandmother Bridget in her grief to see how quickly the Australian life had brought strength and vigour to her sickly brood. Her baby, Jerry, Goulburn-born so soon after her husband’s death, was a merry, sturdy child who was in the saddle before he had learned to walk. The girls too, although small built, were all splendid horsewomen. Sarah who had been thought not long for this world soon became her brother’s right-hand ‘man’, riding everywhere with him and working stock with the cunning of an old hand. Everyone who knew Sarah, either then or later as the matriarch of Cooper’s Creek, spoke of her riding prowess, of her pluck and spirit and sometimes also of her sharp, Irish tongue. Perhaps because she had been so delicate as a child she was always her brother Patsy’s favourite while her devotion to him was fierce and absolute. In Sarah’s eyes Patsy was as infallible as the Pope.

  The more memories I unearth of my little great-aunts and their mother the more I wonder at the fullness of their lives, at their gaiety and their industry. Simple folk though they were I feel it would be a cliché to say that they led simple lives—unsophisticated certainly, but how simple would it have been to establish and maintain the standards they set themselves in their rough and ready bush community?

  Despite all that is said of increasing prejudice against the Irish, our own family at least had almost as many friends in the Scottish, English and Jewish sections of the community as among their own. Only the occasional visits of a church dignitary such as the pioneer Archbishop Polding called for more or less exclusive Irish gatherings. Their religion meant a great deal to these Irish immigrants and there was much rivalry among the Catholic outback community for the honour of acting host to a member of the clergy. Parish priests were few and far between and the Archbishop, an Englishman of the Benedictine Order, to keep the faith alive over his enormous diocese was constantly travelling on horseback or by buggy, celebrating Mass in dusty bush townships, under trees and on riverbanks, in lonely settlers’ cabins or among the earth dumps of the mining centres. Sometimes he led the worship of his Catholic flock within earshot of his rival in zeal, the Reverend John Dunmore Lang who preached the near approach of the Day of Judgement and denounced the work of all such ‘agents of the Beast of Apocalypse’. A contemporary wrote of John Polding that ‘no monk ever looked more of a monk than he with his benign, loveable countenance, the trailing, grey hair tumbling down his neck like snow, the deep-set blue eyes, the mouth showing power and patience and an almost terrible rectitude…’

  He found warm support in the Irish community for his ambitious projects of enlarging the little bush church in Goulburn to a splendid cathedral and later of establishing a fine college in the town for the sons of a people long starved for learning.

  For one memorable fortnight this venerable figure and his little retinue had made their headquarters with the Costello family of Tea-tree Station near Grabben Gullen, and Catholic families for many miles around gathered to meet him and share in the religious rites and general festivities. Mass was celebrated daily on the homestead verandah; there was much delayed baptising and confirming of bush-born offspring, and finally the presentation to the Costellos of a water-colour portrait of His Grace which hung ever afterwards in a place of honour in their home.

  The Costellos and Duracks had met before, but this is the first remembered occasion of Grandfather’s family having visited their station home. It left a lasting impression and had far-reaching results.

  The Costellos had come to Australia from Tipperary in 1837 on one of the overcrowded, disease-ridden emigrant hulks of the day, and their four Irish-born children had died on the voyage. They had settled in Yass, a small town about fifty miles south-east of Goulburn, opened a small store and within the next few years had been blessed with some prosperity and two further children, John and Mary. This they believed to be ‘a heavenly miracle and an answer to prayer’ since they were no longer young. Mr Michael Costello was a hard-working, good-natured man rather under the domination of his strong-willed, pious and ambitious wife. During the gold rush the sleepy town of Yass had sprung to life as a stopping stage on the diggers’ route from New South Wales to the big mining centres of Victoria. Their business had flourished and when their son was thirteen years old they sold out for a good price and took up 1,000 acres of first-class pastoral country around Grabben Gullen and Clear Hills about ten miles from the Duracks’ property on Dixon’s Creek. The herds of both families grazed over a good deal of reserve land between, and the return of the straying Costello stock later gave Grandfather his most plausible excuse for visiting their homestead.

  Grandfather claimed to have fallen in love with Mary Costello at first sight, when she was only fourteen years old, but for some years he saw a great deal more of her brother John, a keen, lean youngster whose restless disposition was already causing his parents some concern. He was not, from all accounts, a wild youth, or an undutiful son, but simply adventurous, and by the time he was sixteen had already ranged the country with droving parties, was a seasoned stockman and had made a local name for himself as a rider and breaker of wild horses. Although four years his senior and bent on courting his sister, Grandfather enjoyed the company of young John Costello for they had a strong common interest in horses and spent hours together tracing on a map the latest tracks of the explorers.

  During this time many family members were courting and marrying. Poor Mary had been swept off her feet by the devil-may-care Dinny Skeahan, friend of Patsy’s mining days. There was some head-shaking over the match, for Dinny was declared ‘a wild one entirely’ and rather too fond of the convivial company of the mining towns and the turf to make a steady husband. Mary, however, captivated by a pair of bold blue eyes and a voice to melt the heart, had ridden blithely off in a buggy to the goldfields where Dinny was confident of ‘being on a good thing at last’.

  Margaret had fallen in love with a young man named John Bennet who, although eligible enough, was, to her mother’s distress, a Protestant. There was division of feeling in the family about this romance but Margaret had the support of her brother Patsy who while firm in his faith disliked all social, religious and geographical barriers on principle. This meant that Sarah approved also, so Margaret, whom they called ‘the flower of the flock’ with her fragile prettiness and her ropes of golden hair, sewed herself an exquisite bridal dress and, married with the priest’s blessing, went off to Sydney with her husband.

  Bridget, the third girl, soon afterwards married a big Irish farmer named Pat Scanlan who had come from County Clare with his two brothers some years before and taken up land in the Argyle district. Pat was a big, red-bearded young fellow locally renowned for the freak strength he demonstrated in the most original ways. His broad shoulders could carry a twenty-eight-gallon barrel of spirits with ease, and sometimes on bush roads he would take over from the buggy horse between the shafts!

  Grandfather’s other mining friend, Pat Tully, was a first cousin of Mrs Costello and when visiting his many relatives in the district called at Dixon’s Creek, at first to see Patsy, and later because he had been captivated by the sprightly Sarah. He had stuck doggedly to the mining life though no great luck had ever come his way. Sarah lectured him for his foolishness and refused to consider his proposal unless he gave up mining for the land, for unlike her trusting sister Mary she believed in reforming her man before going to the altar.

  John Costello was courting Pat Scanlan’s sister Mary, a spirited girl who had recently followed her brothers from Ireland. She was said to have been pretty, quick-witted and well versed in current affairs, but the attachment seems to have found little favour in Mrs Costello’s eyes as the girl was suspected of encouraging John’s ambition to strike out for himself on new country past the frontiers of settlement.

  The anxious mother regarded Patsy Durack’s growi
ng interest in her gentle daughter with less favour still. She had never wanted Mary to be like other bush-bred girls—horse-riding young women like Mary Scanlan and the Durack sisters. Weather-beaten herself, Mrs Costello was determined that Mary should keep the peaches and cream complexion of an Irish colleen. At the slightest touch of sunburn her skin was treated with oatmeal packs and she was sent to bed in gloves over hands smeared with mutton fat, for Mrs Costello cherished ambitions for her of a good match with a city man. Unfortunately, however, the various hired governesses with whom her education had been entrusted proved less interested in equipping their pupil for a successful marriage than in finding husbands for themselves. Mary had had little interest in lessons and later admitted that she had aided and abetted many a romance by disappearing at convenient times into the kitchen where she picked up from the capable Scottish cook, Annie McTavish, most of those practical and frugal skills that served her in good stead in years to come. She was already seventeen when, in ’59, a pioneer band of Irish Mercy nuns opened their first little weather-board establishment in Goulburn, and Mrs Costello, seizing the opportunity of removing her daughter from the attention of unsuitable admirers and improving her education, enrolled her as their first pupil. Mary remained very happily with the good nuns for two years, and for a short time even considered joining them in their self-effacing lives. This project, however, Mrs Costello nipped in the bud.

  ‘Glory be to God,’ she said, ‘after taking four of our little ones already He’ll not be asking for another!’

  But she was delighted with her daughter’s progress, for Mary had become an exquisite needlewoman, and although quite unmusical could struggle through a few little ‘pieces’ on the piano, which seemed to her mother the height of maidenly accomplishment. No one considered it to her discredit that Mary still had the greatest difficulty in writing a letter and had probably read nothing beyond her Bible and the abridged lives of selected saints. Enough that she spoke and conducted herself with dignity and had a simple and endearing charm. Before there could be any further interference with her plan, Mrs Costello whisked her darling off to Sydney to introduce her to the social life of the metropolis. Her plan, however, was of no avail, for Grandfather found urgent business in Sydney and there, between inevitable visits to the races and the stock sales, continued his courtship. Grandmother Costello, a formidable figure in her city finery, always complete with button-up boots and goose-head umbrella, was outraged and from the storehouse of her remarkable Irish memory and often unscrupulous imagination produced stories to the discredit of the Durack name throughout the centuries. She flung a heritage of drunkards, gamblers, wastrels, informers and turncoats at Grandfather’s head and he, never the mildest-tempered or most forbearing of men, had little good to say of the ‘MacCostellos’, the invading Norman de Angulas of remote history.

  ‘It’s no use Patsy,’ the gentle Mary said at last, ‘for think of the criminals we might rear with such ancestors on both sides!’

  This delighted Grandfather who often quoted it with relish long after parental opposition had crumbled under the dogged persistence of true love.

  Meanwhile, a discordant background to these social and romantic activities, raged the battle of the landless against the landed. Far, far away the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Second Chinese War were fought and finished but scarcely an echo penetrated the consciousness of these remote colonials absorbed in their own struggles towards nationhood. From a medley of people drawn to these shores by crime or poverty, to find living space, adventure, freedom, land or gold or who had come simply for the hell of it, out of many creeds and many races, preponderantly English, Irish and Scottish, was emerging the Australian people. The land was moulding them already to a certain uniformity, shading the raven hair to brown, the flaxen to honey gold, blending dark eyes and blue to a tawny hazel, a smoky grey. Even their voices were losing the distinguishing traits of country, county and class, Australia imposing an intonation and emphasis of her own, abhorrent to the outside ear, inescapable within her frontiers.

  The uprooted progeny of a revolutionary age, they were a people struggling lustily but without focus within the crucible of their new environment to find a way of life that was reasonably fair and compatible to all, a people who, in their unique isolation, from the fire of their idealism, the power of their lust, the very strength of their individualism were already clearing the way for a mighty mediocrity.

  Men had brought catch cries snatched hot from the cauldrons of English industrial strife and European social upheaval, while the ‘forty-niners’ who had flocked to California returned to tell how the prairies of America had been opened by free selectors unhampered, as in New South Wales and Victoria, by the widespread pre-emptions of the squatters and the locked acres of Crown reserve. The tentative land reforms following the gold rush years were not enough to satisfy the needs of the ever-growing horde demanding not vast leasehold kingdoms but small freehold ‘selections’ to clear and cultivate. Unexpectedly, a powerful champion of the little men arose from the ranks of the squatters themselves, a big, bluff, handsome fellow with a cleft palate and a quick, blunt wit. He was John Robertson, London-born and among those early settlers who broke ‘beyond the bounds’ in New South Wales. An idealist with a burning faith in humanity and a zeal for the cause of the under-dog, he succeeded in ’61 in pushing through both Houses of Parliament bills designed to give every family that so desired a stake in the agricultural revolution that was to provide land and a living for thousands where only hundreds could exist before.

  His Acts appeared on the surface to be just, democratic and far-seeing, providing, by throwing open all Crown lands, limiting the squatter’s preemptive rights and curtailing his term of pastoral leases to five years, agricultural ‘selections’ of from 40 to 320 acres for all applicants. For this the only conditions required were an advance payment of £10 and the signing of a declaration that one would reside on the land as a genuine settler.

  Throughout the colony hitherto landless little men joined a merry chorus of ‘The Ballad of Free Selection’:

  Come all of you Cornstalks, the victory’s won,

  John Robertson’s triumphed and the lean days are gone.

  No more through the bush we’ll go humping the drum,

  For the Land Bill has passed and the good times have come.

  We will sow our own gardens and till our own field

  And eat of the fruit that our labour doth yield

  And be independent in right long denied

  By those who have ruled us and robbed us beside…

  So, amid the groans and forebodings of the squatters and the excited clamour of the free selectors, the Acts were put into effect. Faster, however, than the wheel of the Great Agricultural Revolution wheels began turning in the minds of all sections of the community to discover how the trusting conditions of the new land laws might be circumvented to their own advantage.

  It could hardly be expected that the squatters were to be so easily deprived of the lands they now regarded as their hard-won heritage, or that the little men would not soon discover easier ways of making a living on their ‘selections’ than by clearing and cultivating the land. Honest John Robertson, in perceiving the weakness and injustice of the existing land laws, had not taken into equal account the frailty of human nature.

  7

  WEDDING BELLS

  The year 1862. Patsy Durack marries Mary Costelio. The Free Selection Act turned to travesty. Bushranging reappears.

  Grandfather and Grandmother were married in the spring of 1862 at Tea-tree, the Costellos’ station home to which settlers and townsfolk from far and wide rolled up in their buggies and fours-in-hand, since, whether or not she approved the match, Mrs Costelio was determined that her daughter should have the biggest bush wedding of the year.

  What a flurry there was, smoothing down crinolines and adjusting millinery—prim leghorn hats for the younger girls, confections of flowers and feathers for the mat
rons whose tightly corseted bosoms bore a proud display of brooches and heavy cameos, festoons of gold chains over tucks and frills and bows. The men were scarcely less gorgeously arrayed in coloured waistcoats, flowing ties and a fashionable profusion of whisker and moustache. Even the small boys were splendid for the occasion in checked pantaloons, tight-fitting trousers, peaked caps or ribboned boaters. Fortunately for family records a maker of daguerreotypes—an enterprising American—had made his way to the district about this time. He must have done a roaring business, for the wonder of photography was novel and irresistible. Everyone was taken—babies decked like little high priests in long lace surplices, spread out upon skin rugs or precariously propped against pieces of baroque furniture, grandparents seated with hands upon knees or on heavily bound family Bibles. Maidens clasped posies of flowers or leant rounded chins upon drooping hands with elbows resting on betasselled plush table covers. Young men in party finery or riding attire stood stiffly ill at ease before painted forests of English trees, or amid a clutter of pot plants and ornate Victorian bric-à-brac.

  It was clear from Mrs Costello’s picture that her stiffly boned, flounced and fringed taffeta would, as her family claimed, have ‘stood alone’.

  Officiating at the ceremony was Father Michael McAlroy, one of those splendid apostles of the saddle who did so much to bring civilisation and community life to the scattered back-block settlements. He had known the Costellos since earlier days in Yass when they had been storekeepers and, although Mrs Costello would prefer to have forgotten these humble beginnings, her husband, mellowed with wine and sentiment, recalled the days when the big, practical priest had shown him how to keep his ledger and get in some of the money owing to him. The Costellos were not the only members of his flock for whom he had combined the roles of father confessor and business adviser, while everyone knew of the incident at Lambing Flat. A judge sent down to quell a miners’ riot had found himself trembling in the midst of 10,000 angry men shouting to have him strung up, when into the medley strode Father McAlroy. The hubbub quickly ceased and the crowd dispersed, for the influence of ‘the fighting Father of Kildare’ went far beyond the limits of his own flock, and men of many creeds contributed to the schools and churches he called to life in every country town within his sprawling parish.