Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  8

  PROPHET OF THE NEW COLONY

  The years 1862 to 1863. A meeting in Sydney with William Landsborough and discussion of the possibilities for Queensland settlement. With cattle and horses into Queensland. Retreat.

  From the time of his marriage Grandfather’s personality clearly emerged as the expansive, impatient, gregarious, organising fellow, who was to take himself and a lot of other people a long way fast. His mother, distressed at his restless energy, once complained that he worked as though he had ‘the devil on his tail’. ‘And so I have,’ he said, ‘but he’ll not be catching up with me this side of tomorrow.’ That was a favourite phrase of his and if he said he wanted a job finished ‘this side of tomorrow’ a wise man would get it done that day.

  Although he must often have appeared an autocrat, time was to prove him sincere in saying that he wanted nothing more than to see his dependants standing firmly on their own feet. He was quick to recognise where talent and ability in others excelled his own and gladly gave to his younger brothers and cousins credit for superior bushcraft and horsemanship. He would defer to them on such matters but he knew he was on his own ground when it came to planning, to seeing ahead and examining a problem from all sides. Friends and family respected his discernment, his capacity for clear thinking and decisive action, and were so submissive to his guiding influence that they would often travel for miles over rough bush roads to consult him about such things as the purchase or sale of land and stud and the juggling of finance. He had a fair head for figures and enjoyed adding up sums on scraps of paper to show people how well off they could be in a few years if they did as he suggested and kept their fingers crossed. In this it must be admitted that his natural optimism often outpaced his better judgement for although he made certain deductions against ‘Acts of God’ he gave credit for a restraint the Almighty did not always show.

  From the time of free selection he was unable to pass a likely looking unclaimed block without wanting to take it up for somebody and would frequently do so if time was limited, without as much as consulting the people concerned. From this time too he began writing home to friends and relatives in Galway and Clare about ‘a bit of a selection’ he had his eye on if they were ‘minded’ to come out. Mostly they came—Doyles, Murphys and Brogans—to swell the Irish communities between Bathurst, Goulburn and Yass. A letter, many years later given to his sons by a family that has prospered through his thoughtfulness, is typical of his approach. I quote it as written:

  Dixon’s Creek Meadow,

  Mummel, near Goulburn, N.S.W.

  2nd Feb. 1863.

  Dear John, I sed I would let you know when it was a good time to come out, well no time is to good if ye look at it from the shady side but this will be as good as eny time and I have a smawl block taken up forty acres about thirty mile from Goulburn good country somewhat high and a creek through the top end, will need hard work and clearing but yere boys will be getting big chaps now and ye have the girls for to milk the cows. I have a bit of a house on it and a man who is not minded to stop as frikened to blister his hands no good for this country so the selection is yers John if ye like to come and also the bit of stock for a start orf five milking cows two good drafts for the dray and some hens if ye want them from this place. Enclosed find £10 for part passage mony or expences and if ye decide not to come keep it for the help ye have all been to poor old Grandma dear old Mammie Amy in her last days God rest her soul. Come strate to Goulburn if ye come and let me know and I will be there to meet ye awl for sure. I have a wife now Mary Costello a fine girl and ye know her mother’s people the Tullys who are at Drimnaugh, Costello was from Tipperary.

  Yours faithfully,

  Patrick Durack.

  His protégés were not all such a credit to him though. Some, to Grandfather’s anger and disgust, disheartened by the long uphill struggle to clear the land, took the easier way of ‘dummying’ for some big holder. Once he heard that a man he had helped was not only acting as go-between for a gang of horse thieves but was using the name of Patrick Durack to get credit at a local store. Grandfather bore down on the big Irishman in a towering rage, laid about him with a stockwhip and ordered him out of the district.

  There was a deceptive power in his light-boned frame, and his eyes, habitually mild or merry, could flash with dangerous fire. Men who had dealings with him soon learned to avoid the hard spots in his good nature. If a man blasphemed that was between himself and his Maker but if he used in vain the name of Saint Patrick or the Duracks, Grandfather made it his own business. Saint Patrick was his special patron and he always celebrated his own birthday on March 17, the Saint’s feast, while he defended his inordinate pride of family by reasoning that a man who had respect for his own name could be trusted to respect the law.

  A loyal son of Ireland, he felt keenly for the rising prejudice against his people that their behaviour often warranted and had little patience with the excuses they made for themselves. The following fragment from a letter written home during one of his journeys, while quoting the views of a certain Mr Billings, gives a good indication of his own:

  I met today at Bathurst a Mr Billings a very amiable nice gentleman, he is with the Government in the Lands Office and had his education received at the Univarsity at Oxford. His Mother was Irish he tells me her people turned Protestant in the thrubles and he has been in Ireland though not in the west. He has had some throuble with the Irish in this country but is not narrow knowing what is behind us and the want of will that is found in many and we have had the example of our parents and other good people or would be the same way. Mr Billings ses it is not the caracter of the Irish they are idle and not to be thrusted with the thruth or to keep in the law but we have the chance in this country to shew the caracter of the Irish and not up against the government for no reson but the love of fite and argument and we will do better to work for the way we would have it here than what it was not in the past and there are some I can think of will do well to mind what he ses. He did me the honor to have a drink with me and we talked up to six…

  It can be understood with what respect he listened to this no doubt rather pompous discourse for he was deeply impressed by people of education and good breeding whatever their failings may have been. In later years in Queensland he employed a rum-soaking book-keeper who was supposed to be the son of a lord and sacked him reluctantly only after he had been discovered forging the name of Patrick Durack on a cheque for the second time.

  In ’62 Grandfather had purchased by auction at Goulburn some 300 acres in the name of his younger brother Stumpy Michael, then rising seventeen. His policy at this time was to raise as much capital as possible by improving and part-stocking selections for sale to other settlers, but this block he declared young Stumpy must develop on his own initiative.

  ‘It’s yere own selection now. Ye must be working out all the problems for yourself.’

  His brother had examined the land and pegged out a site for a shack but that was as far as his initiative was allowed to go.

  ‘Now what sort of a kippenhead will be wanting to perch on the rooftop wheniver the creek’s in flood?’ Grandfather expostulated. ‘There’s only one place to build and it’s yonder on the flat.’

  He was right, of course, but it is hardly to be wondered that Stumpy Michael, although anything but a weak character, just never had much to say.

  ‘The boy must be got out of his shell a bit,’ Grandfather decided. ‘He should be off to Sydney and seeing a bit of life, maybe buying some stud for that run of his.’

  Others agreed that it might give the shy boy confidence to feel his feet in the city away from the family, but Grandfather had meant nothing of the kind.

  ‘And what,’ he asked, ‘would a boy of that age be doing with himself in the city on his own?’

  So it was a family party as usual.

  To Grandfather’s delight other branches of the Durack family had now come out from Ireland, some to settle in the Bathurs
t district, others to go into hotel business in Sydney so that when he arrived in the city with his wife, brother-in-law John Costello and brother Stumpy there was no question as to where they should stay. (It might be of interest here to mention that little Fanny, a daughter of his hotel-keeping distant cousin Tom, was one day to win fame as the world’s champion woman swimmer.)

  Sydney had seen many changes in that golden decade. Old landmarks had been either dwarfed or demolished. Black wattle swamp, where the teams had grazed on the edge of the town, lay reclaimed under a busy thoroughfare to the Quay. The first railway had been laid and everywhere was an air of prosperity, solidity and assurance that had been lacking ten years before. There now seemed as many steamships as sailing vessels on the harbour and the whaling ships of other days had disappeared. In a population more varied even than before were people of obvious opulence, dandies in embroidered waistcoats and extravagant ties, lifting bell toppers to ladies in crinolines stepping fastidiously from monogrammed carriages.

  It was as well Grandmother had city friends to visit, since her menfolk spent most of their time at the stock sales where their attention was one day drawn to a lean, bearded bushman, outstanding even in this gathering of weather-beaten inlanders for the unusual penetration and brightness of his wide-set eyes.

  ‘That’s Will Landsborough!’ they were told.

  Next thing they were pumping him by the hand like long lost brothers, and meeting his companion Nat Buchanan, to be better remembered as ‘old Bluey’ of the overland trails.

  Patsy and his companions had followed Landsborough’s movements closely over the past few years. They knew him for one of the Fathers of the new colony of Queensland who a year or so before had discovered the Camooweal district, followed the Gregory to its source, named the rich Barkly Tableland and returned via the big rivers—Thompson, Barcoo and Warrego. Buchanan had been with him on the trip and was now his partner on the Thompson River. They had come down to Sydney to purchase stud sheep for their property to which Buchanan was returning soon with his bride, Kitty Gordon, a fine bush girl and daughter of the manager of Banban Station.

  Their mutual interest established, they had dined together and talked on into the small hours. Landsborough, now an agent for the land he had opened up, was a stirring but sincere propagandist for Queensland settlement and his words fell on fertile soil with Patsy and his brother-in-law.

  I picture Landsborough with his bright, wide prophet’s gaze summing up the situation, knowing that the best ‘pioneering spirit’ was just this combination of ambitious drive and dissatisfaction with existing circumstances.

  ‘So it is a failure after all, this Free Selection, but the law is made now. The people have come and the pattern has changed. The little men with their stringybark huts and their chock and log fences, firing the forests and cutting the scrub, have come to stay. Men who hanker for the open range, breathing space and boundaries marked by ridge or river have either to resign themselves to a changed order or move out.’

  The explorers maintained that although transport difficulties on a 600-mile trek from the nearest depot, and a superstition that the climate, so far inland, would turn wool to the coarse hair of the common goat, had called a halt to settlement in south-western Queensland, the area could not much longer remain unoccupied. Already cattle and sheep were moving northwards from Victoria and New South Wales and the land boom was in full swing. Any person might apply for a year’s occupation licence for a run of 100 square miles and within nine months, if he had by then stocked his run to one-fourth of its assumed carrying capacity of one hundred sheep or twenty head of cattle to the square mile, for a fourteen-year lease at an annual rental of 10s per square mile.

  For himself Landsborough believed sheep would do well enough out there and put little credence in the theory of their fleece turning to hair. Sheep would survive drought seasons where cattle perished, but owing to the scab disease so prevalent in New South Wales the Queensland Government had recently put an embargo on all sheep crossing the border of that colony. For the cattle man, however, there were other advantages. He would need less labour and no fences for many years.

  Conversation turned to the Queensland blacks who from the beginning had seemed more virile and spirited than those of the south. There had already been isolated instances of serious trouble—nineteen men, women and children massacred at Cullin-la-ringo in ’61 and another disaster near Taroom where a pioneer family of thirteen had been wiped out. Landsborough pointed out, however, that experienced settlers might well expect more help than hindrance from the Aborigines if they started off on the right foot. Exploring parties had had little trouble from the blacks and much to thank them for. In the Barcoo district the natives seemed mild-mannered, timid of white intruders though not hostile. But for Burke’s foolishness in flourishing his firearm, causing the tribe to disappear, they might well have saved the whole party from their miserable fate of slow starvation. As it was, the blacks did not show up again until only one man named King remained, but him they had taken at the point of death and cared for to the best of their ability. King had spoken highly of their kindness and of how they had searched over many miles to find food for him in a drought-stricken area from which be was too weak to travel.

  Drought? But where in Australia, demanded the optimist, was this not a hazard to be faced? It was a misfortune as likely to fall upon the Murrumbidgee as upon the Barcoo and the first-footers out there could take so great an extent of country that in poor seasons they could shift their stock from badly affected areas. It was obviously a land of extraordinary recuperative qualities, capable of turning, almost overnight, from desolation into a waving pasture of fragrant clover and fine natural grasses.

  As for distance from civilisation, with the tide of settlement so swiftly flowing out towns must soon follow.

  When the party broke up at last they had covered so much ground they seemed already life-long friends. Their paths were to cross many times again until Landsborough, an old and honoured pioneer, was fatally thrown from his horse in ’86 and ‘Bluey’ Buchanan had become that ‘old man faraway’, moving on into the Territory and first with cattle on the Ord—his wife, and Grandfather’s, in the years to come, the first white women in the Kimberley hinterland.

  This encounter supplied the spark to fire immediate action. In no time Grandfather had it totted up on paper how the natural increase from an original five or six hundred head of cattle, grazing on the lush pastures of the Cooper, would have them all wealthy squatters in about five years’ time. Costello decided they should breed horses too and in a few minutes they were wealthier still. Finance was no great stumbling block for they could raise a mortgage on their existing properties and pay it off from the sale of the estates when they returned from staking and stocking their Queensland claims. Even though they ran themselves deep in debt it was agreed that any sparing of expense on essential equipment was false economy. The saddles and packs must be new and strong, the waggon solid and well stocked and their mounts the best procurable. Stockmen’s wages were from £1 to 30s a week in those days but for droving trips of this distance and hazard they paid £2—and got their money’s worth! Rations were worked out on the old bush scale of seven, two and a quarter’—seven pounds of flour, two of sugar and a quarter of tea per man per week. They would kill and salt beef on the track, and anything beyond these items was considered a luxury. They carried, however, a case of currants, some rice, mustard, curry powder and a few tins of jam.

  It is not hard, from photographs and family descriptions, to picture the party that moved off with stock from Goulburn early in June ’63. There was Grandfather, twenty-seven years old, slim, dark-bearded, upright in the saddle, his tender Irish skin permanently sunburned and peeling, his slim, strong hands scabbed with small sun sores. His brother Stumpy Michael, although darker than Grandfather, was also tender-skinned all his life. A quiet boy, still beardless with sensitive, chiselled features, too retiring to join the boastful d
isplays of the other stockmen, young Stumpy had not yet proved the bushmanship that was to make his name. Growing in the shadow of his elder brother, listening and learning, he now faced for the first time the long, northward track that he was to travel so many times in the years to come. There was John Costello, twenty-three, lithe as lignum with a quick springing stockman’s step and already a beard like a young bushranger. His almost dreamy eyes were as keen and trained as an Aboriginal’s and his colonial drawl carried over from his parents an unmistakable Irish twist of tongue. Big, blond, bearded Jim Scanlan, whose sister Mary was soon to marry John Costello and whose brother Pat was married to Grandfather’s sister Bridget, was already reckoned a good stockman, although no more than five years out from County Clare. Young Tom Kilfoyle, Darby Durack’s brother-in-law, a veteran of the droving tracks at twenty-one, was a dashing-looking fellow on his fine stockhorse.

  Besides the cook, who was a stolid German known as ‘Vild Villy’, only one member of the party was not related in some way. This was Jack Horrigan, Australian-born of Irish parents, whose name as a horseman is still a byword in parts of the outback. ‘Poor old Horrigan was no oil painting even as a young fellow, when we first joined up,’ Grandfather remarked many years later. ‘But I never saw a man handle a horse as prettily.’ Born to the saddle, he was bandy-legged, jockey-sized, keen-eyed, thin-featured with a scraggy red fringe of beard. Trousers low on his lean hips and tucked into his high-heeled elastic-sided boots, broad-brimmed hat fastened under his chin with a leather strap, he was the Australian stockman par excellence

  With 100 horses valued at about £2,500 and 400 breeding cattle reckoned at £5 a head, they planned to push on past Bourke, 400 miles from Goulburn as the crow flew, nearer 600 following the rivers, and on into country recommended by Landsborough over the Queensland border. They agreed that Kilfoyle, Horrigan, Stumpy Michael and the cook would remain here at a selected depot while Grandfather, Costello and Jim Scanlan made south to sell up and return with the women, children, further stock and all the impedimenta of permanent settlement.