by Mary Durack
‘It’s soft in the head ye are, ye silly old man, and young John here with a heart of stone to be taking a young girl where there’s niver a white woman in a thousand miles and lucky to have a black gin attend her in her time of trouble. Well, ye can be off the lot of ye and good riddance and I’ll carry on at Tea-tree with a manager.’
Still when the time came for departure there was the senior Mrs Costello beside her husband in the family buggy, grim-faced under poke bonnet, the goose’s-head umbrella from which she was inseparable at hand to ward off the sun over the long, hot miles. Meanwhile Tea-tree had been put under lease, for the old people loved their home and could not bring themselves to dispose of it.
‘The day may come when you’ll be glad of our “little cocky run”, as ye call it,’ Mrs Costello said. ‘It will always be a roof over yere heads if ye’ve nowhere else to turn.’
John Costello and his wife would remember her words when, forty years later, an ageing couple with a big family, they would return to set up the neglected homestead and clear the land again of the encroaching scrub.
Eager as Grandfather was to follow them, family problems and financial difficulties tied him to the Goulburn district for a further two years. In July 1865 my father, Michael Patrick, was born but the joy of a son and heir was overshadowed by the sickness of the two-year-old girl. Grandfather, carrying her everywhere in his arms, crooning to her, willing her to life, scorned the women’s forebodings.
‘Wamen! It’s a flock of ravens they are. The same they were saying of Sarah—“Ah, the little angel not long for this world” and all. God Almighty, look at her now, with her brood of giants!’
Sarah Tully felt no less cramped than himself under the conditions of close settlement. At twenty-five, a small, lean, brown-skinned woman, she had a forceful, almost terrible vitality and sometimes out of frustration or Irish indignation at some local incident, she would saddle up and ride like the devil across country to fling herself off, breathless and excited, at the gate of Dixon’s Creek some fifteen miles away. Great-grandmother Bridget would come panting, full of joy and anxiety:
‘Sarah child, ye’ll have the bairn born dead if ye ride like that!’ (There was mostly a babe in arms and another on the way.)
‘Nonsense, Mother! Haven’t I ridden with them all, and aren’t they the finest children in the colony?’
The fierce devotion that Sarah lavished on all her family was almost fanatic with her offspring whom, following the example of her Grandmother Mammie Amy Forde in Ireland, she placed, soon after birth, on the fresh tilled soil to receive the goodness and strength of their mother earth. For all this two of her little ones already lay near her father and Poor Mary’s two sons in the Goulburn cemetery.
‘Please God we can all be going north soon,’ she would say. ‘Even Dinny Skeahan should be doing all right up there away from the gold and the pubs.’
By ’66, however, Grandfather could no longer close his eyes to the fact that Queensland’s rosy promise had grown somewhat pale. That the colony’s debentures had become a drag on the London market by the middle of ’65 had been considered of little account. ‘Only to be expected,’ men said, ‘a temporary fluctuation’, and in this frame of mind the government had plunged on with its ambitious schemes of development. But British investors had become wary of what they now knew from bitter experience in the defeated American Confederacy, in South American republics, in Spain and the Middle East, to be dangerous over-borrowing. The failure, in the middle of ’66, of London banks that had made big advances to the new colony reflected at once on its affairs. There was chaos within a day of the news reaching Queensland. Unemployed and disillusioned rioted in the streets of Brisbane and bankruptcy spread like a bushfire through the Land of Promise.
Meanwhile, in the north of New South Wales, always at least three months out of touch with current affairs, the Costellos were fighting for foothold in an inhospitable land. Their station, which they had named Warroo Springs, gave little sense of security for the country was patchy from a pastoral point of view, and the blacks who had soon discovered the superiority of horseflesh to their native lizards and kangaroos were a constant menace to stock. John Costello had decided on a policy of killing beasts for them at regular intervals and of trying to explain the white man’s views on personal property, but one of their young stockmen made a game of firing over the natives’ heads for the fun of seeing their terrified retreat. One day he had been found speared in his swag some miles from the homestead, since when no natives had shown up for their beef ration but had increased their killing and chasing of stock on the run. Nonetheless, a few natives had attached themselves to the white settlers and were proving faithful helpers.
Not long after the family’s arrival at Warroo Springs a son, John, had been delivered to the young couple by the capable hands of Great-grandmother Costello, and the infant’s sturdy build seemed a good advertisement for the district. In letters to his relatives John Costello was careful always to temper news of their hardships and misfortunes with a note of optimism for the future and reports of ‘the better country farther out’ to which they would move as soon as other members of the family had joined them.
Early in ’67, soon after the birth of a second son to my grandparents, their little girl’s frail life ended. Consumed with grief—for how could there ever be such another angel child?—Grandfather determined to delay his departure no longer than it might take him to ‘raise the wind’. The sale of their three Argyle district properties, about 900 acres in all for which they had paid £1 an acre, would not realise much more than twice the purchase price, even allowing for improvements, since their stock had been depleted since the ’63 debacle and the best they had left was to go on the road with them. Grandfather estimated that he must have at least £4,000 behind him for this project, about £2,000 to see them on the road and as much again to tide over the first two or three years when little would be coming in and a good deal going out.
Bankers, hitherto fairly co-operative in advancing money to settlers, hesitated to finance a venture to a still unknown destination in an already depressed colony where the settlers had, moreover, only a flimsy lease title to the land. The problem was overcome at last by a deal of Irish juggling and the advice and assistance of the bankers Samuel Emanuel and his son Solomon who had recently joined his father in Goulburn. So, after fourteen years in Australia, Grandfather started on his thousand-mile trek north with a load of debt that would have bowed the shoulders of any but an incurable optimist.
Although this time he could afford only a small herd of breeding cattle and comparatively few horses, he had refused to stint on equipment. They had come into the district as penniless immigrants but at least they should move out in the grand manner, and Grandfather proudly displayed to curious droves of friends and relations the wonders of his four covered waggons, built to his own design, two with bunks that could be folded when not in use and complete with everything required for comfort on the road, the others stacked with goods, equipment and livestock. Everything they possessed was to go with them, even their fine Irish linen and lace, bulky feather mattresses, silver and brass, china and glassware, for this time there could be no turning back.
A rough estimate of their requirements and expenses for the expedition ran as follows:
Buggy and buggy horses, furniture, crockery, cutlery, household linen, kitchen sundries, a number of tools, saddling and gear, 6 pigs, 6 milking goats, 14 laying hens, 3 roosters, 12 Muscovy ducks and 3 sows and boar and other sundries, not counted in exes, as already to hand.
Farewells went on amid final preparations for departure, Grandfather extending wholesale invitations to friends and relatives to join them later in Queensland. Already he was picturing a Beulah land of happy community life, roads and townships springing up in the empty wilderness. A simple-hearted man with a passion for ‘fixing’, Grandfather believed that life not only should but could be adjusted so that people were not constantly harassed an
d frustrated, where families could put down roots and spread thriving branches.
Any dismay Grandmother might have felt for this exodus was tempered by pleasure at the prospect of joining her parents and her brother John. It was true, as her mother maintained, that she was not like her brother’s wife, Mary Costello, by nature or inclination a pioneer. She would have settled down very happily to an ordinary suburban life and if circumstances drew from her qualities of resource and endurance that made her seem born to the role, she at least had no such illusions. Once, when praised by a city friend for her courageous pioneering spirit, she replied simply:
‘I had nothing of the sort, my dear, but when Patsy said we must go pioneering what else was I to do?’
While their relatives were packing up for Queensland, Darby Durack and his family were also moving out from Dixon’s Creek to what they considered superior land near Boorowa, about sixty miles west of Goulburn. Now the parents of seven sons and five daughters, Darby and his wife, anxious that the younger children should have a better education than had been possible for the rest, did not aspire so far afield as their relatives. The two eldest boys, ‘Big Johnnie’ and ‘Black Pat’, as they were usually known for obvious reasons of identification, were now seventeen and fifteen years old and had already been on droving trips with their Uncle Tom Kilfoyle. Already men in size and practical experience, they were now determined to strike out for themselves on the Castlereagh where they had taken up two sheep selections which they called Gidyeagunbine and Muchenba.
‘The old man will get nowhere with his scrub-bashing,’ they declared. ‘The only way to get anywhere in this country is leave the land as it is and run your stock on the natural pasture.’
The Irish farmer who had worked and cherished his land almost as a sacred trust had been unable to influence the outlook of his Australian-born sons.
‘Ye must learn to know the land,’ he had said. ‘Ye must feel for it as a living thing or it will die.’
But his boys had shrugged:
‘Better that than it should kill us first.’
Since Great-grandmother Bridget had promised her son-in-law John Bennet that she would not trail his little girl to Queensland, she now made her home with Darby’s family at Boorowa. Her youngest boy—‘Galway Jerry’ as he was later called—was to remain with her and go to school for another year or two before joining his elder brothers, and the youngest daughter, Anne, to continue teaching in Goulburn where she was being ardently courted by a young Irishman named John Redgrave who gave his occupation as ‘miner, horsebreaker and tutor’.
Sarah Tully had been all for joining the north-bound expedition but here her quiet-spoken husband exerted his authority. Without capital behind them another couple and five children would be nothing but a burden to poor Patsy. They must wait and see how things turned out before giving up their interests in the south. Pat had recently taken up a second free selection block near Adelong, about 150 miles south-west of Goulburn, a haunt of his early mining days where, since there had been fresh rumours of gold in deeper shafts, he dreamed of dropping on a lucky strike while tilling the land. Sarah, always suspicious of mining, said they would move from their place at Hume Creek only to go north, but Dinny Skeahan had happily agreed to fulfil the conditions of occupation by putting up a shanty on the Adelong block and working a shaft
Poor Mary, still vulnerable to the bright plans her husband so eloquently expounded, agreed to carry on the selection at Lambing Flat with her little sons while Dinny dug up enough gold to put them all on the road to Queensland. To these complicated plans Sarah vented her scepticism in the words of a popular song of the time:
So he built him an iligant pigstye
That made all the Munster boys stare,
And he builded likewise many castles
But alas! they were all in the air.
10
EXODUS
The year 1867 to 1868. Patsy Durack and his family leave Goulburn for the north of New South Wales. Reunion with the Costellos at Warroo Springs. Establishment of a station on Mobel Creek, Queensland. Breaking of the drought. Costello takes horses to South Australia and returns via Goulburn.
In June ’67 the family cavalcade moved out of Goulburn to catch up with the stock already wending its way north along the Lachlan in charge of three hired hands. The cattle were all Herefords whose west England working ancestry had established a suitably robust and docile strain, with sturdy development of chest and hindquarter and good hoofs for hard travelling. Grandfather had become a keen stock breeder, always ‘culling’ the coarser animals that ran to sway backs, long heads and narrow eye spaces, selecting for straight, clean lines and good heads. He could judge the weight of a beast almost to the pound, a skill he handed on to my father, who, when describing either beast or human, never failed to add what the subject would probably ‘go’ on the scales.
Grandmother, with the two-year-old Michael and the baby Johnny in arms, travelled in the buggy with either Grandfather or young Stumpy Michael who took turn about with one of the larger horse-drawn waggons. Two hired teamsters and the cook, who travelled with the cattle, were in charge of the other three vehicles and after the parties joined up the buggy went lead each day to strike camp for the following cattle and teams. Fires were lit, billies, cooking pots and camp ovens in which bread had been rising on the way along, came rattling off the cook’s waggon. Grandfather would set up a shade for his family while Grandmother fussed over her infants, bathing the hot, tired little bodies in sometimes no more than a pannikin of water. Every man took turn at night to watch around the cattle while the rest gathered at a communal fire where tea and coffee were kept brewing at all hours and where Grandfather and his brother enlivened the quiet evenings with fiddle and flute. Soothed by the sound of music and voices the cattle grazed peacefully, some edging close to the camp and throwing themselves down contentedly within a few yards of the fire.
The first stages were comparatively easy travelling, over wheel-made tracks and past farms and stations where they would sometimes linger for a day or so on the invitation of hospitable bush people touched to see the little family forging on into the never-never, recalling the Costello party of over two years before and eagerly inquiring how the brave young wife had fared with her expected little one. Most spoke pessimistically of conditions over the border. It was surely a bad time to be taking up country in the new colony when so many were getting out, they said. Had they not heard that the Bank of Queensland had failed, that in Brisbane police were called upon almost every day to quell riots among the unemployed? Did they realise that the price of livestock scarcely covered the cost of droving to market, that they were boiling down sheep and cattle for tallow as in the bad times in New South Wales, and that people said nothing short of a miracle could now save Queensland from complete disaster? Yes, Grandfather said, they had heard all this but depressions were passing phases of history. Besides, they believed in miracles.
Lifelong friendships were made on this journey, for through all their years in Queensland one or another of the family was frequently on the road back to Goulburn. Twelve years later when my father and his brother came south for the first time on their way to school they would be surprised at how many remembered this first meeting and how one woman, with more sentiment than tact, had clasped their mother, crying: ‘What has it done to you, that terrible, cruel country? What has become of your lovely skin and the roses in your cheeks?’ So we picture her, still young and slim and fair in her blue poke bonnet, high-necked blouse and neat gloved hands, a gentle, fastidious little woman facing a new life in that harsh and lonely land, and Grandfather, brisk-moving, dark-bearded, keen-eyed, telling with his Irish lilt of their hopes and plans. And there is young Stumpy Michael, whom people on this track would know best of all the family, a quietly spoken, courteous boy, twenty-one years old, five foot ten inches, strongly built, already encouraging a beard to protect his sensitive skin, but a tough man on the track, a skilled hand with t
he teams.
They stocked up at bush townships that grew sparser with the weeks and the miles. A month, by easy stages to the Bogan Gates, had brought them 200 travelling miles from Dixon’s Creek, then as the low featureless scrub below the Darling spread about them all signs of settlement petered out, and they made a compass course through more or less trackless bush.
There were breathless days of aching heat and others when the hot winds bowed the pale grass, stirring up the dust and veiling the sun while the stock plodded doggedly with bowed heads, intent only upon reaching the next water. On black soil country over mile upon mile of raised Mitchell grass tussocks the going was an agony in poorly sprung vehicles. Sometimes, in extreme heat, they travelled at night, steering a northern course by compass and by stars.
They reached Bourke, their last outpost, after about three months on the track, to find that the optimism of the township pioneers had been justified and it now boasted a number of stores and hotels, two banks, a Court of Petty Sessions and a hospital. Every road in the far west swung into this centre and residents spoke of its progress with pride.
‘Bourke is not a town,’ they said, ‘but a city whose borders are hundreds of miles apart.’
After replenishing their stores for the last time, the party moved north on a roundabout trail of the Warrego and Cuttaburra and north-west towards the Paroo and the Costellos’ station between the rivers.