by Mary Durack
While the white man surveyed the landscape the native tracked lizards and marsupials to their haunts, emerging from a wild scramble with a small blue rat and a spiny lizard which he introduced as ‘Nai-ari’—a little Moloch horridus, gentle ant-eating miniature of a monster that might well have walked the earth when fish swam in Queensland’s forgotten sea. From the trailing Nulloochia, a species of wild cotton, he pulled dry brittle fruit and chewed them with relish. ‘Good tucker,’ he said, for nothing, apart from poisonous plants, was ever despised by the wandering children of the hungry plains.
The black man pointed westward to a meandering smudge of timber, where, he said, lay the ‘good water properly’, camping place of the Boontamurra. It had been different in the old days when Cobby had approached them as tribal messenger, bearing the carved letter sticks—the ‘milli-milli’—and other peace symbols of the Murragon. Today he came in the white man’s clothing and mounted on a white man’s horse, his message not of some forthcoming ceremony, of birth, death or betrothal, but of the coming of a strange people to share their camping grounds. For himself Cobby had never questioned the new regime, but he could not answer for the reaction of these nighbouring tribespeople.
‘You got that shotgun, boss?’
The timber grew less scattered as they drew towards the watercourse, and through the ragged arches of bordering coolibah and wild oranges the water shone polished bright in the setting sun.
The coming of the travellers had aroused a deafening clamour of birds, parrots and water fowl of all kinds, wild geese, plumed duck, spoonbill, avocets. Flocks of teal wheeled noisily with egrets, ibises, herons and pigmy geese, while pelicans, heavily rising, flapped off in the wake of low-flying brolgas. A land loved by birds must be good land, the travellers reasoned, marking the length of the waterhole bending away between ravaged timber with the grass and driftwood of flood-time in its topmost branches.
Cobby pointed to a bank of sand breaking the waterhole where fires, hurriedly covered, still smoked and smouldered.
‘Big mob Boontamurra close up, Boss.’
The thirsty horses, sniffing the danger scent of the wild people, sipped the water nervously with lips and ears backturned. Grandfather and his brother walked to one of the deserted fires and raised hands in the peace signal they had learned from the Burtna blacks. Presently there was a stirring in the timber and timidly the people of Boontamurra emerged, men women and children, over 200 strong, streaked with ochre, decked with feathers, down of emu and wild duck in fantastic patterning stuck on with blood.
Soon Cobby was chattering away with them, telling the story of the white man’s coming, the dawn of a new age of plenty and novelty. Already the name bestowed on the white man by natives in the south had spread to the far tribes, but ‘Cooeebooroo’, the man who cooees, was much of a mystery still. By some it was said that he was man and beast in one and went upon four legs, but now it was seen that he walked upright like themselves.
Cobby explained that his master was a great man, a brother—‘Boonari’—and the reverential title was repeated in good faith.
‘Boonari! Boonari! Taralee!’ Everything was ‘very good’.
Asked whether their waterhole was permanent, the blacks made a babble of assent.
‘You-eye! Thillung-gurra.’
Cobby interpreted.
‘Yes. Yes. Good water. Not go dry.’
Grandfather’s Irish tongue fumbled with ‘Thillung-gurra’.
‘Thyloungra…Thylungra.’
There was good-humoured laughter at his efforts. An agile youth, decorated to indicate an early stage of tribal initiation, beckoned the white man to the water’s edge where he displayed a device of stones and nets ingeniously arranged for trapping fish. From this he removed a fine specimen of golden perch or ‘yellow belly’, flapping alive on the end of his spear. Cobby translated his tumbling sentences. One knew the holding capacity of a waterhole by the size of the fish. The creeks that quickly dried allowed their creatures little time to grow. Smiling, the youth introduced himself, thumping his chest.
‘Burrakin!’
He was five foot nine or ten inches, broad-shouldered, lean-hipped, his rippling dark skin slashed with protruding tribal scars that were accentuated with ochre and feathers. His face, with wide-set eyes, sloping forehead, broad nose pierced with a bone, and wide laughing mouth, was eager and intelligent.
‘Him yabber you brother belong him,’ Cobby said. ‘Long time him brother die. Now him jump up white man.’
Grandfather smiled acknowledgement of the relationship, but ‘Pumpkin’ was the best he could do with Burrakin. Later he was often to remark that he had named this native better than he knew for in the vegetable kingdom the humble, hardy pumpkin was the bushman’s best friend, his standby through good season and bad.
The lad’s brothers were brought forward and christened Melon Head and Kangaroo. Now all were clamouring to be renamed—Jimmy, Willie, Jackie, for the lilting music of the tribal names, a few to be perpetuated in creeks and hills and billabongs—Murryaweatherloo, Wathagurra, Tongalerry, Gungaditchee, Warraboleyna, Waddi Mundoai. The last was a merry little man, his name meaning ‘wooden foot’. When a child his leg had become crushed to pulp by a heavy piece of timber when swimming a flooded river but the gallant little fellow had devised himself a wooden stump on which he hopped about as lively as a cricket. He was witch doctor, sorcerer, comedian, renowned for his keen senses of sight, hearing and smell. In later years, when anything was lost on Thylungra, it was little Waddi Mundoai who found it, covering the ground like a sparrow, his head cocked from side to side.
When night came down over the Thillung-gurra waterhole the travellers camped, without fear, within sight and sound of the Boontamurra and their gunyahs of mud and bark. Already familiar to them were the scents they breathed, the pungent reek of river mud, of smoke from aromatic woods, of roasting duck and kangaroo, of wild bodies rank with blood and fat.
The black people, for their part, unsuspecting the change that had dawned for them, had already returned to their past, with Cobby who had given warning of their savagery happily ensconced in their midst. Darkness vibrated with the savage rhythm of sand mounds beaten between the knees of the old men, with the hollow pulsing of didgeridoo, the clopping of cupped hands on naked thighs, the sharp calculated click of boomerangs and ‘talking sticks’. Wild voices took up the throbbing measure in a song of earth and element, of time without beginning and without end, while the ground shook under the heavy stamping of the dancers’ feet.
Firelight flickered on animated spectres, fantastically patterned with ochre and feathers, topped with crazy headgear designed to awe or to amuse.
‘It is the blessing of Almighty God they are kindly and child-like savages,’ Grandfather said and would never alter his estimate even when the simple people had turned fiends at last in blind thrusts of bewildered rage.
Morning brought a sense of driving urgency. The secret of success in this country was to get in first and who knew but that someone else was already riding out to claim the pick of the Cooper plains? There was no time to lose, they said, to the bewilderment of the blacks who spoke of wild goose cooking slowly in stone ovens. To them time was a magic and a mystic thing to be spoken of in awe—a time past and a time to come for which all things must be kept unchanged, whereas the white man spoke of it as something tangible that might be ‘lost’ or ‘found’ or even ‘killed’.
So they returned to Mobel Creek with tidings of good pasture, permanent waters and friendly tribespeople. The blacks had drawn them a mud map indicating that the watercourse which they called Kyabra swung south and north again in a half ellipse finally junctioning into a big river of many channels, probably Cooper’s Creek. There were good permanent waters all along and one they spoke of as ‘Momminna’, apparently not far distant, bigger than the hole they called ‘Thillung-gurra’.
The return of Costello, Scanlan and the two native boys, a mere six weeks on the road fr
om Goulburn, was hailed with delight and arrangements for moving on began at once.
It was sufficient within the law of the time that the newcomers ran their stock on the country they wished to occupy, provided they took steps to lodge official claim as soon as possible. That was interpreted as meaning anything from a few weeks to two years.
Stockmen rode out to comb the plains, the gullies, ridges, breakaways of the Mobel holding, gathering in the cattle from their self-selected camping places, the horses from their wider range. Meanwhile the women packed up the waggons and the drays, stacked in the rough-hewn furniture, the kitchen utensils, babies’ cradles piled with clothing, tin trunks full of valued possessions from their old homes in New South Wales.
The natives, Cobby, Soldier and Jimmy with their wives and families, entered into the urgency of departure, electing cheerfully to make their homes on strange waters and among strange tribespeople.
So, by April 1868, the cavalcade of stock and waggons was once again on the move, following the watercourses on to the sweeping prairies between the western rivers. The mob, now dwarfed by the breadth of the great plains, was in fact pathetically small. Of the 150 head with which Grandfather had left Goulburn he had lost more than half in the drought trek from Warroo Springs, and although there had been a small increase on Mobel Creek the time-worn Thylungra stock book starts with the significant entry:
Cattle
Came from Goulburne in 1868
100 head.
Costello was starting with about twice this number, as he had mustered over 300 from Warroo Springs. Grandfather had about thirty head of horses and Costello, since he had taken the surplus to South Australia, about the same. Their stock, all told, was little enough on which to stake a future on untried country but their hopes rode high through the pastures of this first good season.
‘Look at it!’ Costello enthused. ‘Didn’t I say we’d be on clover in no time at all?’
The Boontamurra people, scaling the sandhills, gazed on the fantastic spectacle of moving cattle, horses and mounted men, open waggons drawn by yoked bullocks, covered waggons horse-drawn, a flock of goats, a dray-load of squealing pigs. A medley of new noises broke on the ancient silence of the plains, a bellowing and a neighing of stock, a thunder of hoofs, a cracking of whips, a clanging of bells and a rumble of wheels. The ‘Cooee-booroo’ had returned but there could be no eager welcome for such a fear-inspiring horde. There could only be hiding and watching…watching the thirsty stock move in to drink, churning the clear waters into mud, urgent, clumsy hoofs trampling the fishing nets into the sand, scattering the stone fish traps, while birds in their thousands wheeled and screamed. Later, when all was peace again, and the strangers and their herds moved on, there would be a tale to tell, a new corroboree.
They did not know yet that the ‘dreaming’ was over for the Boontamurra and soon enough for all the wandering ancient tribes of the white man’s big new colony.
12
LAND OF WAITING
The years 1868 to 1869. Drought and hard times haunt the settlers.
Into focus through the blur of years ride these hard, lean, bearded men, quick-moving in their days of slow travel, pitting human will and energy against a strange land’s hostility, dotting its great grey empty plains with their stock, their homesteads, their fences and yards; and beside them their women, wind-burned, sun-browned, wrinkled before their time, coping, normalising, dedicating to the will of God griefs and anxieties that pedal radio and flying doctor would spare the bush people in years to come.
Grandfather and his family settled on the Thillung-gurra waterhole while the Costello party moved south on a pot-hook trail twenty-five miles downstream to where Kyabra Creek swelled into a lake, seven miles long by half a mile wide. This was ‘Big Momminna’, another favoured camping place of the natives, abounding in water fowl, pelicans, duck, herons and cormorants. They called their place ‘Kyabra’.
During the months of settling in Grandfather and Costello must have driven themselves and others almost to breaking point. Stockmen were sent out to tail the cattle until they grew accustomed to their new camps, also as elsewhere to make friendly contact with the blacks and kill an occasional beast for them. A few they had met on first coming to Kyabra Creek, among them old Waddi Mundoai, Pumpkin and his brothers, Melon Head and Kangaroo, had turned up again soon after their arrival and remained as a matter of course. The three younger boys took readily to stockwork while Pumpkin also showed remarkable aptitude in the use of tools.
Drafting yards went up, barricades of split timber made to withstand the sieges of time, for Grandfather had become impatient of the colonial attitude of ‘good enough’. He built defiantly, as though with every blow of his adze he would reassert his resolution and the permanence of his occupation, and others about him must do the same. He always held that shoddy workmanship was an attitude of mind and betokened lack of faith in the future. He worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day and expected others to do likewise, checking on their labours with eagle eye, testing the staying power of rails, the depth of post holes, the hanging of gates, pacing, measuring, contriving.
Even the ‘temporary’ mud residence on the river bank was made so well that it was still in use until demolished for a modern homestead seventy years later. It was built of mud mixed with dry leaves and grass, horse-churned to a sticky clay, shovelled between upright board frames and rammed firm. When the mixture dried the boards were removed and the walls stood rough, red and durable. The house was bungalow style with hard, mud floors and sloping coupled roof extending to wide verandahs and thatched with a waterproof interlacing of straw and paperbark—a typical Irish farmhouse in the Australian bush.
Bullock and goat hides were carefully pegged and salted and later softened by patient rubbing with rough stones to make floor mats and bed coverings. This was work at which the black women excelled, sitting for hours in the shade pounding away in the ancient manner of crushing the hard nardoo.
The furniture was solid and rough-hewn, the bunks of unplaned timber and rawhide, the big dining table built in the main room so that it could never be removed in one piece.
But the crudeness of bush living was softened for the men whose wives went with them into this voluntary exile. A generation later people would remember the homely charm and comfort of the first Thylungra, its shuttered windows gay with chintz, the dining table meticulously laid with spotless damask and shining silver cutlery, the heavy oil lamps with their elaborate silver bases and globes embossed with deers’ heads.
There was no time yet for the relaxation and enjoyment of living that would come with the years, but through all the long months of toil Grandfather, his brother and John Costello learned to know the land they had claimed. Riding around, shifting and tailing stock, they had ranged as far out as the channel country—a vast flat area watered in good seasons by the westward-flowing system of the Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina Rivers. Only in time to come would the immensity and potential of these pastures be fully realised and man obtain a bird’s eye view of that sixty thousand square mile plain, eroded to an intricate pattern of shallow, braided channels, swamps, gutters, billabongs—a natural irrigation system for the rich fodders and clovers that followed swiftly on the rains. However, even these earliest pioneers, jogging over a weary panorama of broken country too complex to map, sensed something of its unique quality.
In the higher stony ridges they had been puzzled to find a number of small pits, two or three feet deep, holding an even level of water and so regular in formation that they had thought them man-made, like the desert wells of other parts. The blacks insisted that this was ‘dreaming water’, and the wells made by sky heroes of the time long past. One of these ‘spirit men’, they said, had banished a great river underground where it flowed deep down in the dark, a seepage rising here and there in holes like these to succour thirsty travellers. Years later science would tap the resources of this legendary stream—the ‘water underneath’—and brin
g it throbbing hot to the surface from deep artesian bores, but by that time these first pioneers had packed up and moved on.
Although they had put little credence in this story, the settlers were eager to learn all they could from the blacks of their country and its wild creatures, for like most bushmen they were ardent naturalists. They learned to distinguish the interlacing tracks of reptiles, insects and marsupials, to read significance in the habits and antics of birds.
At the end of August, Stumpy Michael and a native boy named Willie set off with two waggons to bring supplies from Bourke and put in their claim for the Kyabra Creek country. They had reckoned the journey of about five hundred miles there and five hundred back, as the track wound, would take them about three months but four months went by and there was still no sign of them.
When the wet weather clouds began banking up the family knew that if the travellers did not beat the rain, swollen rivers and boggy plains might hold them prisoners for months. Every day anxious eyes scanned the horizon for the homing waggons. Hopes were raised by spirals of whirlwind and dust, possibilities were endlessly discussed and hazards assessed. That they might be lost was hardly considered, for Willie was a native of exceptional intelligence and Stumpy himself a natural bushman. Sickness was a possibility, fever, snake bite, dysentery. Accident to one of the drays was a likelihood, for it was a simple thing to break an axle coming down a steep incline, over a gully or breakaway. Still, Stumpy was clever enough with his hands to have mended or improvised in a very short time. Attack by natives was a haunting fear and trusted scouts from the local tribe were sent out to discover whether any such rumour had circulated among their people. They returned always with the same story. The teams had passed unmolested on their way south but had not returned.