Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  Sometimes settlers were beaten by nothing so much as the nervous strain of such interminable conjecture, of waiting for rain, for mail, for someone to turn up, by hope long deferred, or bitterly frustrated by clouds that passed away, the mail that was left behind, the man who did not come.

  Beef and goat mutton was the settlers’ staple diet for as the waterhole dwindled the fish disappeared and the water fowl took off to other haunts. Sugar was down to the last few pounds, carefully rationed. There was no tea, no jam, no tobacco, little salt, and weevils riddled the few remaining bags of flour.

  Scratches and insect bites festered and spread into big, oozing, scabby sores—‘Barcoo rot’ they called it, though other districts claimed and named the sickness as their own. It was not hard to diagnose the cause, but the yams, nardoo and parakeelia of the parched bush had little curative effect on the pampered constitution of the white. Grandfather quickly ploughed and fenced off a garden area and planted pumpkins, potatoes and runner beans and these, with patient hand watering, showed promise.

  Through hard years of make-do Grandfather developed a number of pet economies and devised all manner of improbable substitutes, often convincing himself, if not others, that he had improved on the original product. When the tobacco gave out he made a dry hash of gum leaves and pituri, recommended by the blacks, not good, but better to some tastes than nothing at all. Tea was eked out with the dried leaves of wild marjoram and other herbs—a brew commonly known as ‘posts and rails’ because of the little sticks that always came floating to the top. There were endless experiments in preparing ‘bush tucker’ to give variety to the salt meat menu. Grandmother did her best with kangaroo, emu and even, under strong persuasion, with lizard, but she put her foot down when it came to snakes, frogs and witchetty grubs, which Grandfather insisted were delicacies if cooked on hot coals as the blacks advised.

  In the station store there were always criss-cross stacks of home-made soap, concocted of a mixture of fat, caustic and resin stirred over a slow fire, candles made in moulds shaped to a point at one end with string wicks pulled through and held in place as the liquid tallow was poured around to set. Everything was grist to the settlers’ mill. Even their ammunition was home-made—the leaden lining of the tea chests melted in a crucible and poured into bullet moulds, later to be filled with gunpowder. Grandfather also made ‘gammon’ bullets loaded with coarse salt or flour to fire at the marauding crows and eaglehawks.

  The new year of 1869 came in under the shadow of two haunting fears, one for the safety of Stumpy Michael and black Willie, the other for rain. The hired stockmen, unable to tolerate the isolation, and the shortages, had soon gone on their way and neither Grandfather nor Costello could leave their places. They could only wait, watching the sky for clouds, the plain for the dust of the waggons. They could expect no news from passers-by for none came that way in those early days. Their nearest neighbours were over 200 miles north on the Thompson River, 150 miles south on the Wilson, 200 miles north-east at Tambo while out west lay only the mighty loneliness sweeping over 350 miles to meet the drifting sands and gibber plains of the Simpson Desert. Once during these heavy weeks of waiting and anxiety there had been a shrill outcry from the blacks as two horsemen emerged from the horizon dust.

  At first they were thought to be Stumpy Michael and Willie riding home after for some reason abandoning the teams, but it was a stranger who dismounted and came to greet the family. His name was Welford, a polished young Englishman whose father was a judge in Birmingham and who had come to Australia in search of fortune and adventure. From a few thousand pounds capital he had purchased a mob of 500 breeding cattle and some horses from Roma, hired three white stockmen, two native boys and a cook and pushed out to take up the first good unoccupied country he could find west of the Condamine. From the Bulloo his party had picked up the tracks of waggons and stock and he and his boy had left the party some miles back to follow them into Thylungra.

  My grandparents took this brave-hearted English boy at once to their hearts. He was their first contact with the outside world for many months and they were anxious to see him established as their first neighbour. Grandfather rode with him to the head of Kyabra Creek, about 120 miles north of Thylungra homestead, to a good piece of country he had thought of taking up for himself. Welford was pleased with its possibilities and having sold Grandfather twenty-five female calves to boost the small Thylungra herd, moved on to settle in.

  Now the blacks predicted there would be no rain that season, for the chattering hordes of budgerigars that so delighted the eye with acrobatic displays, now darkening the sun like a storm cloud, now turning in a conjuror’s vanishing trick on the knife edges of a million wings, were congregating too thickly about the remaining waterholes. The nankeen plovers, rising in the furnace blast of rainless summer with long-drawn cries of ecstasy to circle and dive through the racing whirlwinds, were no good omen either, for these birds revelled in drought. Aboriginal heads shook dolefully at sight of nests abandoned, half built, and others with broken eggs, at emus and brolgas rearing singleton chicks in the same law of the wild that prompted the tribespeople to kill the newborn babes of drought.

  Every morning clouds piled up to the north to melt in midday heat and evening skies were agate-bright fading to amethyst. Cracks widened on the parched plains and hot winds filled them with the brittle remnants of precious grass. The kitchen garden languished and died.

  Stock fed but did not fatten on mulga, spinifex, salt-bush, blue bush and cotton bush—hardy stand-bys of drought years. Wells were sunk into the creek beds and water fed by means of whip and bucket to lines of rough-hewn troughing.

  In mid-January rain fell at last in an earth-shaking storm that raised a film of green on the bare plains. For two weeks thunder rumbled among threatening clouds, then came two days of searing wind, sweeping up the red dust and darkening the sun. Fat lamps burned all day in the stifling house while stockmen with handkerchiefs tied under their eyes rode out to urge the bewildered cattle on to water in the face of the stinging, howling gale.

  Grandfather’s horse stumbled in a breakaway and rolled on its rider as the maddened mob thundered past. He lay in agony until the tearing wind had spent itself and the sun blazed out on the red land turned white under a shroud of desert sand, when he was found by the blacks, half-conscious and almost buried alive. He was riding again before his ribs had mended or his cuts and bruises healed. He had no faith in the efficacy of lying up while one could still stand, but Grandmother contended that the ‘sciatica’ which was to plague him for the rest of his days dated from that time.

  It was nearly six months before the long awaited waggons came swaying into sight with Stumpy Michael and Willie cracking the whips on the last stretch, smiling stiffly through the dust on their beards.

  And oh, there were sacks of flour, casks of black sugar, cases of medicine—those panaceas of all ills, Holloway’s ointment and Epsom salts—a cask of rum, kegs of salt, kegs of nails, bolts, cases of currants and raisins, garden seeds, spices, bolts of calico and turkey twill, needles and thread, men’s slop clothing, barrels of gunpowder, clay pipes, rank plug tobacco, boots and tins of jam. There was prepared leather for saddles, and heavy saddle cloth, and for the children a tin of boiled sweets.

  Stumpy related how, on reaching Bourke, he had found the single general store almost depleted by the rush of prospectors to the Gympie diggings.

  Apparently few had learned caution from the Canouna stampede of ’58 when 20,000 prospectors met with bitter disappointment, for no sooner had a fossicker named Nash reported rich specimens in the bed of the Mary River than settlers were again leaving their runs and labourers their assured jobs to join the rush.

  Stumpy Michael had put his bullocks out to grass and settled down to await the further supplies expected any day. Three weeks passed and no one had shown up except a few impatient and frustrated settlers like himself. Tortured by thought of the family’s need and anxiety he decided at las
t to push on down the Darling, 150 miles to Wilcannia, but here too provisions were short and many necessary items unprocurable.

  It was three weeks before the supply boat came up the river, and then he and the faithful Willie had faced the long, hard home journey, zigzagging to find water in the drought-stricken land, toiling along the sandy courses of dried up rivers and creeks.

  On steep inclines they had had to stage the load, bringing it on part at a time and toiling back for the rest, coping with panicking cattle when the ropes twisted or the load slipped. On abrupt declines they had felled trees and hitched them behind the drays. One of the leaders slipped and broke its leg and had to be shot and several others died from eating poison bush. Michael had purchased replacements from a station but these were unbroken to team work and the going was slower and tougher than before. It needed no more than one trip on the road with the drays to learn why bullockies were notoriously hard-mouthed men, but Michael was to face this journey until he became a familiar figure at every station and township on the road.

  For twelve years his life was to be spent mostly on the track with the supply teams or droving stock. The Thylungra cash books are full of brief, revealing entries: ‘Michael, for cash to Goulburn…’ ‘On the road Wilcannia…’ ‘Cash going Adelaide with cattle…’ ‘Exes on roads bringing cattle up.’ ‘Exes to Cootamundra with horses…’ ‘Cash to Sydney with cattle (flood-bound four weeks)’. Flood-bound—waiting for some river to subside, sandflies and mosquitoes torturing his permanently sun-burned skin, centipedes and scorpions crawling from the closing cracks in the ground, sometimes causing agonising bites, snakes wriggling in to share his refuge from the driving rain. ‘Give it to Stumpy Michael,’ people said. ‘He always gets through,’ and there was never a trip that his memory and his pockets were not taxed with special messages, letters and commissions.

  A great load of anxiety had lifted with his return, but still the rains held off. Light showers, two months after the big dust storm, had brought another film of grass to wither on the plains in 112 degrees and after that the cold weather set in with a sudden drop of temperature to freezing point. In the mornings there was ice on the horse troughs and water frozen in the pails and they knew then that there could be no more rain before the next monsoon.

  In July Great-grandmother Costello, who lived mostly with her son at Kyabra, came to Thylungra to her daughter Mary who gave birth in August ’69 to her fourth child. Grandmother considered herself lucky to have had a white woman with her at a time when many bush women had no help at all. Sometimes a gin was. summoned hurriedly from the camp, or a woman gave birth alone while a frantic husband rode to the nearest neighbour fifty to a hundred miles away, perhaps returning to find mother and baby dead. But these were times to be spoken of in whispers, in female company only, and a woman tried not to cry out in labour lest her intimate distress be heard by menfolk and children.

  The baby Jeremiah had been lusty enough at birth, but he became fretful with prickly heat rash until too exhausted to suck or even to cry and died at six weeks old. Great-grandmother Costello, standing grim-faced beside the first grave in the little Thylungra cemetery, looking across at her son-in-law had voiced her reproach with terrible restraint:

  ‘The poor bairn never had a chance!’

  13

  THE BATTLING YEARS

  The years 1869 to 1873. The Pastoral Leases Act brings improved conditions for settlers. Patsy Durack and John Costello peg wide claims and wait for rain. A murder on Kyabra. The family at Thylungra threatened by blacks. Shortages and hard times. Family letters. Death of P. Durack’s sister Bridget and Uncle Darby. The breaking of the drought.

  Somehow they kept their faith in the land and the good times coming, although scraps of news from the outside world were far from encouraging. One thousand Queensland settlers had walked off their properties since ’66, and were drifting to the goldfields, into the city and the outback towns. Some managed to find better land elsewhere, but most joined the ranks of the proletariat and the government began to fear that with so much bitterness and disillusionment abroad it would be none so easy to entice men back to the land. The discovery of gold had narrowly averted catastrophe to the young State but prosperity was still a long way off. Prices remained low, for stock had increased far beyond the needs of the population and although the outside world was clamouring for food the day of tinned and frozen meat had not yet dawned.

  Many settlers, in order to realise something on stock that would otherwise have perished before the season broke, drove their cattle hundreds of miles to the nearest boiling down works, a desperate measure that had a far-reaching side issue, for the sight of these fellows from the furthermost frontiers poking their wasted stock along through the drought-stricken countryside touched many hearts.

  Could nothing be done, it was asked, to keep them on the land where men of their calibre were so sorely needed? The advantages they had been promised amounted to practically nothing. They had no security, no guarantee that land opened up at such great risk and cost would not be resumed on twelve months’ notice with nothing to show for their efforts. Moreover, there were too many impossible conditions attached to their fourteen-year leases, and rentals were absurdly high for untried country.

  No doubt these struggling ‘outsiders’ were surprised and gratified to find their case so strongly espoused and eloquently pleaded. They could hardly have expected anything of the sort since squatters in New South Wales had aroused little sympathy from anyone and were in fact generally regarded as a national menace, an impenetrable barrier against the smaller man.

  The fact was that these western Queensland settlers were too isolated and remote to have, as yet, antagonised anyone and their chances of making out at all seemed so slim as to awaken the sporting instincts of the Australian people. If the pioneers were surprised by the sympathy they aroused among so many strangers, the outcome of the appeal must have been even more astonishing, for it brought about a rapid reassessment of the land policy, and the heartening Pastoral Leases Act of ’69. The bill increased the terms of leasehold from fourteen to twenty-one years and allowed renewal of leases for fourteen years instead of a meagre five. Settlers were permitted to purchase an area of 2,500 acres containing specified improvements. Rentals were reduced, rights of pre-emption, that had proved so disastrous in New South Wales, considerably extended and generous compensation offered for improvements on land at any time resumed.

  On this right of resumption the State, mindful of its duty to posterity, had of course to stand firm, for although leases might be indefinitely extended even to ninety-nine years the title deeds remained with the Crown, together with the right to use the land for other purposes should the need arise.

  Grandfather and John Costello knew that much of the area they had originally claimed could still be resumed by the government at twelve months’ notice, but under the amended Act they should, by surrendering their leases within six months, receive back half their runs for ten years and were free to pasture their stock on the rest until it was sold. This suited them well enough and, anxious for closer settlement, believing that with the return of good seasons people would come flocking out eager to participate in the advantages of the new Act, they rode about throwing open thousands of square miles of country between Kyabra Creek and the Diamantina. Sometimes this ‘throwing open’ meant no more than riding through, making contact with the local tribespeople, observing the waters and general topography for future reference, but often it entailed the careful selection and pegging of properties for relatives, friends or possible purchasers. Something of the extent of their activities may be traced on the early maps by the names they gave the various blocks, Clare, Scariff, Galway, Lough Derg, Lough Isle, Lough Neagh, Shannon View, Limerick, Yass, Wheeo, Grabben Gullen, Goulburn. A few of these names are still in use today, but many of the smaller blocks have since been incorporated into larger properties and are not to be found on present-day maps.

  Although the ar
ea was still almost a blank on official maps, they charted the land they rode with extraordinary accuracy and detail, marking the twists and turns of creeks and river channels that so seldom ran, plotting the good country, shading in the mulga scrub, marking the rocky belts of eroded range in elaborate ‘herring bone’, smudging in the sandhills.

  Their methods of pegging boundaries were rough and ready, though the surveyors of later years were often surprised at the clarity with which they defined the dividing fences of the future. One of their devices was to light a fire on a dark night at either end of the intended boundary when two men, carrying lanterns, would walk towards each other, pegging as they went. In the morning they would run their line, straight as a die, into the ashes of the fires. Years later, when a surveyor found difficulty in laying a boundary on Pinkilla, one of the pioneers suggested this simple old-time method, which met with immediate success.