by Mary Durack
In the early years when the nearest post office was at the little town of Tambo, over 200 miles north-east of Kyabra Creek, it was often eighteen months or more before selected land was officially registered. Although the stock book shows that Thylungra was occupied by the middle of ’68 the official registration was not made until June ’71, and that of Kyabra in ’72, but few serious disputes about the tenure of country arose between these early pioneers. A man had only to run a few head of stock on to a piece of unoccupied country to lay claim to it. His ‘tracks’ were on it and that was that, and before long the tracks of Thylungra and Kyabra stock fairly peppered the countryside.
While the drought prevailed Grandfather could not saddle himself with too much rental but he spread his ‘tracks’ liberally over an area of some two and a half million acres of mostly adjoining country divided, on his own maps, into holdings averaging 100,000 acres. On Thylungra’s eastern boundary he selected land for his sister Sarah Tully and her family and pictured them with a nice little homestead on Wathagurra Creek. Immediately north-east of this he had pegged a block of country which he named Rasmore for his elder sister Poor Mary Skeahan, her husband and boys. He had blocks in mind also for his youngest sister Anne and his brother Jerry, while Jim Scanlan expected soon to be joined on a neighbouring property, Springfield, by his brother Pat and his wife Bridget, Grandfather’s third sister.
John Costello meanwhile was laying wide territorial claims in all directions. Out along the Cooper, 120 miles west to the Diamantina and 150 miles upstream, he established a mighty pastoral empire of over eight and a half million acres on which no other white man but himself and his faithful head stockman Jack Farrar, after whom he had named the big Diamantina tributary Farrar’s Creek, had as yet set foot. He and Grandfather were seldom at home in these days, never at rest.
They rode with their lives in their hands, in peril of death from thirst or native spears, but their feats of endurance and bushmanship were known only to their immediate associates. Like most happenings in this remote corner, Costello’s remarkable trip with horses down the Strzelecki to Kapunda in ’67 received no publicity and the credit for opening this desert stock route has been generally given to Harry Redford who got through the same way with 1,000 head of stolen cattle from Bowen Downs near Tambo in 1870. John Costello, riding out among the Cooper channels, picked up the tracks of this large mob of cattle that had passed through towards the south-west and soon afterwards asked patrol officer Gilmour whether he knew anything of these enterprising drovers. Gilmour was puzzled for he had heard of no new settlers moving in that direction or of any squatter who would be likely to send stock that way in a drought season. His enquiries caused western graziers to investigate their runs and Grandfather, riding some country he had recently taken up on the Bulloo River was intrigued to discover, hidden in the mulga, an ingenious contraption for watering stock. A timbered well had been put down and above it constructed a stub tank with outlet pipe that operated on an old time patent whereby a horse worked the whim, bringing one bucket up as another went down. The water was fed into a line of rough timber troughing and everything had been put together completely without nails. At the same time the manager of Bowen Downs about 200 miles north-east of Thylungra discovered that 1,000 head of cattle and a 500-guinea white bull were missing from the big station herd. Redford had worked on the reasonable assumption that a mere thousand would hardly be missed from such a property and that the Bowen Downs brand was unlikely to be recognised 700 miles away in another state. Most Australians are now familiar with the story of Redford’s extraordinary manoeuvre, his sale of the cattle for 5,000 guineas, his subsequent arrest and return to Roma for trial with the incriminating white bull, and his acquittal by a sympathetic local jury in the face of overwhelming evidence. Much of the tale is incorporated in Rolf Boldrewood’s classic Robbery Under Arms, but the part played by the Kyabra Creek settlers in putting the police on the alert is not generally known. That men could have got away with such a large mob of cattle and were detected only by accident serves to illustrate the vast emptiness of this part of western Queensland when Grandfather and Costello were staking their Cooper claims.
‘And what are you wanting with all that country atall?’ Great-grandmother Costello protested. ‘Whatever can you be doing with it?’
‘Don’t you see, Mother,’ her son would point out, ‘we’re in here first and when the drought breaks everyone will be rushing out taking up the land. We have to secure it for all the people we promised to bring up.’
‘And what if they’ve sense enough in their heads to say “no” to yere kindness?’
‘Then we can sell the rights to someone else. There’ll be plenty after them when the drought breaks.’
And Great-grandmother Costello with a hopeless upward glance:
‘When the drought breaks indeed! And who’s to say we’ll not all be broken first?’
In fact many men would break before that four-year drought and the children at Thylungra and Kyabra would ask what this rain was like that everyone spoke about and prayed and waited for.
Sometimes in the stillness of night and early morning anxious ears would catch a distant rumble, a pulsating roar or a sound like rising wind. The sleeping homestead would start awake to find it was nothing but the patient throbbing of a didgeridoo, the persistent beating of a sand drum or some Aboriginal rainmaker whirling his bull roarer to rouse the sleeping spirits of water and life. Day and night dark voices from the dry river beds, and gullies threatened and cajoled the drought spirit and her children who rode the desolate land in whirling spirals of dust.
By this time big encampments of natives had gathered within a few miles of Thylungra and Kyabra homesteads to receive regular rations from the station people. This pleased the blacks who had thrown in their lot with the settlers but were still bound by strong ties of loyalty and relationship to the outside natives and at night bush and station blacks joined in communal singing and dancing. On important ceremonial occasions as many as 600 might forgather on the far side of the big Thylungra waterhole but how easily they might have wiped out this first little handful of settlers seems not then to have occurred to either blacks or whites.
Sometimes the lean black women, naked and shyly smiling, would bring their new-born babies to the white women to be named and admired in their neat bark coolamons. After a fight they would be called upon to patch up cuts, broken limbs and split heads and to treat terrible burns caused by the native habit of sleeping too close to the fire and rolling into the embers. They had effective and homely panaceas for all these things and in tending them grew to love the strange, wild people whose ways they would never understand.
Disturbed by evidence of cruel rites and occasional cannibalism, the family had resolved by degrees to instruct the more civilised station natives in the virtues of monogamy and the evils of their savage practices. Realising they could get nowhere with the tribal elders, they started with the young men who had come into the stations before the final stages of initiation and who, if the black man’s laws went against the grain with them, were willing enough to take the white man’s word for it that they were evil or of little account.
About this time a youth had appealed to Costello for permision to marry a girl forbidden him by tribal law. The white man called an enquiry, found that the girl had been ‘promised’ to one of the old men who already had two or three wives anyway. In vain the elders expounded, in their limited pidgin phrases, on the intricate and complicated marriage system that governed not only the Boontamurra but every tribe in the continent. It was not, they argued, simply the selfish will of the older men to claim all the young girls for themselves, as Costello declared. This girl, according to the marriage class system, was ‘mother’ to this boy, and how could it be moral in any law for a man to marry his mother?
‘Nonsense,’ said Costello, ‘how can a girl be mother to a boy older than herself? Be off with you now with your nonsense and leave the young people alone.’
> He performed the marriage himself, blessing them and tying their wrists together with a piece of string, confident he had struck a blow against foolish superstition and heathen nonsense.
Ignoring the whisperings and warnings of the station blacks, he gave permission for the couple to camp in the saddle shed near the homestead until the affair had blown over. Some nights later, startled by terrible cries, he went out with his lantern and hurrying to the saddle shed stumbled over the headless body of the faithful native boy Soldier who had helped him take the horses to Kapunda in ’67. Soldier had been sleeping across the doorway to protect the young people from attack and had kept the killers at bay while the bride and groom escaped.
In the morning Costello, grief-stricken and angry, rode off with Scrammy Jimmy to make enquiries at the outside camp.
The site, where 200 natives had been camped the day before, was deserted but Costello, determined to have the matter out, insisted on following the tracks until they petered out over stony ground. Some natives appeared on a ridge and while riding forward to question them Costello was hit on the side of the head by a well-aimed stone. As he fell, half stunned, from his saddle two blacks closed on him, but the agile Jimmy sprang from his saddle and split one man’s head clean through with a tomahawk. The other vanished into the scrub while the station boy lifted his master in front of his saddle and rode home.
No one seems to have doubted that the stone was intended to kill Costello or wondered why the blacks had not ambushed the two riders in the ridges and made a proper job of them with spears.
Grandfather came galloping from Thylungra to find his brother-in-law laid up with a wound that was to leave an impression on his skull for life. Kyabra was pandemonium, the blacks wailing and elaborating shrilly on rumours of a plot to attack the homestead at night, to spear the inhabitants and burn the place to the ground. Costello and Grandfather, familiar though they were with the blacks’ love of drama, knew that they must take steps to protect their families. Holes were made in the homestead walls to fit the muzzles of guns and the women were instructed in the use of firearms in case of trouble while the men were away. John Costello’s wife had always been a good shot, but Grandmother was more terrified of firearms than of wild blacks and proved a poor pupil.
The Kyabra excitement fizzled out, but as the drought persisted there was a feeling of tension and growing resentment among the bush blacks. They believed that defiance of the old law must inevitably bring its punishment and that everyone must suffer for the stupidity and wrongdoing of the few. At the same time they were becoming disillusioned about the settlers’ generosity and goodwill. Time was when they had distributed tobacco, tea, sugar and flour but they grew more and more niggardly with these good things and the blacks began to doubt the white man’s word that his store was empty until the teams came back.
Old Cobby warned his master repeatedly of this distrustful attitude but as the bad seasons persisted it became imperative for all hands to be out on the run shifting cattle from waterless areas.
Every night, while his master was away, the old man and his gin slept with their swags across the doorway of the house. Nothing stirred that they did not hear and the track of every strange native within a mile of the homestead was noted and reported.
Even during the day Cobby was never far from his mistress and her children so that Grandmother, although now devoted to the old fellow she had at first distrusted, sometimes became impatient of his being forever under her busy feet. She had now three boys, for a little son, Patrick Bernard, had been born in September 1870.
It was Cobby who one day gave warning of a menacing shadow at the kitchen door. Grandmother turned, flushed and surprised from the stove, to see clustering dark figures streaked with white ochre, bedecked with emu feathers.
‘Tea, chugar, tobacco! Gibbet!’
The teams were late back from Bourke again and supplies perilously low. Grandmother, on an inspiration, offered a pumpkin, and a few precious sweet potatoes, but the natives tossed them contemptuously aside and pointed to the containers along the kitchen shelves.
‘Tobacco!’
Helplessly the white woman opened empty tins.
The blacks came swarming in, overturning packing cases, jeering as Cobby let forth a blood-curdling yell and disappeared. With mounting impatience they scattered things about the floor, so engrossed that they did not see the old man return until he had thrust a rifle into his mistress’s hands.
‘Kill’m missus! Shoot’m dead fulla!’
As Grandmother raised the rifle uncertainly the blacks retreated to the door, and her six-year-old Michael who had taken in his father’s instructions shouted shrill advice.
‘Cock it, Mother, like Father showed you!’
He snatched the rifle, adjusted expertly, and handed it back. There was a deafening explosion, a bedlam of terrified shrieks and cries and a kitchen full of smoke.
‘It went off in my hands,’ Grandmother said helplessly. ‘Dear God, what have I done?’
‘Nothing,’ her eldest said in disappointed tones. ‘They all got away.’
Cobby leapt about gesticulating wildly after the retreating blacks.
‘Shoot’m again, Missus! Shoot’m again!’
‘Never again,’ Grandmother said. ‘Not as long as I live.’
It was the first and last time she ever used a rifle, though every night until Grandfather returned, Cobby insisted on firing at intervals through a hole in the wall.
Grandfather and Costello now increased precautions when leaving home. However stifling the night no one was allowed to sleep on the homestead verandahs. The doors of the house were always barricaded after dark, weapons kept ready to hand and dogs trained to keep watch for prowlers. Anxious for the sense of security they felt could only come with closer settlement they wrote urging friends and relatives to stake their faith in the good times soon coming to the sweeping plains of ‘the Cooper fall’.
The news that selections had been taken up in potentially rich ‘outside’ country was surprisingly quick to spread abroad and drought or no, by early ’71 although so many ‘inside’ settlers were still walking off their properties southern landseekers began to arrive in Queensland’s far west. Among the first of these were Jim Hammond and his family, Mrs Hammond being one of the Tully clan and a younger sister of Great-grandmother Costello. These people took up one of the tentatively selected blocks on a north-western section of Kyabra Creek which they named Tenham after the Hammond home in England. Then came Syd Prout, one of the two well-known pioneer brothers, to be escorted by Costello to a promising strip of country which he at once took up and called ‘Kangi’. Not many months later some half dozen landseeking parties from Victoria came to take up various blocks west of Kyabra Creek. These included the Tozers, Cottons, Bostocks and Frenches, not previously known to the family. These were soon followed by further Costello relatives named Roche, Sandy Abbey and Mike Tully with, close on their heels, two Irish clans named Doyle and Hackett who claimed some vague relationship and who had brought a herd of horses to selections Costello had taken up for them named Dalton and Castle Hackett.
Each party brought its stock, its waggons and equipment and it seemed that the lonely, silent land must quickly awaken to lively community life, but only meagre showers came to replenish the waterholes in ’71. No rivers had come down since early ’68. Horses, ranging far for feed and water, ran brumby among the Cooper channels and weak cattle perished in the mud of stagnant waterholes. Some of the settlers who had come with such brave hearts and high hopes decided to cut their losses and move out. The sight of their retreating waggons was a heart-breaking sight to the Durack and Costello families, now hand-watering their remaining stock from troughs fed by whip and bucket from the bed of the creek. There was little increase in these years for the cows were too weak to rear their drought-born calves and the Thylungra stock book from ’69 to the end of ’72 tells its own story:
April ’68
branded ca
lves on the Mobell
63
Oct. ’68
" " at Thylungra
20
Jan. ’69
female calves from Welford
25
Mar. "
branded
21
July "
"
25
Oct. "
store cattle
140
Dec. "
branded
36
May ’70
"
76
Aug. "
"
35
Dec. "
"
68
May ’71
"
71
Oct. "
"
89
Nov. "
store cattle
143
April ’72
branded
99
Oct. "
"
135
Total cattle on Thylungra at end of ’72 – losses 200 approx =
946
From this it will be seen that there were too few adult cattle to market during these years. In ’69 Grandfather had gone to Roma, 350 miles east, then the nearest town of any consequence, to purchase store cattle to build up the Thylungra herd, and in ’70 and ’71 Stumpy Michael, John Costello and Jim Scanlan had gone south to Goulburn, returning with further stock.
Journeys such as this had kept family members in New South Wales in touch with those in Queensland during these years of separation. They also gave the two unmarried boys a chance to court their sweethearts. Stumpy Michael’s romance with Kate McInnes was being firmly aided and abetted by his sister Anne who, fearful that they might lose touch and become otherwise attached, kept up a vigorous correspondence constantly informing brother and friend of the other’s activities and splendid character. Kate kept all Anne’s letters with loving care and handed them down to her family so that we are able to follow Stumpy Michael’s activities over this period in some detail. In May ’72 Anne wrote from Gullen, near Goulburn: