by Mary Durack
My dear Kate,
Michael told me the day before he went away to write to you. He did not start on Tuesday as Mr Costello was not ready, but they started early on Wednesday morning. He said that he was going to write to you from ‘the Darling’. Will you be so good as to write to me when you get this letter and tell me how they are getting on, for he said that he would not have time to write but the one letter and that should be to you…
Mother sends love and hopes to have the pleasure of embracing you as a Daughter ’ere long. I hope dear when you have your photo taken you will send me one and I will send you mine…
Your sincere friend
Annie A. Durack.
In June the same year Anne wrote flutteringly of her own romance:
I am sure you have heard of my flight to Sydney long before this. So now you see I am out of Michael’s road and the sooner he goes off the hooks the better. He has not heard the news yet.
My dear Kate I did not think when I last wrote to you that I would be married so soon. Mr Redgrave came to Goulburn to see me and he would not go back without a companion so it was all done in a hurry—the best way. So here I am, one of the happiest little wives in the world. It is no use me trying to praise him dear Kate for I could not do him justice. I will send you his portrait and my own as soon as we have them taken.
Dear Kate you must write and tell me how you are all getting on and if you have heard from that old man of yours lately. You know you must not forget him while he is away for I am certain that he will make a kind good husband since he is a good fond brother. My dear Kate I could not tell you how happy I am. The more I see of my husband the more I love him for I am now beginning to know him better and can see that he is a fine and a noble hearted fellow… He has been prospecting this long time for Merchants in Sydney and if he finds anything he has as much interest in it as they and they find him the money to work it. We are beginning with but very little, so you see dear, it was not for riches that I married…
By December a forlorn note was creeping into Anne’s letters to her friend:
…Well dear I am almost tired of Sydney and begin to long for a ride. It is now six months since I was on a horse so you will understand how I feel. I would like the city better if Mr Redgrave’s business did not take him so much away, but think it will be soon all done, for I see by the paper today that he has found something very rich. Have you heard from my darling brother lately? I have had but the one letter from him since I came to Sydney but I had last night a letter dated Nov. 5th from Miss Hammond of Tenham, then staying at Thylungra. They were all well out there and some signs of rain when she wrote. My brother Jerry was starting for Goulburn next morning so she said, so I think he must be home by this time. She also said that Michael was away at the time at Charleville on business…
Young ‘Galway Jerry’, now aged nineteen, had gone north to Thylungra a year before, leaving his mother and little niece, Mary Anne Bennet, with Darby’s family at Boorowa, and not long afterwards the child’s father had forthrightly settled the much-vexed question of her upbringing. Two of Darby’s younger children, the only witnesses of the episode, told of an important looking gentleman in a frock-coat and top hat who had alighted from a carriage, swooped upon the little girl and vanished with her in a cloud of dust. Great-grandmother Bridget, having no legal claims to the child, was without redress and inconsolable when further tragedies were heaped upon her. Poor Mary Skeahan, still struggling at Lambing Flat while Dinny sank shaft after shaft on the Adelong, lost yet another little boy, leaving her, in ’72, with only three out of six sons. Soon after this came the sudden death of Bridget Scanlan, Great-grandmother’s fourth child, from what was described as ‘a chest complaint’ such as had taken her sister Margaret Bennet some years before. Great-grandmother had gone at once to the Scanlan selection outside Goulburn to help big Pat with his four motherless children.
Soon after this Darby Durack, while hacking away at the relentless scrub on his Boorowa selection, was smitten with sunstroke and died at the age of fifty-three. After all his years of struggle he had little or nothing to leave his widow and family of thirteen sons and daughters. The all-pervading drought had closed in around the Castlereagh and for over two years the elder boys had been keeping their few remaining sheep alive on agistment, trailing them around the countryside in search of water and grass. After their father’s death they gave up their fruitless battle, sold their stock and took on droving and carrying contracts to support the family.
Sarah and Pat Tully, now both eager enough to join their relatives in the north, could not face the expense of such a move and Grandfather, while the drought persisted, was in no position to finance them. In fact the family at that time, with a mounting overdraft, was almost as poor as it had ever been. At Thylungra living expenses were cut to bedrock. Scarcely any clothing was bought. Grandmother made shirts from calico and patched the stockmen’s moleskins with canvas from old tent flies. Boots were home-made from kangaroo skin and goat hides, with elastic let into the sides.
Though their men might rove abroad the women remained locked in their forgotten world, bearing and rearing their children, maintaining the home base for their men. Fashions passed them by, but twice a year with the station stores they received mail and bundles of papers from the outside world. Grandmother read no more than the births, deaths and marriages of the Goulburn district and snippets of church news, but Mary Costello at Kyabra read everything systematically, one paper a day from first to last, discussing the pros, cons and possible outcome of world issues long before resolved.
‘I knew it,’ she said on a visit to Thylungra in the middle of ’71, ‘it’s come to war between Prussia and France just as I predicted.’
‘I told you about that when I got back from Roma three months ago,’ her husband said. ‘It’s probably blown over by now.’
‘Never mind,’ his wife replied, ‘as far as I’m concerned it started last week, when I got up to it in the papers.’
‘Rain come soon now,’ the blacks said when in November ’72 the cockatoos, swifts and martins were seen to be flying low again and the big grass spiders in the lower branches of the mulga began fortifying their webs.
Then came a rumble of thunder in the afternoon. Clouds from the north, indigo dark, scudded before a driving wind; great drops flattened the curling edges of the cracked, parched soil and washed the salt pans clean of the sickening phantoms of mirage. A wild triumphant chanting rose from the native camps with shrieks of excited terror when blazing forks of lightning shattered the sky and splintered a tree on the storm-lashed plain.
Before the homestead area was fairly wet storms in the upper reaches of the Thompson and Barcoo sent a wall of water racing south-west down the shallow rivercourse, swirling in a thousand tributaries. A breathless rider came in from stock shifting around the junction of the big river and Kyabra Creek.
‘The Cooper’s coming!’
With the flood roar already in their ears men rushed to saddle horses and move stock to higher ground, up into the ridges and sandhills. Kyabra Creek came down like thunder with rain swirling to meet it through gullies, cracks and breakaways. Frogs roused from their long torpor in the hard-baked river mud and rifts in the drought-cracked plains gave voice in deafening chorus with the shrill, returning birds.
Soon the creek was lost in an inland sea where the earth buildings seemed to float like little Noah’s Arks. A few outhouses, newly built, came down like stacks of cards, but the homestead stood firm as the water rose, frighteningly, to the window ledges and subsided slowly to the confines of the creek bed.
All had spirit now to face the discomforts of the ‘wet’—the blowflies that came in droning battalions with the new green grass to infest every crease and cranny of the salt meat slabs, the small flies that carried infection from the blacks’ to the children’s eyes, the mildew that ruined stacks of clothing overnight, the fungi that spread over the wet timber of yards and buildings, the mud that clott
ed every boot and every hoof, the foot-rot that infested the few sheep and goats in the paddock.
The sea of water left behind a rising sea of sweet clover and grass—Flinders and spider-couch, Mitchell, wild sorghum, cane, pepper and button grass. Then came the wildflowers, brightening the drab plains with vivid splashes of colour. Melons, pumpkins and snake beans sprang to life in Grandfather’s kitchen garden and he watched them, rejoicing and calculating the harvest. One morning he brought his wife to see how quickly the fruit was maturing, but the garden had vanished overnight with a strip of land half a mile wide swathed clean as though from the scythe of a giant reaper. Locusts had bred in the warm, damp soil, thriving on the new, green grass until the young hoppers had been strong enough to begin their forward march. Within a few days their wings had grown and they were flying in dense clouds across the sun, crackling like a bush fire as they stripped trees and shrubs to gaunt skeletal shapes.
Grandfather ploughed out through slosh and bog to repair yards that had been damaged or washed away. Climbing the sand dunes he surveyed the receding flood, saw drowned stock hung up in the branches of the trees or eddying with driftwood in swiftly running channels, his relief at the breaking drought mingled with apprehension of this land of extremes. Perhaps someday, somewhere, he would find surer, kinder country, but meantime he must secure himself here in the best way he knew, by spreading his net as far as human energy and the law of the land would permit. From the blacks and his own observations he had formed a theory of seasonal cycles on which he calculated that western Queensland was now due for a succession of good years. He was determined to run a race with the next drought.
‘Sooner or later we’ll all have to walk out of this country,’ the pessimists predicted.
‘When I walk out,’ said Grandfather, ‘I go in a four-in-hand, and I go a rich man. So help me God.’
14
TURN OF THE TIDE
The years 1873 to 1874. First sale of Thylungra cattle at Wilcannia. The marriage of ‘Stumpy’ Michael Durack and Catherine McInnes. The bride and groom return to western Queensland with Great-grandmother Bridget Durack and an Irish tutor, Mr John Healy. Life at Thylungra. Sale of land on Cooper’s Creek. Blocks taken up by Duracks and Costello. Establishment of Charleville. The Tullys and Skeahans arrive in western Queensland. Death of Anne Redgrave and her child.
In April ’73 Anne Redgrave wrote to her friend Kate McInnes:
Well my dear, it was a disappointment again about the mine but Mr Redgrave has got a machine to go out to Bumbo now so I will hope they will succeed after all their trouble and expense. I feel dreadfully lonely as I must still stay in Sydney. If he is to be long away I might go back to Goulburn and get into business of some sort for I am tired of waiting and doing nothing.
I had a letter from Patsy and one from Michael written on the 28th February and they were soon to start on the road with cattle which they tell me are rolling fat since the drought broke and should fetch a good price. I suppose you have heard of the dreadful floods they had out there. They all had a very narrow escape. Dear Michael and some other men were nine days on a sand hill, stranded on the way back from Charleville where there is a postal and lands office since last year so they do not have to ride so far as Tambo now. They got food by swimming three miles to a house for it. Fortunately Michael is a strong swimmer and does not mind tackling the flood except for some channels that are death traps they say. Patsy reckons the flood waters covered eighty miles and out on the open plains was six and ten feet deep measured on the tree trunks. When the river came down a second time stronger than the first Michael went to help a neighbour, a Mr Tozer, gather in his cattle and he and four others were five days cut off eating anything they could catch in the flood. Bush rats, snakes and frogs are very good, he tells me, if you are hungry enough. Do I see you shudder my dear Kate? There is worse even than this that they have eaten out there but I will spare your feelings.
My brother Jerry who started for Goulburn in November did not reach home until the 28th February after a good deal of swimming, for the flood caught him up also. I will write when I hear when you might expect to see Michael again…
In June of the same year Anne reports to her friend of a letter from her brother Michael from Wilcannia, 500 miles south of Thylungra, where he had sold 200 fat cattle at £8 a head. She mentions also that her brother Patsy meanwhile had been on a 600-mile jaunt to Brisbane to interview the Colonial Treasurer about land matters and had there sold a lease he had taken up ‘to a young gentleman from Melbourne’ for £500. He was to return by Roma, 350 miles from Thylungra, with a mob of store cattle for fattening on the now incomparable Cooper pastures.
When do you expect my dear brother down? [Anne asks her friend]. I hope you have not written to put him off coming down at Christmas as he planned. I shall be very angry if you do. I see what you are up to my lady! You don’t want the hot weather for your wedding! Do not put it off dear Kate, for my poor old Mother’s sake. I am sure it would break her heart if he does not come at Christmas. I do believe that all that keeps her alive is the thought of his coming then. You know she is by herself now at Scanlan’s for my sister Sarah is starting to the Adelong this week, and my sister Mary is up near Lambing Flat. I often cry when I think how dreadfully lonely she must be. Write him immediately dearest Kate and say you will be ready and willing when he comes. Things are improving out there now and the brothers are partners in everything. My brother Patsy has taken up some property to which Mr Redgrave and I may go soon when he is through with this mining job. Patsy has called the property Bunginderry and has put some stock on it for us which he has branded with an ‘R’. It is very likely we would be going out with you and that we will be up there together my dear sister. I wish from my heart it may be so.
Stumpy Michael, now twenty-seven years old, with his handsome, dark-bearded face and quiet manner, had been too diffident to make verbal proposal to the young lady his sister had long since picked out for him. Even his letters had been few and far between for he was, he insisted, ‘a poor fist with the pen’. His request for Kate’s hand he had contrived to write on the banks of the Darling so that the address might serve also as a term of endearment that might otherwise have seemed presumptuous. Truth to tell, he had been somewhat in awe of his sister’s friend, an accomplished girl who was not only well versed in classical literature but who played the piano with distinction and produced faithful copies of seascapes which hung, elaborately framed, in the McInnes home at Tarlo River. Daughter of the inland, she had a great love for the sea, a throwback, her people said, to her seafaring Scottish ancestors from the Isle of Skye. She had little natural taste for rough bush life and the unlettered conversation of outback folk but Stumpy Michael had been her hero since their childhood days and Anne’s earnest plea that she should not delay his coming had proved unnecessary. He reached Goulburn after all in September and they were married early in October by Father Michael Slattery in the Goulburn Cathedral, as a cutting from the Goulburn Herald makes ponderous note:
Mr Michael Durack, formerly of this district, now of Cooper’s Creek, Western Queensland, has contracted marriage with an amiable and respectably connected young lady to whom he has been long attached—Miss Catherine McInnes. This lady’s father, Angus McInnes Esq., originally of Inverness, Scotland, is an old and respected resident of the Tarlo River, Middle Arm, N.S.W. His mother was a McLeod, niece of Captain Neil McLeod of the McLeods of Gesto, an ancient family, not unknown to history and able to prove a pedigree extending back into remote centuries…
Great-grandmother Bridget was now free to join her family in Queensland, for Pat Scanlan, widower of her daughter Bridget for whose four children she had been caring, had recently married another Irish girl named Mary O’Keefe. All Great-grandmother’s children were now in the Cooper’s Creek district except Anne Redgrave, then with her mining husband in Moruya, about 200 miles south of Sydney. Anne was then expecting a child and had not after all been able to get to the
wedding she had dreamed of for so long but the bride and groom made a hurried trip to visit her before setting off from Goulburn on their long journey north. A sad little letter that caught her up on the road was the last Kate was ever to receive from her devoted friend:
I cannot tell you how lonely and wretched I feel since I got your letter to say you were starting next day. I had made up my mind to start for Goulburn next Monday to see you all before you left and stop until after my trouble would be over, but it would be no use going now that you are all gone. Do you think that Mother is quite willing to go? 1 wish now that I had decided for her to stay with me, for I am so very lonely. I hope and trust we will be able to follow you out there soon…Write frequently while you are on the roads. I send you my portrait at last but was not at my best when it was done and should have waited except that if all should not go well for me I would like you to have a reminder for your prayers.
Your fond sister,
Anne.
The honeymoon of Stumpy Michael and his Kate was unorthodox to say the least. They had set out from Goulburn about two weeks after the wedding, Stumpy Michael, his bride and old mother travelling in a covered waggon packed with wedding presents and furniture. In a smaller waggon with the camp cook went an elderly Irishman by the name of John Healy who had at Grandfather’s request been selected by friends in Ireland as tutor for the children at Thylungra. On what grounds this unlikely choice had been made other than his claim to have ‘studied for the priesthood’, was something of a mystery but there he was and having paid his fare from Kilkenny there seemed no option but to bring him out to Cooper’s Creek. Considerably more than the years he owned and as broad as he was long, Mr Healy, irascible, talkative and devout, peered like some quaint bullfrog from behind thick-lensed spectacles at the Australian scene that he did not hesitate to declare was the devil’s making. To the memorable disgust of his travelling companion, when not lecturing on the iniquities of local behaviour and customs, berating the heat, the dust, the bumps, the flies and the unholy landscape, Mr Healy told his beads aloud all the way to Cooper’s Creek.