by Mary Durack
But poor Redgrave was not spared his child; nor did he sell his interest in the mine. Grandfather, moved by his loneliness and grief, made arrangements for him to come to Thylungra with one of the northbound parties. Not long afterwards we find him figuring as storekeeper and horsebreaker on the Thylungra books.
15
CLOSER SETTLEMENT
The years 1874 to 1875. Community life on Cooper’s Creek. Sale of land rights brings many settlers. Father Dunham visits his outback flock. Trouble with the blacks. Death of young Maloney on Wombinderry. The Native Police Force. Murder of Welford on Welford Downs. Patsy Durack’s opposition to Police. P. Durack now a J.P.
The association of the Cooper people over the next decade would fill a volume in itself. Robustly independent though they were in having come to the wilderness at all, they were interdependent in a typically Irish way. I expect every station kept a tally similar to Grandfather’s daybook for Thylungra which reveals the wholesale lendings and borrowings that went on all the time. Grandfather, like the rest, was both a borrower and a lender, though in these early years he was tiding many families over until they could pay their own way from sale of stock. For some years he paid rent on country for various relatives, settled their store bills and even wrote cheques for their stockmen’s wages. Page after page of entries, scratched over as the debts were settled or cancelled, run like this:
Lent to Tozer on the 18th Sept. ’73 70 lbs flour and 270 lbs salt.
Got from Tozer by brother Michael on his way down to Wilcannia 12 lbs flour and 7 pints of sugar. Also Tozer owes me £5.
Coming home from Tenham I got 3 lbs flour, one box matches, 1 lb tobacco, a tin of mustard and 22 lbs rice off Edward Hammond.
Jim Hammond owed me £3 which I paid for him to Rev. Father Dunham in Roma.
94 lbs of flour from Jim Scanlan, Springfield. Returned by Young.
Borrowed from P. Tully, Wathagurra: 6 lbs tea, 66 lbs sugar and 142 lbs salt. Pat wants the bags back.
Lent to Kyabra in May, fetched by Michael Costello, 200 lbs flour, 50 Ibs salt, 14 lbs tea.
Nov. ’74. Paid for P. Tully for rent on country, for the four cows from Reed @ £4 each, for the duty on cattle and horses coming from New South Wales, also for goods from Wilcannia £395. To be paid back after first stock returns.
Oct. ’74. P. Hackett has now payed everything which I have lent to him up to date only the tea and sugar still dew.
Supposed to be coming to me from D. Skeahan after settling his Murphy account and price of cattle sold in Sydney. Also Fine on Rasmore country—Expect back—as have now paid this twice for D. S. £5. 5. 0 each time. Also D. Skeahan owes John Horigan £5 borrowed from him on road to Charleville for to give to Father Galagher.
Most of this was paid back in cash or kind and noted with complicated detail. Dinny Skeahan, Poor Mary’s husband, appears to have been the only unreliable borrower. At last, no doubt weary of his long-range promises of settlement, Grandfather marked the Skeahan entries either ‘Lent to be forgotten’ or ‘Lent to be paid back’.
When cash or labour was short they worked for each other. It is a common thing in the Thylungra daybook to find Pat Tully sometimes owing wages to one of the Duracks and the Duracks sometimes owing wages to him. They drove each other’s stock to market, sold horses for each other and purchased anniversary presents for each other’s wives. Everyone’s life appears to have been an open book to the community but they were bound by a strict code of family loyalty. The black sheep was protected and defended by the flock and his shortcomings kept as far as possible from outsiders, for a single bad reputation was a blot upon the name. Each kept his private tally of debts paid on another’s behalf, and could hound him until he settled up if he liked, but beyond the family circle no one would know of it. To the outside world every member must appear solvent, trustworthy, and living in domestic bliss. They were as tribal as the Aborigines. Inevitably there were rows and occasional flare-ups of jealous antagonism, but the only record of long-range feuding was between the Hammonds of Tenham and the Scanlans of Springfield, who rather than have a common boundary ran a two-mile strip between their runs. On this no-man’s-land someone eventually ran up a shanty pub which later became a coaching stage.
In these days of motor-cars, party lines and pedal transmitters people somehow visit each other less than when a call meant harnessing a buggy or saddling a horse. They seemed quite indifferent to distances or to the heat and dust of long journeys.
Although 1874 and ’75 were light seasons and the Thylungra stock book shows a disappointing branding of only 332 calves, the general feeling of optimism is indicated by the purchase of 525 store cows at £2,488. The tide of depression in Queensland had turned. All over the new colony people were drifting back to the land and pushing out into the back country right into the furthermost south-west corner over to the Diamantina and down to the Barcoo. Nappamerri Station had now been established by the Conrick family whose stock grazed over the place where Burke and Wills had perished in ’62. The country Grandfather had taken up on Cooper’s Creek he sold in ’74 to a Victorian investor for £5,000. John Costello’s big, lightly stocked runs on the Cooper, Farrar’s Creek and the Diamantina were all snapped up within two years of the breaking of the drought. Keerongoola, on a Cooper tributary, had been bought by John Hope of South Australia; Whichello, with its splendid six-mile waterhole, and Morney Plains on the Diamantina by Collins Brothers. The stations Gilppie and Tanbar, below Windorah, had gone to Armitage and Gillately, Monkira to Debney and Mooraberrie to Coman Brothers of New South Wales. Daru and Mt Leonard, Connemara and Clastnamuck were all sold, Congabulla given to De Burgh Persse, another tract of land on Farrar’s Creek to Mike Tully and Sandy Abbey, relatives of Great-grandmother Costello and Pat Tully of Wathagurra, who shortly afterwards sold the land for a good price and returned to Goulburn. Thomas Webber took over Milka Lake near the South Australian border and Currawilla was given to John Costello’s faithful head stockman Jack Farrar for whom he had named the creek on which it was established.
Of the Costello country there soon remained only the huge holding he had named Davenport Downs adjoining Monkira on the Diamantina which was soon afterwards purchased by Cobb and Co. whose coach service had pushed from New South Wales into Queensland after the Gympie gold strike in ’69 and was now running between Bourke, Roma and the east coast. This company already owned Cunnamulla Station on the Cuttaburra 120 miles north of the border and saw further possibilities for horse raising on the Diamantina.
Members of the family, on their visits to Roma, had already become acquainted with a stalwart English parish priest named Father Dunham who, being informed of the increasing number of his flock around the Cooper, decided to pay them a visit. He was no bushman and had already caused much anxiety by getting himself lost in the vicinity of Roma, so he brought with him an experienced companion named Noonan.
No prince or potentate could have been accorded a more royal welcome than this pioneer clergyman who had braved the lonely track out west. Cynics were later heard to remark that any minister undertaking such a journey must be either very devoted to the Gospel or very fond of money and in truth Father Dunham had hoped to combine the spiritual consolation of his far-flung flock with the furtherance of his dearest wish—the building of a church in Roma.
Sunday best, long packed away, was taken from tin trunks. Buggies were polished and harnessed and the Cooper’s Creek community bore down on Thylungra to pay its respects and press invitations on the distinguished visitor.
When all were assembled young Michael, my father, nine years old, hair sleekly brushed from a centre parting, came forward nervously to read Mr Redgrave’s carefully prepared address.
Children mustered for christening included baby Ambrose, the first-born of Michael and Kate, Sarah Tully’s new-born Annie Amy Forde, three young Costellos, Grandmother’s Thylungra-born offspring Pat and Mary, and Poor Mary Skeahan’s seventh and fourth surviving son, baby Jerry, born
at Thylungra not long before.
In later years my Uncle Pat claimed the distinction (in which he was not alone) of having inspired Banjo Paterson’s, ballad ‘The Bush Christening’ and would quote the lines with relish:
He was none of your dolts, he had seen them brand colts,
And it seemed to his young understanding,
If a man in the frock made him one of the flock
It must mean something very like branding…
He recalled being ushered up to the improvised baptismal font where the awesome stranger stood in outlandish regalia, amid an unusually hushed gathering of relatives and friends. In a flash he was through the door and across the yard, to the protection of the blacks’ camp. Pumpkin pushed the terrified child into his humpy and stood guard until the boy was at last coaxed forth with many reassurances and promises of rich reward.
So charmed were the settlers with this genial and cultured priest that they became competitive in their efforts on his behalf. John Costello presented him with a 100,000-acre holding, Dunham Towers, north of Davenport Downs on the Diamantina, which Grandfather and his brothers undertook to stock and others to equip with homestead and yards.
Father Dunham left Noonan in charge of the estate and set off back to Roma in high delight. Before long, however, the ‘natural increase’ of the ‘holy herd’, as it was called, became nothing short of miraculous, and so often were the cows of neighbouring stations seen running with calves that bore the Dunham Towers’ brand that the settlers rose in protest. Noonan made counter-accusations declaring that he was doing no more than protect the interests of Holy Church against black-hearted marauders.
The outcome was a stiff letter from the Archbishop of the Diocese suggesting to his minister that the roles of property owner and parish priest were incompatible.
The matter as patched up when John Costello again took over Dunham Towers, sold it to a more satisfactory neighbour and presented Father Dunham with the cheque. No grudge was borne on either side. The priest continued his annual visit and as guide, philosopher and friend was honoured and well loved, his name to be immortalised in a river which Stumpy Michael later discovered in far-off Kimberley.
But this long-hoped-for closer settlement had another side. The blacks, finding their lands and waters dwindling with every influx of newcomers, took to the wholesale killing of stock—at first for what they considered their rightful compensation, later, as bitterness and misunderstanding spread, with deliberate wantonness.
Some of the early opal prospectors were responsible for much trouble and misunderstanding with the blacks. A man, whose name is still remembered in the district, got one native after another helping him with the promise of tucker and tobacco in exchange for opals. If the black produced a stone and demanded payment he would tell him to be off and shoot him in the back as he went.
What wonder that the white men’s herds became scapegoats for the bewildered rage of the tribespeople? Tongues and tails were hacked from living animals, horses hamstrung, maimed and left to die. Every traveller brought rumours of increasing trouble and many settlers now openly declared that Western Queensland could only be habitable for whites when the last of the blacks had been killed out—‘by bullet or by bait’.
The first white man killed by the blacks in these parts was a young stockman named Maloney at Wombinderry on the northern boundary of Jim Scanlan’s Springfield. John Costello had shown the Wombinderry block to two men named Reid and Fraser who stocked the run with horses and left Maloney and an older man named Silletor in charge while they returned to New South Wales for further stock. Young Maloney, bored to distraction with life in this lonely outpost, made friends with the local blacks and then, hoping to impress and astonish them with his ‘white man magic’, began firing around them from behind trees. They took his teasing in good enough part until one day he playfully shot one of their dogs.
‘You shouldn’t of done that,’ Silletor told him. ‘The niggers are fond of them dogs.’
‘That wasn’t no dog,’ Maloney replied. ‘It was a mangy dingo cur.’
He then went off to fish by the river and when, a few hours later, his mate went to call him he had vanished. Some days after when Jack Farrar rode across from Kyabra to see how the two men were getting on he found Silletor almost demented with fear and loneliness, declaring that the blacks had kidnapped his mate.
‘If he’s missing they’ll have killed him,’ Farrar said.
When Farrar got Silletor back to Kyabra, Costello at once sent word to the newly proclaimed town of Thargomindah about 120 miles south where Inspector Gilmour was then stationed with a contingent of native police. This force, consisting, except for officers in charge, entirely of Aborigines, trained, smartly uniformed and well mounted, was at first supposed to patrol the countryside, have parley with encampments of bush natives, try to explain the white man’s laws and arrest and imprison ringleaders of bad crimes, and as such it had been hailed as a humane and timely move to restore peace and security to the community.
Gilmour rode out with his troopers and quickly had the mystery solved. The body of Maloney, or what remained of it, weighted down with heavy stones, was now partly revealed by the receding level of the waterhole. Jim Scanlan, who knew young Maloney’s family in Ireland, had come with the party from Springfield, equipped with a shroud, blessed candles and a bottle of holy water so that he could at least write home that the lad had been buried with all possible ceremony.
There were, however, no questions asked of the blacks as to who had committed the crime or why. No arrests were made and the bodies of those shot around a camp at dawn were left to the ravages of wild dogs and birds of prey.
When news of the affair reached Thylungra, Grandfather rode after the police party in a towering rage, demanding an explanation of their policy.
‘What kind of a law is it that will train blacks to murder their own countrymen?’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ he was informed. ‘We never recruit blacks for service in their own district. A Kalkadoon will shoot a Boontamurra at the drop of a hat, and vice versa. They’ve been at each other’s throats for generations.’
Whether or not they ever made an honest attempt to reason with the now totally unpredictable tribespeople, it was soon clear to all that the black troopers rode to kill—to shatter the old tribes, the Boontamurra, the Pita-Pita, the Murragon, the Waker-di, the Ngoa, the Murrawarri and the Kalkadoon, to leave men, women and children dead and dying on the plains, in the gullies and river beds.
Not long after the death of Maloney a terrified native stockboy rode into Thylungra with news of the killing of Welford, the young Englishman who had been the family’s first neighbour on Kyabra Creek and whose property, Welford Downs, adjoined their northern boundary. Grandfather heard with deep distress how his friend had been teaching a native, newly arrived from another district, to use an adze, when the boy took up a heavy tool and brought it down on his master’s head. The murderer had then seized a firearm, saddled a horse and ridden off.
Fearful of being implicated in the crime, the station natives had hidden the body in a tree, but Welford’s head stockman had galloped with news of the murder into Charleville where a contingent of black police had recently been stationed.
Grandfather at once sent Pumpkin and Willie to Welford Downs to advise all natives in the vicinity to gather at Thylungra where they would be under his protection. The blacks, however, with only a few exceptions, now dared trust nobody and suspecting a plot to trap them at Thylungra made off into the surrounding bush. Only a handful who had sought the refuge offered escaped the raid that followed. Faithful station natives and bush blacks perished together, among them one Ngurrun, the Emu man, a kindly giant of the Boontamurra who could run down kangaroos. Years later when the drifting sand of the plains uncovered the bones of the massacred blacks, some among them were found to be of phenomenal size. The bone of a man’s forearm brought into Thylungra was the size of an ordinary man’s entire arm.
All through the outback the hunted natives grew wary and shrewd, moving like shadows over the land. For years the black police would ride, until the country could at last be declared safe from menace—safe and quiet and the songs of dreaming stilled for all time. The police would earn the praise and thanks of the settlers for their work and a few would die in the cause of duty.
Constable Urquart’s ballad, telling of the vengeance wrought upon the Kalkadoons after the death of his friend Powell some time later, is still remembered by old hands in the districts he rode:
Swiftly the messenger had sped
O’er the rough mountain tracks,
To tell the news, our friend was dead.
Killed by the ruthless blacks…
And one spake out in deep, stern tones,
And raised his hand on high,
‘For every one of these poor bones
A Kalkadoon shall die…’
See how the wretched traitors fly,
Smitten with abject fear,
They dare not stop to fight or die,
And soon the field is clear.
Unless just dotted here and there
A something on the ground,
A something black with matted hair
Lies without life or sound…
From this time on Grandfather’s half-humorous contempt of the police grew to a thoroughly Irish antipathy that often caused his family keen embarrassment.
‘I’d sooner have an outlaw put his feet under my table,’ he would say when the patrol came on its rounds, ‘than any of that murthering gang. They’ll be getting no thanks out of me for their protection.’
Not many, even among his own relatives, saw eye to eye with him on this score and demanded whether he would see all their stock killed and their families constantly imperilled for his principles.
‘Principles be damned,’ he thundered, ‘it’s common sense. We’ll all be singing out for labour in a few years and not a mother’s son of them left alive. And where would any of us Christians be today if it wasn’t for the help we’ve had from your heathen blacks?’