by Mary Durack
Despite his wife’s entreaties, he now refused to take any form of lethal weapon on his long, solitary rides.
Just over forty and in the prime of life, Grandfather was a dynamo of restless energy. He would return from registering country, purchasing or delivering stock, and plunge straight back into the station activities. Sometimes he would dismount at the yard where they were branding cattle and would enter into the job before going to the house to greet the family or have a cup of tea. He had no patience with what he called ‘lommicking about’ or ‘going to slape on the job’. Even the blacks moved briskly on Thylungra, for paternal though he was, Boonari’s quick impatience was something to look out for. It is said that he once stamped an indelible 7PD brand on a slow-moving black rump, a distinguishing mark that the boy bore proudly to the day of his death!
Another time he was incensed at a stockman’s cutting out cattle in the blistering noonday heat.
‘Be arl the goats in Kerry,’ he shouted to McCaully, ‘what’s that kippenhead think he’s doing?’
‘I told him he was a fool,’ the Scot complained, ‘but there’s no stopping the mon.’
‘Isn’t there at all now,’ Grandfather fumed, and riding over to the importunate stockman laid him out with a single blow of his stirrup iron.
Created JP for the district from ’74, he assumed certain magisterial duties and settled local arguments with a despatch and logic that was seldom questioned. One of his methods of resolving differences was to light a fire between the disputing parties, who, at a word from the umpire (usually himself), would begin a pantomime of leaping and thrusting across the flames. The first to touch his opponent’s nose with his hand was acclaimed the winner.
At one time a difference arose between Grandfather and Duncan McCaully over the naming of a hill. The Scot plumped for ‘Mt Aberdeen’, the Irishman for ‘Mt Ortheven’ but when Mr Healy decided in Grandfather’s favour McCaully insisted on another contest with a Scottish referee. This time Grandfather made sure that his ‘tap’ on the nose was conclusive enough to draw blood and Mt Ortheven stands today in testimony of his sprightliness.
Only once, as far as memory goes, was his verdict seriously challenged, and this when, having condemned a fencing job as sub-standard, he was taken to court in Charleville. Grandfather, owing to a recent tirade against the force, stood none too well at the time with the local magistrate, which may or may not have had something to do with the decision. When judgement was given in favour of the contractor he gave vent to his indignation with an eloquence that went down in local history.
‘Is it like the blacks ye would be having us, propping up bark humpies and the like for to be destroyed in a puff of wind? What’s become of the country atall with everything done slipshod and falling down all roads?’
Grandmother, hating fuss, tugged imploringly at his coat tails, but he refused to be quietened.
‘What ails ye, woman? What sort of a JP is it atall that can’t be condemning a miserable fence?’
16
EYE WITNESS
The years 1875 to 1877. Prosperity and population come to Cooper’s Creek. Arrival of Pat Scanlan and his family, Darby Durack’s sons and others. Account of Thylungra personalities given by an old drover. Letters from John W. Durack and Jeremiah ‘Dermot’ Durack telling of these times. Folk-songs of the Cooper.
Here now were the times that are legend on Cooper’s Creek. Good seasons, boom prices for cattle and horses and ready sales for rights of the country they had taken up brought quick prosperity to the pioneer settlers and encouraged to the district some of the keenest stock dealers and best horsemen in Australia. The combined Thylungra and Galway herds stood at no more than 6,000 in ’76 and cattle sales totalled £3,200. The sale of sixty well-bred horses at an average of £35 a head brought in another £2,050 and land rights a further £4,500. By ’77 the two stations reckoned between them 10,000 cattle. On 1,000 head marketed they netted about £7,500, made £3,000 on horses and £5,000 on land rights. Debts were long since paid off and the family balance sheet began to weigh well on the credit side.
From this time into the eighties the Thylungra books tally an average of fifteen white stockmen, including drovers, six to eight fencing, building and carrying contractors and a married couple as cook and handyman. The couples came and went in more or less six-monthly succession, the stockmen and contractors changed about, but old Mr Healy, the tutor, stuck fast.
In ’76 Pat Scanlan, with his second wife, her two children, one born at Parkes on the way north, and the four children of his first marriage with Grandfather’s sister Bridget, came north and made their headquarters with Jim and Susan Scanlan at Springfield. For a few years, however, Pat hired out his great strength for contracting jobs and was as often as not employed on Thylungra.
About the same time an English couple named Curtis with a grown family of two boys and two girls, formerly well-to-do squatters who had fallen on hard times in Victoria, came to make a fresh start in western Queensland. Grandfather, always pleased to have contact with people of refinement and education, started them off on a small adjoining block which he named Curta and helped them put up a house no more than a mile from his own. Planning to build up capital for a bigger property, the Curtis boys worked most of the time on Thylungra and Mrs Curtis and her girls were regarded as part of the family community.
The brothers Michael and Stephen Brogan who had come from Scariff, County Clare, to take up a block near Grandfather on Dixon’s Creek in the early sixties both came to Thylungra early in ’75. The payment of £19 for their coach fares from Goulburn to Bourke is the first mention in existing family records of negotiations with the firm of Cobb and Co. that was soon to play such a big part in all their lives.
Darby Durack’s eldest boy, Big Johnnie, then aged twenty-five, had also come to Thylungra in ’75 and the following year his three younger brothers, Black Pat, Long Michael and Jerry Brice, aged about twenty-three, twenty-one and seventeen, took over the management of Mooraberrie, between Farrar’s Creek and the Diamantina, for Edward Coman who had purchased the property from John Costello not long before. Big Johnnie, between taking cattle and horses to Sydney, Wilcannia and as far as Adelaide, was stocking a block called Mt Shannon which Grandfather had registered in the name of Darby’s widow. It may be remembered that her name was formerly Margaret Kilfoyle and her younger brother Tom was also on the Thylungra books at this time, with a carrying contract to bring loading up from Bourke or Wilcannia.
The community, although preponderantly Irish-Australian, included a leavening of English and Scottish and at this time numbered even one German named Adolph Steinbeck. The blacks had one day brought word to Thylungra that a solitary white man was wandering about in the bush shouting at the sky and obviously ‘silly alonga head’. Grandfather rode out and found the poor fellow, almost perishing and certainly near crazy. He had come to Australia with little knowledge of English and less of Aboriginal to bring salvation to the natives, who after seeming to accept him had suddenly cleared out and left him stranded. Grandfather brought him in to the station and suggested he stayed for a while as carpenter and got to know something of the blacks and their country before taking on further missionary work. His name figured on the pay roll for two or three years, but whether he after that returned to his original calling is nowhere recorded.
Considering all the personalities either permanently at Thylungra or moving in and out over these years it is little wonder that an old-timer named Will Blake whom I met many years ago described it to me as ‘a menagerie’.
‘I could write a book about it only my sight’s gone on me,’ he said.
Fortunately I jotted down what he told me, for future reference, and am surprised to find in view of what I have since learned how accurate his memories were.
He arrived in Charleville with cattle from New South Wales towards the end of ’75 when the Cooper settlers were buying breeders or mixed store cattle for fattening. Grandfather had come in to
purchase a mob of 1,000 store cows and was evidently concerned by the condition of the sixteen-year-old drover’s boy.
‘I was a mess all right,’ he told me, ‘eyes bunged up with sandy blight, skin covered with Barcoo rot and scurvy and a whitlow on one hand.’
‘Better come back with me, son,’ Grandfather said. ‘Give a hand with the cattle and have a rest up when you get there. The wife and the old mother will have ye right in no time atall.’
Thylungra had a big spread on it by this time, with two main homesteads and a number of other buildings, stockmen’s quarters, blacksmith’s ‘shop’, meat houses, saddle and buggy sheds, and blacks’ wurlies along the bank of the creek.
‘And what a crowd of characters,’ my friend said. ‘I can see them now, after sixty years, men, women, children and a big mob of blacks, all running out to meet the boss and see who he’s picked up this time. There was your Grandma, Mrs Patsy, a wonderful little woman—always on the go but never flustered, making everyone feel happy and at home, but it was the old lady, your Grandpa’s mother, who took me in hand. She was the sort of medicine woman of the tribe and had me smeared over and bandaged up before I could say “knife”. “You’ve got to keep the light out of your eyes,” she told me. “How’m I going to see?” I asked her. Then I found she had a nice little piccaninny trained for the job. I wasn’t the first blind man he’d looked after. He’d been leading his old dad around by a stick since he was five years old. The eyes were pretty well cleared up inside a week, but I stayed on at Thylungra for over five years. It was the only real home I ever knew and it was home to plenty others as well, but I was away a lot of the time droving with Stumpy Michael and I got to know him better than any of them. He was a quieter man than your Grandpa, a different type, but I never saw brothers more devoted than those two. Stumpy was a natural bushman like Johnnie Costello. We used to say he carried his compass in his head and he could track as well as any blackfellow I ever knew. He never blew his own trumpet. He was stocky and shorter than most of the crack stockmen round the Cooper but he stood out among the flash, skiting young fellows and they looked up to him. He knew all the main routes and the back tracks from Western Queensland down to Sydney or into South Australia. He’d been over them time and again in drought and flood, with cattle or horses and with the teams, stood up to bushfires, and stampeding cattle and hostile blacks and came through the lot. He had more guts and less swagger than any man 1 ever knew, but he wasn’t doing it just for the fun of the thing. His wife was never struck on the bush life and he wanted to make enough money to build her a good home in a settled district, where he could breed racehorses and settle down in the one place with his family.
‘Come to think of it, I reckon that’s what they all wanted then—even your Grandpa, Galway Jerry and John Costello.
‘Now I want you to put down all the names of the chaps there at that time,’ he said, ‘because pretty soon no one will remember them and they deserve to go down in history. Barney Lamond, George Kermode, Duncan McCaully, Jack Horrigan, Bill Feeney, Jim Russell, Jack Storier, Fred Cavanagh and John Copley were all first-rate horsebreakers and stockriders and a pack of regular wild colonial boys and there was the Colonial Experience chap Ivor McIvor we used to call “The Toff, but who turned out as tough as the rest of us. Later on he married one of the Curtis girls and took up a property on the Bulloo. There were the Brogans, Mick and Steve from County Clare and John Redgrave, another Irishman, your Grandpa’s brother-in-law who’d not long since lost his wife and kid. We used to try and cheer him up and Patsy Durack wanted him to take up a place called Bunginderry, but he never seemed to fit in very well up there. He left after a year or two and went back to the mining.
‘And don’t forget there were some mighty fine black stockmen there too. Maybe they didn’t have the style of the whites but they could handle horses and cattle with the best of them. Pumpkin was your Grandpa’s right-hand boy. He was quick and intelligent and could turn his hand to anything, horsebreaking, butchering, odd jobs, blacksmithing, gardening, but horses were his main interest like with the rest of us. And there were other wonderful young fellows—Pumpkin’s brothers, Kangaroo and Melon Head, and Willie who offsided Stumpy Michael and old Cobby who shadowed the youngsters like a watch dog and little Waddi Mundoai hopping about on his wooden leg. There were plenty of black women too, but any young fellows who had ideas on those lines had to go elsewhere. There were no half-castes born on Thylungra in your Grandpa’s time but there were a few fellows had the romance licked out of them with his stockwhip just the same.
‘Your Grandpa thought the world of his blacks and they gave him some good laughs too. One day a new chum boy told him he’d lost his stirrup irons.
‘“Now how in the name of Moses would ye be losing yere stirrups?” the old man asked.
‘“You ask’m saddle,” the boy said. “Him been lose’m—not me.”
‘Your Grandpa’s cousin, Big Johnnie, who was droving for Thylungra and Galway Downs, was about twenty-five or six then—a fine-looking young chap and a nice, friendly way with him. The ladies all used to go for him and we had bets whether he’d get off with one of the Curtis girls or one of the Hammonds, but he kept them all guessing. “I’ve got to get half a dozen sisters married off and see a bunch of young brothers through college before I can think of settling down,” he’d say, and he was genuine about that too. I often think how he planned for his family and how just when he might have started for himself there was that blackfellow’s spear came out of the scrub with his number on it. But he had a long way to go still if you reckoned it in miles. His three younger brothers, Black Pat, Long Michael and Jerry Brice, used to come over from Mooraberrie sometimes and were always in on the Galway race meetings. They were handsome lads and fine stockmen—and they knew it too. Black Pat was the local boxing champ and Long Michael, six foot three and supple as a piece of whipcord, was about the best marksman on the Cooper. He used to come in for a lot of chiacking though, because he’d always stammer when he got wild and was never one to take too kindly to a joke against himself.
‘Their mother’s brother, Tom Kilfoyle, one of the best bushmen in Australia, was doing the carrying for Thylungra. He’d been through a few dry gullies in his time and he knew the ropes and all the tricks of the stockman’s trade. Your Grandpa used to reckon he’d sooner have him on his books than his borders. Every time he’d pay him he’d say, “And here’s a bonus, Tom, to keep ye from taking up the block next door.”
‘Some used to say that Jack Horrigan, who was head Thylungra stockman, was the best horseman in Queensland at that time and others used to reckon Bill Feeney was better. They were always challenging each other and your Grandpa would be called in to judge. Naturally it was a pretty hard job and the old man had a rhyme about it that wound up like this:
“And when I get to heaven feeling that I’ve earned a rest,
There’ll be Horrigan and Feeney, at me yet to name the best,
In and out the choirs of angels, through the halo-waving crowd,
Bill upon a streak o’ lightning, Jack upon a flying cloud.”
‘Horrigan was the toughest looking bloke you could imagine. He had long arms and bandy legs and he walked like a gorilla, but there was another side to him. He had a relative who was a nun in the convent in Bourke and she used to pin medals over him every time he came through. Wear them? My oath he did! Used to reckon no horse’d ever get the better of him while he had them on and no horse ever did as far as I know. He reckoned his motto was “Live hard, pray hard, swear hard and die hard” and he did all those things.
‘Your Grandpa’s youngest brother Gal way Jerry used to take all the fellows off. He was a wonderful mimic, a natural born comedian and when the old man would get in one of his rages the young fellow could always bring him round.
‘“Be off wid ye, Jerry ye kippenhead,” old Patsy would say. “Ye’d have a man laugh on his death bed when he ought to be crying for his sins.”
‘Th
e best act Jerry ever put on was taking off the old Irish tutor, Mr Healy, and the German carpenter, Adolph Steinbeck. They were both pretty strong on the praying, but Steinbeck was a Lutheran and he had a different style. Your Grandpa let them both take turns saying Grace but they wouldn’t leave it at that. They’d take the opportunity to throw in all the prayers they could think up and when they ran out of ready-made ones they’d start inventing. Finally the old man said they’d have to cut it down to two or three each, but old Healy used to spin out the Hail Mary like nobody’s business: “Pray for us sinners,” he’d wind up, “what ails them heathen blacks, can’t someone tell them to quieten down outside there ’til the prayers are over, and if there’s somebody here thinks he can be converting them he could start be teaching them a bit of ordinary, decent respect…now and at the hour of our death…ye stop yere shinannakin there, young Johnnie, or ye’ll be getting a butt over the ear…Amen.”
‘Young Galway Jerry had only to start doing that act and he’d have us all in stitches. They called him “The wild Irishman of the family”, but he was the only one of them born in Australia. He was pretty wild all right at that time, but he was mighty popular with the crowd. He used to hit the grog a bit and then the game’d be on. Some chaps want to pick a fight when they’ve had a few in, and some want to cry and some get sentimental, but Galway Jerry always wanted to start a race meeting. Never mind what time of the day or night—out would come the horses and there’d be shouting and galloping all over the flat and your Grandpa usually enjoying it as much as anyone. Galway Jerry organised the first proper races on the Cooper and before Windorah was established there were picnic meetings on Galway Downs.