by Mary Durack
‘Horses were the main thing in life for us all. We lived for horses and any spare time we had we were training and grooming our hacks for fancy stockwork and bush race meetings. We all minced around the Cooper with short, quick steps and spurs jingling on the high-heeled elastic-sides that were mostly a size too small. We suffered like hell, but it was the fashion to have small feet outback—supposed to be a sign of good horsemanship. It was stuff and nonsense of course. Duncan McCaully used to get a bad time about his size tens, but he could stick a horse with the best of us. Wriggling out of our boots was as hard as a snake getting out of its skin, and we used to cut U-shaped hollows in the timber frames of the bunks to help us lever them off…’
How vividly the old man brought the past to life for me as he talked on of these noisy extrovert days of the teasing—‘chiacking’ as they called it—the rivalry, the practical joking, nicknaming, bragging, swaggering, fighting and coming together on lively sprees. Scattered most of the time, they all tried to make back to Thylungra for Christmas and Saint Patrick’s Day when Grandfather celebrated his birthday.
‘I never knew anyone celebrate as hard as Patsy Durack,’ I was told. ‘You couldn’t knock him up and he never expected anyone else to knock up either. We’d start early in the morning and carry right on through ‘til late at night, horse races, foot races, jumping, boxing, tap dancing and stunts. Everyone had a special stunt of some sort, walking on his hands, balancing knives on his nose, lifting weights—that was Pat Scanlan’s specialty—turning handsprings, or maybe just singing or reciting or giving a tune on a tin whistle or a gum leaf. Your Grandpa played the fiddle and the flute by ear and Stumpy Michael’s wife was a first-rate pianist.
‘After dark they’d always have the “Thylungra Championship” for the new chums. All the fellows would line up and at the word “go” they’d be off hell for leather but the new blokes always got out in front somehow—through the tape and splash into the waterhole five foot down the bank!’
There had been no objection to men taking their ‘drop of the crathur’ on Thylungra. Grandfather had little patience with drunkards but liked his men to enjoy a few drinks on high days and holidays and there was always a cask or two of rum or whisky with the Thylungra loading.
Often, when the crowd was in, there had been two and three sittings for meals, but there was no such thing as a ‘men’s table’. Grandfather regarded mealtimes as a chance to talk with the men, to ask them about their homes, their folks and their experiences.
‘Your Grandpa never seemed bored listening to our yarns,’ my friend said. ‘He’d sit there nodding, or maybe plaiting a bit of greenhide for a stockwhip and saying “Go on now”, or “You don’t say”, and sometimes he’d give an almighty yell and slap his knee. “Go on,” he’d say. “So your great-aunt married a Hogan”—or whatever it might be—“well, I had a cousin back in County Clare married a Hogan in ’45.” And next thing he’d be claiming you as a relative, as if he didn’t have enough of them as it was—Duracks, Costellos, Hammonds, Tullys, Moores, Skeahans, Scanlans, Hacketts, Dillons, Minogues, Brogans, Kellys, Roaches, Abbeys, Kilfoyles—all out there then and all related in some way. Those who weren’t working on the place were always visiting. Your Grandma’s first cousin, Frances Hammond, whose family had Tenham Station, stayed at Thylungra for weeks at a time, and her brothers were always in and out. There were five of them, I remember, Ned, Mick, Martin, John and Jim. Well, we all fancied ourselves as pretty smart fellows in those days but we had to hand it to the Hammond boys for social style. They were doing well then and beginning to spread out around the Cooper. They drove their own cattle to market like the rest but when they hit the cities they lived high. The yarns they’d spin when they got back—especially young Mick—about the beautiful actresses he’d taken around—had us green with envy. Some of them reckoned they were kidding us up a gum tree about their high times and conquests, but we’d find out later it was nothing but the truth. They had top hats and tails and walking-sticks in the city—had their photographs taken to prove it—and back home they rode some of the flashest horses on the Cooper. Ned was thrown and killed by one of them but the others lived to a good age and had families. They had four stations finally, Tenham, Hammond Downs, Munro and Ingella. You’d meet them one time and they’d be flat broke and the banks taken over, and next time they’d be back again on top of the world.
‘Frances Hammond had been bridesmaid at your Grandma’s wedding and they were like sisters. That was why she was there so much—independent too, used to ride over on her own from Tenham to Thylungra—forty-five miles in the day. She was a lovely figure in the saddle in those long, graceful riding skirts they used to wear, but she was too old for me. The one I was sweet on then was little Delia Scanlan, Big Pat’s girl, who was living with her uncle Stumpy Michael and his missus at Thylungra.
‘I can’t say any of us got much chance with the girls out there though, what with the ragging we’d get from each other and the eagle eye we had kept on us by the older women. There was never the free and easy way between the boys and girls they have these days. Any fun we had was with the crowd—no cutting off in pairs.
We used to reckon some of the older women were tartars but looking back now I can see they had to be to keep that wild mob in hand. Every now and again your Grandpa used to count the women and girls on the place and the more there were the better he liked it, but sometimes they’d gang up on him about something the way they do and he’d blow his top.
‘“Come on boys!” he’d say. “Let’s get out of here while there’s any manhood left in us. Wamen,” he’d say, “they’re the curse of the country. I’d like to ship the lot of them out to sea.”
‘Sometimes your Grandpa’s sister Mrs Dinny Skeahan was there with her four boys. The two eldest, Michael and Patsy, were old enough for stockmen then and their Dad, Dinny, and his brother John were contracting on Thylungra most of the time. I was always sorry for Mrs Dinny. She looked like a woman who’d had a terrible hard life and I don’t wonder with a man like hers.
‘There was a time when Dinny and his missus had a bit of a selection called “Newcastle” which was the closest he ever got to having a permanent address. Being almost illiterate himself he got one of his sons—who wasn’t much better—to do the station ordering. Once Dinny told him to write away for one hundred yards of a strong sort of material we called “bungaree”. “How many noughts in a hundred, Dad?” he asked. Dinny thought over this for a while. “Put two,” he said, “and another one for luck.” That might make more,” the boy suggested. “Nonsense,” Dinny said. “Another nothing can be neither here nor there.” In due course along came one thousand yards of material and everyone on the selection, black, white and brindle, wore bungaree until the white ants got into the roll and finished it off!
‘Later they took up a little bush pub known as “Jack in the Rocks” but Dinny soon became his own best customer. When his wife had to go off somewhere one day she put a jar of rum on the counter with instructions that he had to put a shilling in the till for every nip he took. When she got back the jar was empty and so was the till—except for one shilling. “There was only but the one bob to hand,” Dinny told her, “and I swear by all the saints in heaven that I put it in again for ivery nip taken.”
‘At Jack in the Rocks you got corn beef and spuds in their mud when the coach stopped for dinner and Dinny would entertain his clients with tales of his palmy days as a station owner. “Sure and when I uster droive in to Adavale wid me spankin’ four-in-hand, the shout would go up ‘’Tis Mister Skeahan from Newcastle’ and the people would come running out to welcome me, but a different story indade it is today when I come along in me old buckboard. ‘Sure,’ they say, ‘’tis only old Dinny o’ the Rocks—to hell wid him!’ As if I was to be held in any way responsible for the cruel blows of fate!”
‘Another of your Grandfather’s sisters, Mrs Pat Tully, used to ride over about once a week from Wathagurra, twenty-five miles
away, with a kid in front and another hanging on behind…’
Will Blake was there when Sarah Tully came to Thylungra with her sick child, the two-year-old Francis who had been born on their journey north, hoping that her mother’s skill might cure him. With no doctor nearer than Roma, the child’s case was never diagnosed and he died in a spasm in his mother’s arms. Again Thylungra and Kyabra were plunged in grief and the little body was buried beside the Durack baby Jeremiah who had died in the depths of the Cooper drought in ’69.
My grandparents had five children by the end of ’74—my father, Michael, my Uncles John and Pat and my Aunts Mary and little Birdie. Their last child, Jeremiah, my Uncle Dermot, was born in February ’77. The oldtimer remembered the event quite clearly.
‘It came as a sort of surprise to us, but we might have known when the old lady, Mrs Costello, your Grandma’s mother, showed up from Kyabra. A typical pioneer woman she was—face like a nutcracker and a voice like a cross-cut saw, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, always laying down the law, but there was a lot of comon sense in what she said just the same. Well, there was Mrs Patsy looking after the crowd as usual, pouring out dozens of cups of tea, and next morning we hear a sort of bleating noise when we come in to breakfast and there’s the boss on the verandah proud as Punch with a baby in his arms.
‘He was proud of all his children and some people used to say he’d ruin them. Old Mrs Costello was darn sure of it and didn’t mind telling him, but I reckon they were all right. Your two uncles, Johnnie and Pat, were young rips, into all sorts of mischief but your Dad was never the kind to get into scrapes. He was a rather serious, responsible sort of a boy and the fellows treated him pretty respectfully even then. Somebody once asked the old man what he was going to make of “young Mick”, and he looked surprised as though he hadn’t thought of it.
‘“Make of him?” he said. “What do you mean—‘make of him’? Michael comes down from a long line of eldest sons and after me he’s head of the family.”
‘The boy had the makings of a good rider at eleven or twelve and his Dad had him well schooled in stock breeding but he never seemed to get into the life like most of the other kids. He mostly had his nose in a book, even when there was a mob of cows and calves bellowing out in the yard. “Aren’t you going to watch the branding?” we’d ask him. “Not just now,” he’d say. “I’ve seen it plenty times before.”
‘“He’ll never make a stockman like his Dad,” someone said once, but Jack Horrigan wouldn’t hear a word against any of them.
‘“He won’t need to be,” he told us. “The old man come up the hard way but his kids’ll always have plenty others to do the hard yakka. Patsy Durack’ll be a millionaire before he’s through.”
Others too have given verbal and written accounts of these crowded days at Thylungra. My Uncle John, one of the ‘young rips’ mentioned in the foregoing account, wrote from Perth during the 1920s to his Tully cousins at Ray Station, earlier known as Wathagurra, recalling memories of their youth. With typical family sentiment the letter was treasured and a copy given to me after my uncle’s death in 1936:
…I still see all the nooks and corners of the dear old home. I see the flocks of wild birds, the placid waters, the butterflies on the perfumed wild oranges and the gooseberry bushes. I find myself in memory, chasing their elusive ways…
I remember the fearsome ‘Tri-anti-wonti-gong’ that devoured boys who did not do as their Mother told them. This monster poor Mother created in her anxiety to keep us from falling into the water from the slippery banks. It lived in our childish imaginations until time dispelled the illusion—and delusion, for we actually saw it, dressed in black, with great horns and monstrous shape. I remember too, it had the desired effect…
I see the old school house where Mr Healy taught us pot hooks and hangers, the rule of three and long prayers. I hear him reprimanding us because we did not ‘do as he desired us’. I see the shadow of the big tree steal across the school room door that measured the termination of school for dinner hour. Even as I write I hear the rattle of the spoons in the tea cups as they always did rattle when the shadow crossed the door…
I see you all at Wathagurra, as you used to call the old place. There sits Uncle Pat Tully enjoying the sweet peace of his good, old heart. I see dear Aunt Sarah gauging my wistful face as she brought in the cakes and cream that only she could make. My cousins Pat, Joe, Sis, Clara, Maria, Sarah Ann and you all. We sit down at the feast together. After it is over we all make merry.
Uncle Michael, Aunt Kate and cousins; poor Aunt Mary and cousins Skeahan and their old homes run through my memories. I hear Uncle Jerry’s jovial laugh; and poor old Grandmother—Why! Today, Easter Sunday, is the day she used to ask us to get up and see the sun dance. Dear old loving soul…But too much retrospect does not fit in with the modern trend of life. It will not pull you through the drought nor help you crank your cars…God be with you all…
J.W.D.
The baby Jerry, my Uncle Dermot, whose birth in February 1877 was another of my old friend’s memories, became a Professor of Mathematics, was for a time Principal of the Allahabad University, India, and retired to Ireland where he died in 1956. I visited him there during the thirties and when he knew I was writing this book he helped me in many ways, particularly in delving into the family background. Although his memory can hardly have extended further back than 1880, much that he wrote adds to the general picture of life at Thylungra about this time and the characters of many of his relatives.
Never in my life [he said], have I written such long letters as now, at the end of it, but you might as well have all I can remember of the family, of father and mother and the old life at Thylungra and at Maryview, our Brisbane home. Part of me belongs always to the Australian bush, and I still cry sometimes over Banjo Paterson’s ‘Man from Snowy River’ as I did when you were here in ’36, but I doubt I will go back now. Ireland holds me and will claim my bones. As well perhaps that one of the family returned to honour the land they left in the years of grief and famine and had forgotten how to love.
‘You children do not know the meaning of hunger,’ Father said to me. ‘Please God you never will.’
Being the youngest in the family I believe I was closer to him than the others. My first memories of him are at Thylungra, Cooper’s Creek, when I was a very little chap and your father and Uncle John away at college. Later when we made our home in Brisbane the elder boys were again away. I went everywhere with Father, on horseback or by buggy. It was from him I first acquired a love of horses and had learned to ride well enough at three or four years old. He could talk of horses by the hour going right back to his first loves, the big Irish hunters of the Galway Blazers. He always bred from thoroughbred sires and produced some of the finest half breds in Australia. His two famous grey buggy horses, Banjo and Tarragon, often carried him, Mother and me from Thylungra to Adavale, one hundred miles on a bush track in a single day.1
Would I could adequately describe the character and warm personality of your Grandmother. She was a simple, homely woman, very capable and calm and greatly loved by all. Everyone confided in her, knowing that her advice would be sound but that she would not censure them for their shortcomings. In this she more resembled Father’s Mother than her own, our Grandmother Costello, who was somewhat stem as we remember her, probably in her anxiety that we should not degenerate into young bush scallywags. ‘Grandma Bridget’ as we called her would defend us no matter what we did. When a bad tempered governess soundly rapped my knuckles she would say ‘That vixen’ and would take me to her room and console me with a boiled turkey egg. I suppose it might be said that we were somewhat indulged in our youth, with Mother and Grandma Bridget always so gentle and poor Father so anxious for our happiness, as he was for everyone’s, so eager to give us everything he had been denied in his own youth, especially education, and so proud of any little scholastic success we had. Although I followed an academic career, our Father and Uncle
John were actually more ‘bookish’ by nature than myself and how proud Father was to tell his friends that they ‘knew Latin and something of Greek and all the writers you could lay tongue to’.
Although firm in his own faith, remember that your grandfather had no bigotry in any form. No man was ever refused hospitality on account of race or creed in his house, nor did he ever utter a disparaging word on any religion that another held dear. Servants he always regarded and treated as members of the family, and if they left for any reason he kept in touch with them wherever they were, worried about them if he heard they had struck hard times and remembered their children’s birthdays. This human attitude he had to all men may explain his wonderful tact and unusual success in dealing with the aborigines. Dear old Pumpkin always regarded himself as one of the family, referred to Father as his ‘brother’ and would have given his life for any one of us. Any natives Father had with him from boys did not speak pidgin English, though some said they spoke with an Irish brogue. It did not strike us that Father spoke with a brogue, but I suppose he did as you will see from his letters that he sometimes spelt with one.
Yes, the verses you found in your Grandfather’s handwriting were his own. Did you not realise that all Irishmen are poets at heart and that most of them, even I, have a go at it at some time? I had a number of poor old Father’s efforts, but I burnt them some time ago. I understood the bush jingles that were so much a part of our lives in those times were rather scorned by your generation. I did not want them laughed at. His metre was not always the best no doubt, but to me they carried the unmistakable rattle of bridle and spurs that I always associate with him, and like him they are full of good, homely sentiment, sadness and humour and reflect a real love of the bush life he lived. Lawson, Paterson and Ogilvie did much the same thing better, but they came somewhat later.
I cannot remember that Father had any faults, except perhaps that he was somewhat mercenary. Or should I say ‘acquisitive’? And is that a fault? It stemmed from his desire to give his family the advantages and security he had missed in his own youth. He reached out after great lands and great wealth and in his time held both. He would have done better to keep a firm grip on somewhat less. But that was not in his nature and who are we to criticise men like himself, his brother Uncle Michael, and Mother’s brother Uncle John Costello, who rode through the mirage and found the rivers?…