by Mary Durack
It is a pity my uncle burned his father’s verses, for the snippets that have come into my hands indicate that he had a ready flair for rhyme. Before the era of the more famous balladists rhyming had become the fashion of the bush and there was a wealth of folk-song among these Irish and Scottish Australians with their singing hearts and dancing feet. Fiddles, accordions, mouth-organs, flutes and gum-leaf bands accompanied the topical jingles with familiar tunes and sometimes original airs that were never set down. Grandfather’s verses had titles like ‘The Stockman’s Sweetheart’, ‘When Duncan Rode the Winner’, ‘The Duffer’s Luck’ and ‘The Drover’s Song’, the last being the only one that survives intact and which was no doubt inspired by his first, ill-fated expedition from Goulburn to the Barcoo.
The Drover’s Song
Cheerily sings the drover
With his stock so fat and sleek
Up to the border and over
His fortune for to seek.
Merrily sings the drover
For with luck upon his side.
There’ll be Mitchell grass and clover
And creeks ten miles wide.
Dismally sings the drover
For himself and his luck fell out
But still he rides on like a lover
Into the arms of the drought.
Mournfully sings the drover
As his stock die one by one.
Wild dogs and eagles hover
And bones turn white in the sun.
Wearily sighs the drover
As he lies him clown on the plain
To sleep with his swag for a cover
Til the grass springs green again.
Eerily wails the drover
When the drought wind sweeps the sky
And men say ‘Hear the plover!’
As he moves the ghost mob by.
Mick Skeahan, Poor Mary’s eldest, then a boy of fourteen or fifteen, also composed trailing topical verses and songs. One, written later in his life, of which a single verse will serve, bespeaks the nostalgia of his generation for those horse-mad, enthusiastic days:
And where are the horses we took such delight in,
Old Sunshine, the reefer, that never would fall,
And Midnight, the rager, and Blantyre, the camp horse,
And the old chestnut Bally, the best of them all…?
They have gone on the road down the River of Silence
They’ve crossed the long stage that we all have to cross:
They are going to stay on the Station of Silence,
Where Death is head-stockman and God is the Boss…
17
NEW TOWNS IN THE WILDERNESS
The years 1877 to 1879. Tragedy at Wathagurra. Mr Healy and his pupils are lost in the bush. The problem of education. Patsy Durack’s increasing interests. The Costello family move out. Opal mining brings towns to the Cooper and Cobb and Co. comes west. Races at Windorah.
It was during one of Father Dunham’s visits, when the family at Wathagurra was assembled at Mass, that the three-year-old Annie Amy Tully disappeared. Nobody, not even one of the blacks, had seen her go and when they found her little pannikin beside the creek they at once began dragging the waterhole.
Helpers, black and white, came over from Thylungra and Kyabra and for three days the search went on. Even Pumpkin, Willie and Scrammy Jimmy, notorious trackers though they were, could find no trace of footprints on that stony, windswept plain where the child had wandered in hopeless circles among the breakaways.
Young Michael, my father, riding with Pumpkin, found the little body at last lying in a gully with some bush flowers clutched in her hand as though she had died in sleep. They brought her to Thylungra and buried her with her baby brother Francis.
Father Dunham spoke of ‘another angel in heaven’ and of ‘resignation to the will of God’, but Sarah, acquainted with sorrow, keening in the tradition of her people, wanted no formal words of comfort.
‘And who is any Englishman whatever to be telling an Irish mother how she must bear her cross? This is the fourth child He has taken from me, Father, and I shall thank Him in my own way and my own time but I shall have my grief out.’
Devoted as her brothers were to their robust pioneer priest, Sarah Tully never quite forgave him his English dislike of emotional display. Once when he rebuked some of his Irish parishioners for their hot-headedness she had turned on him in scorn.
‘You may know something of our souls, Father, but it’s little you know of our hearts.’
After the tragedy at Wathagurra, Grandmother had forbidden her children to go across the creek without Mr Healy or one of the blacks. The boys, bush-reared and quite capable of looking after themselves, resented the old tutor’s forever trundling along behind, panting and perspiring, shouting for them to ‘go no farther’ and having no idea of his whereabouts. The two younger boys, John and Pat, enjoyed seeing how far they could lead him before he realised he was headed in the wrong direction. It was a joke they played once too often, for one afternoon, having been led for two miles out of his way, the old man grew irritable and obstinately refused to be put on the right track.
‘D’ye think ye’ll be knowing the way better than yer teacher! Come now, after me. Not another word!’
As evening drew in Grandmother sent old Cobby to call the wanderers home, but the native returned to say he had followed their tracks until after dark when they were still heading away from the house. Grandmother sent at once for her husband who was out after cattle with most of the station hands and despatched the young ‘Colonial Experience’ man McIvor to fetch her brother John from Kyabra.
Costello, the first to receive the news, galloped with his faithful tracker Scrammy Jimmy to Thylungra where fresh horses were ready saddled at the yard. Few bushmen had not at some time gone in search of a wanderer only to find him perished of thirst and they had no delusions about the difficulties of their task. Much of the country over the creek was hard and stony which made tracking difficult, while many of the gnamma holes that, according to the blacks, had held a steady level of water from time beyond memory, had gone dry during the last drought. When filled again by the rains they had quickly evaporated, probably because, since the coming of the white man, the natives had neglected the careful ritual of covering them.
Time and again Costello, McIvor and the natives, Jimmy and old Cobby, picked up the trail of the wanderers that sometimes crossed and recrossed their own steps in the manner of the hopelessly lost. When night fell again the searchers camped till dawn, followed the tracks for another day of increasing anxiety and camped again.
It was the following afternoon when Scrammy Jimmy stopped, put his ear to the ground and pointed confidently westward. They hurried towards a dry thicket from which rose the delirious tones of an Irish voice.
‘Lost in the wild bush of Australee and related to the Duracks. Keep to the north-east, children! Keep to the north-east!’
The old man had stripped off all his clothes and was lying upon the ground exposed to the blistering heat. The two children were nowhere in sight but from marks upon the ground it was discovered that they had been lying nearby.
‘Blackfella bin take’m away!’ Scrammy Jimmy announced suddenly.
Having quickly put up a shade for the old tutor and left one of the natives to tend him, the search party hurried on to where the boys and a few blacks were seated in the shade beside a small concealed waterhole, enjoying a primitive meal of wild roots and wallaby.
The blacks explained how they had found the exhausted wanderers, had tried to carry all three to the waterhole, but the old man had fought them in terror and had been impossible to cope with.
The party returned to Thylungra with Mr Healy secured to a horse, still commanding at regular intervals: ‘Keep to the north-east, children! Keep to the north-east!’
‘Another hour and he’d have been finished,’ John Costello said, giving over the demented old man to the care of his sister and her mother-i
n-law.
For a while it seemed Mr Healy could not survie the effects of his experience. His Irish voice, cracked and desperate, raved on night and day, while his blistered skin peeled off in great slabs and his eyesight, always poor, seemed quite gone. Slowly, with careful nursing they brought him round, but it was clear that his teaching days were over. A shadow of his former portly figure, he could no longer pretend to be other than an old man, hard of hearing and with failing sight, and sometimes he would cry like a child.
‘Ah, but it’s a cruel land, a cruel land, and what am I to be telling them at home in Ireland?’
It was realised then that he had misled his people about the position he held in Australia, indicating that the money he sent them, a good three-quarters of his modest salary, was a mere trifle. To ease the old man’s mind Grandfather increased his wage and elevated him to the nominal position of bookkeeper.
Grandfather’s boys had no regrets when it was realised that poor Mr Healy would never teach again. He had been a sore trial to them for three years although he could not have been quite impossible as a teacher. He had taught them to read, and instilled a certain respect for books. They had at least the rudiments of mathematics and already wrote a better hand than most children of the same age today. He had, moreover, so hammered in the prayers, litanies and Latin responses of their church that they would never forget a word of them. Thirty years later when my father met a priest travelling through the Northern Territory he surprised him by being able to serve Mass under a boab tree without the aid of a prayer book.
Their future education was a great worry to Grandfather and the often discussed project was again raised of sending them to St Patrick’s College that had been established in Goulburn in 1875.
Poor Mary Skeahan had just then fought out the issue with her husband of sending her boy Patsy whose education had been so far neglected. Dinny saw no sense in it at all, but could hardly raise further objection when Grandfather undertook to pay the fees. Still, Grandmother was heartbroken at the thought of parting with her sons. She argued, practically enough, that if Grandfather wished them to follow in his footsteps he should engage another tutor and begin to train them in the many parts a station man was called upon to fill. People were already complaining of a shortage of labour outback, for although there were so many men on the Thylungra books, they were a restless crowd of fellows, always coming and going and changing about from station to station, while it was almost impossible to entice good tradesmen so far into the wilderness. Thylungra and Kyabra, having looked after their Aborigines, were better off than many places but few children were being born in the station camps since the shattering of the tribes and it seemed that there would be few to take the place of the faithful first retainers.
‘How would you have got on,’ Grandmother asked her husband, ‘if you had not been able to turn your hand to anything—stockwork, building, blacksmithing, saddling, gardening and the rest? Think of all the things you could do when you were their age.’
‘That is not to be compared,’ Grandfather said. ‘When I was their age it was a great struggle to keep alive from day to day, but how often I longed for the chance to read a book when I must be milking the cows or cutting the turf or digging in the fields. I would not wish that situation on my family.’
He took the optimistic attitude that the labour situation must improve with closer settlement and the establishment of outback towns and held that it was more important to educate his growing sons to the station of this new landed aristocracy. But for a while Grandmother, backed by her female relatives, had her way. No doubt that was one of the occasions when Grandfather wished the women to the bottom of the sea.
The elder Miss Curtis, who had been engaged to teach pot hooks and pretty manners to the two little girls, was at last put in charge of the schoolroom. Unfortunately for the reserved, rather prim girl, her pupils John and Pat soon detected her romantic attachment to young Ivor McIvor and they proceeded, with the mischievous cunning common to small boys, to wreck her chances. Anonymous letters and traps calculated to make the girl look ridiculous in the eyes of her hero eventually reduced her to a state of near breakdown. Relations with the Curtis family became somewhat strained and they decided at last to give up the idea of cattle raising on Kyabra Creek. They packed up and moved to Roma where Mrs Curtis and her girls opened a small school while Mr Curtis and the boys worked on surrounding stations.
A man of reputedly aristocratic lineage, who received occasional remittances from his family in England and had come to Thylungra as bookkeeper, next took over the task of tutor. Since he was seldom quite sober, however, and regarded his task of instructing the young as an amusing turn of fate, his regime suited the boys all too well.
Grandfather, now thoroughly preoccupied by the increasing tempo of his life, unwilling to start another argument with the women, let the situation run on. By ’77, along with his two brothers and John Costello, Grandfather realised that he was now well on the way to becoming a rich man but far from relaxing he became more active than ever before. He was now seldom at Thylungra for more than a few days at a time, for his interests were becoming more widely spread every month. It seemed that as his bank balance increased so also did his sense of insecurity, for he knew well enough that money amassed through the sale of land and stock could be as quickly lost in a succession of bad seasons. His aim was to secure himself and his family against disaster by having enough outside interests to keep his Cooper properties going over a drought period.
He had no thought of sale at this time, for he realised well enough that there could hardly have been any richer fattening country in the world than those Cooper channels in good seasons. Still, he was mindful always that the land was not freehold. They had no more than a tentative right to the grass on which they pastured their herds and in law had no right to the soil or any minerals it might yield and even to plant a kitchen garden, unless within the bounds of a limited ‘homestead area grant’, could have been held illegal. It was a clause of the Pastoral Leases Act of ’69 that they must be prepared to give up the land on demand for cultivation or closer settlement and certain small resumptions were already going on. Although these did not much trouble the settlers since they were compensated for improvements and pioneering work, there was no guarantee that government demands might not at any time force them out of the country. They were not then to realise that the hardships and isolation were a certain security in themselves, that none but an occasional voice crying in the wilderness would contest these million-acre holdings or prove over-anxious to try them out for ‘other purposes’. In the seventies they did not yet speak of their pastoral empires as though they were empires indeed. ‘“Cattle kings” you call us,’ Grandfather wrote in answer to a newspaper correspondent complaining of the big landholders. ‘Then we are kings in grass castles that may be blown away upon a puff of wind.’
And so he rode on and on, hungry for land and more land and the security that seemed always just out of reach. Land hunger was a disease of his time, leading many besides himself on pastoral trails that ran out as often as not into sand and ruin. Will Landsborough, Nat Buchanan, John Costello, the brothers Prout, Patsy Durack…riding, riding…Cattle, horses, country…
‘And now,’ Pat Tully told Grandfather one day, ‘Sarah says we must all be going in for sheep.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Grandfather. ‘Haven’t we told her already the country’s not suitable for woolgrowing? It’ll do no good out here.’
‘But Sarah says it will,’ Pat sighed. ‘She declares she knows it in her bones that the Cooper will grow wool fit for to make a garment for the Pope.’
‘Take no notice of the poor girl,’ Grandfather advised him. ‘What would a woman be knowing about such things?’
‘It’s too late,’ Pat told him. ‘We’ve got five hundred head on the road out now. They’ll be here in a week or two.’
Grandfather left him in disgust with a ‘Glory be to God’ and a vow that no s
heep, other than a few for home consumption, would ever sully Thylungra soil. But how many today, knowing Thylungra as the most valuable property in the Commonwealth, shearing 100,000 sheep a year, have ever heard that it started as a cattle run? And who, outside her family, knows that it was an Irish woman, sensing the future ‘in her bones’, who nagged the first sheep to the Cooper Plains and lived to realise her ambition of presenting His Holiness with a garment made from Cooper wool?
Grandfather had scarcely recovered from this shock when John Costello rode to Thylungra with another.
‘Patsy,’ he said, ‘we’re getting out.’
Grandfather turned on him in surprise.
‘What’s that ye’re telling me?’
‘Peppin and Webber have offered me £60,000 for Kyabra and I’m going while the going’s good.’
‘And what would ye mean by that?’
‘We’ve had a wonderful run of good luck but it can’t last forever. Besides, I’ve promised the family to take them to the coast. Here’s young Mary, the eldest, ten years old and never set eyes on the sea.’
‘But you couldn’t be going ’til after the wet!’ Grandfather exclaimed.
‘Why not?’ Costello asked. ‘I’ve made up my mind and it’s no use hanging around. We’re getting out next week.’
‘And what has poor mother to say to it?’ Grandmother asked.
‘She’s delighted of course,’ Costello said. ‘You know she never liked this country, but she’ll be out every year to visit you, you can bet your life on that.’