Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  John Costello had now disposed of all his Cooper properties except a small block adjoining Thylungra which Grandfather immediately purchased from him for £2,000.

  ‘And what does that make ye worth now, John?’ he asked. ‘Just as a point of interest?’

  Costello and Grandfather took delight in ragging each other about their prosperity. The well-worn jokes cropped up whenever there was a collection being raised, maybe for a sporting trophy or the convent at Bourke in which they all took a special interest or for one of Father Dunham’s priestly schemes.

  ‘Ye’re the rich man of the family now, John. We’ll be expecting to see your name right at the top of the list.’

  John Costello would counter: ‘What! After the deal you made with Jimmy Tyson last week?’

  Costello was undoubtedly richer than the Durack brothers at this time but he never conceded the point.

  ‘There’s just enough put by to retire on, Patsy. I’ll get a little property where I can raise some chooks and maybe a few stud bulls and a horse or two and stay at home with my family. You’ll do the same if you’ve got any sense.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking of it,’ Grandfather admitted, ‘but I’ll never sell out of the Cooper. I’d always be coming back to Thylungra once or twice a year and the boys will be carrying on out here.’

  ‘You can afford to set them up in more dependable country now,’ Costello argued.

  ‘You tell me where I’ll find it, and I might consider it,’ Grandfather said. ‘But what about the poor blacks—old Cobby and Pumpkin? They’d be breaking their hearts.’

  ‘Take them with you,’ Costello said. ‘I’m bringing any of mine who want to come along.’

  Another point of rivalry between the two men was their understanding of Aboriginal psychology.

  ‘I’d never take a blackfellow away from his country,’ Grandfather said. ‘They get too homesick.’

  ‘Nonsense! What about old Cobby and the rest of them we brought from Waroo Springs and the Bulloo?’

  But Grandfather would not be talked down.

  ‘That’s nothing but a step and a jump. I tell ye no inland born black will ever settle on the coast.’

  Still Costello maintained, rightly enough as it proved, that his old retainers would grieve less for their country than for the family they had served and loved, and when they moved out of Kyabra a week or so later old one-eyed Jimmy, his gin Susan and two or three others went along with them.

  The families from Thylungra and Wathagurra rode out to see them on their way with their waggons piled high, Great-grandmother Costello and her umbrella beside her old husband in the self-same buggy they had driven over the long miles from Goulburn to the ‘back o’ Bourke’ twelve years before. Although there was sadness at the parting of these people who had faced the unknown together and depended so much upon each other in their empty land the leave-taking had its brighter side. After all the years of struggle and uncertainty, of hardships and sorrows shared, of building and expanding and watching the tide of settlement flow out across the Cooper to the Diamantina and beyond, Costello was getting out as a rich and successful man and there was nothing to prevent his relatives doing likewise when they pleased.

  ‘But good and all as it is to be going,’ Great-grandmother Costello said, ‘how like John to be moving us in the mud and slosh. I tell ye it’s rivers we’ll be swimming before we get to Brisbane and poor old Father with his rheumatism.’

  She was right about the rivers, for rains that meant fat cheques for the settlers made hard travelling for wayfarers. They wallowed and bogged through glassy heat haze over those 350 watery miles to Roma, camping for days, plagued by mosquitoes and sandflies, waiting for flooded channels to subside.

  Near Roma they met Father Dunham, coming out by buggy to his congregation in the west. The priest showered the family with blessings and good advice, celebrated Mass under a tree by the roadside and before parting handed over the key of his presbytery in Roma.

  This was haven for the weary and weather-beaten family. Great-grandmother Costello sank into an easy chair on the latticed verandah with a sigh of profound relief.

  ‘We’ll go no farther, John,’ she said firmly, ‘until ye’ve a home for us to come to. Your father and I can count every bone in our old bodies for the ache of it.’

  Costello rode on alone a further 250 miles to Rockhampton where he found that a lovely coastal property named Cawarral was for sale. He purchased it on sight, with its 4,000 splendid shorthorn cattle, hundreds of wellbred horses of racing stock and rambling old homestead built up, Queensland fashion, on high blocks and topped with a shingled roof. There were outhouses, training stables, paddocks, orchard and flower garden and—most wonderful of all—several miles of ocean frontage!

  On the way south to Brisbane to finalise his purchase he was met at Gladstone by his old friend Pat Drynan, early settler of the Wilson River, who told him that his coastal property, Annondale, was also for sale. Elated no doubt with the heady smell of the sea air, Costello clinched the purchase of this estate as well before rejoining his family.

  Meanwhile, in Roma, the Costello children had their first experience of formal schooling at the little academy run by Mrs Curtis and her daughters. On Costello’s return Curtis gladly accepted the position of manager of Annondale and the two families joined in an excited procession to Rockhampton.

  Their going had brought a wave of restlessness to Cooper’s Creek.

  ‘Our children have never seen the ocean either.’ Stumpy Michael’s wife reminded him. ‘You know how I love the sea and not in the whole of Australia could you have found a place farther away from it.’

  Little wonder that Kate Durack, a woman of strong character and independent views, should often have chafed at the family habit of living more or less on each other’s doorsteps and making mutual decisions, which nearly always meant doing as Grandfather suggested. In all their married life her husband had rarely been home for more than three weeks at a time and was frequently away with cattle or supply teams for over six months on end.

  ‘Patsy says cattle are bringing seven to eight pounds in Adelaide and only fetching five in New South Wales, so we shall have to poke them along down.’

  ‘But that’s over a thousand miles again—and another thousand back! Can’t you go the shorter route?’

  ‘It doesn’t pay unless they’ve had an exceptional season down the Birdsville track. They’ll lose no condition at all this year down the Darling-Murray route. Well turn them in rolling fat like they leave the Cooper.’

  ‘What about Big Johnnie and the others? Can’t this mob wait ’til they get back from Goulburn?’

  ‘No chance. They’ll have to start straight back to the Darling with those horses for Sidney Kidman.’

  ‘Tom Kilfoyle?’

  ‘He’ll be taking the teams to Bourke. Patsy and brother Jerry will be fetching the store cows across from Roma and Dinny Skeahan’s given up everything for his opal show at Mount Margaret.’

  ‘You’re nothing but a slave,’ Kate said. They called you “Handsome Michael” a few years ago but they’d hardly know you for the same man now, and still only thirty-two! Isn’t it time we got away—lived our own lives? Surely we can afford it now?’

  ‘Soon, Kate,’ her husband promised. ‘We’ve all been thinking for some time of getting into city property, settling down nearer the coast, but we want to get a few more stations going out here first. The west is going ahead fast now and we’ll get boom prices for Cooper properties in a year or two. We’ve got to be thinking of the future, my dear.’

  ‘The future,’ Kate sighed. ‘You Duracks talk of nothing but the future and life slips by.’

  After ’77 with the sudden rush of opalers to the Grey Range the country opened at an exciting pace. Cobb and Co. with 6,000 horses on the roads in three States, following the rivers and the prospectors, quickly swung their coaches west from Charleville with miners for the opal fields and speculators to view the land.
Coaching stages were proclaimed town sites before names were found for them—‘The Blackwater, Gumbard Junction’, ‘The crossing of the Mt Margaret and Kyabra roads’.

  By the middle of ’78 the storekeepers had come out from Roma and Charleville, the shanties had gone up and the dusty little centres of Adavale and Eromanga—the most inland town on the continent—were there to stay. ‘Civilisation’ was sweeping west and south into the forgotten corner—Thargomindah, Eulo, Hungerford, Tinnenburra, Barringun and back to the Darling at Bourke, the busy coaches forging intricate chains of communication in the wilderness, linking the rivers, bogging through the sandy channels, flashing and bumping over the big grass plains, conquering the loneliness. Their drivers were personalities of the bush roads, men of experience and resource, proud of their spanking turnouts with from six to twenty-two horses in a team, coaches brilliant red, jingling harness polished bright, coloured saddlecloths, rosettes on the ear buckles.

  ‘It’s a wonder someone hasn’t put up a pub at Adavale,’ it was remarked at Thylungra a month or two after the coaches came through.

  ‘I’ve been thinking the same way meself,’ said Grandfather, and a few days later was pacing out the fairly generous proportions of his ‘Hotel Imperial’ which was open to business, complete with billiard table brought out express from Brisbane, within two months.

  By the end of ’78 the opalers were out among the stony ridges on Galway Downs. A man named Jack Cummings who had been prospecting for some time without much success put up a shanty pub for the miners who would ask the coach driver to take them out to ‘old Jack in the rocks’. So the first licensed premises on Cooper’s Creek, that was to be the last bid to elusive fortune for Dinny and Poor Mary Skeahan, acquired its name.

  The opal fever spread west across the channels and out to Canterbury—‘The J. C.’ A hawker, ploughing west with goods in his waggon for the Diamantina settlers, had struck the heavy wet of ’78 and made for the highest land in sight just as the Cooper flood roared down, spreading its watery mantle over the countryside. A party of drovers had taken refuge in the same spot and some blacks had pitched their wet weather wurlies there among the stones and spinifex.

  ‘Blackfella all day come here flood time,’ they said. ‘This one Windorah—high, stony place.’

  When all the rum on the waggon was gone there was nothing to do but fossick for potch and colour until the flood went down. The whisper of opal spread as the waters shrank back into the channels, the prospectors pushed out with Cobb and Co. and the teamster’s waggon became a store.

  When Costello had first taken up the site in the early seventies he had called it ‘Stoney Point’, but the native name Windorah was now officially bestowed.

  Grandfather, elated to hear of a town and some 200 opalers less than seventy miles north-west of Thylungra, a mere thirty from Galway Downs, rode out to inspect. Encouraged by the success of his Imperial at Adavale he had The Western Star run up at Windorah within six weeks. McPhellamy, the local butcher, put up the Cosmopolitan next door and business was brisk. Both hotels had adobe walls made from hard baked mud and spinifex with antbed floors and roofs of scrub thatch but on Cooper’s Creek in ’79 they were shining examples of progress and confidence.

  Grandfather and Galway Jerry organised a racing carnival to follow through from the annual meeting at Thargomindah, on to a picnic meet at Galway Downs and out to the new town. Bough shelters and stalls were hustled up, the horses began to arrive and the crowd flocked in.

  Teamsters’ outfits became ‘bumboats’ overnight, hurriedly stocked with flash shirts, riding pants and hard liquor. Some traders charged exorbitant prices for the clothing and gave the ‘snake juice’ in with the purchases to encourage further spending. One enterprising hawker brought bolts of material for the ladies, heavy silks and tarlatans, dainty muslins protected by canvas covers from the insidious dust. The ‘city prices’ he advertised were a fiction, but his stock was ridiculously cheap on present-day standards and it had quality. A heavy grey silk, made up by Grandmother for her cousin Fanny Hammond—a creation of bouffant skirts and ruffles of fine Irish lace—is treasured still by Fanny’s grandchildren on Mayfield, their Cooper’s Creek property.

  When the first meeting started, the pioneers delightedly counted 400 heads in a land where a few years before they would have been hard put to make a score. Events were quickly organised, handicaps, hurdles, ladies’ bracelets, blacks’ races, donkey races and the jealously contested Cooper Cup. Sarah Tully on her Arab stallion won the ladies’ race and Grandfather’s grey Panic carried off the bracelet for his wife.

  There were inevitably some fights and split heads and as no police constable was present Grandfather and John Costello, both JP’s, assumed magisterial duties. When Ned Hammond and Dinny Skeahan took to one another with the stirrup irons it was Grandfather who finally intervened, laying Dinny clean out ‘to save further bloodshed’.

  It seems to have been a poor show for Dinny all round. His horse ran a close finish with one of Horrigan’s and after some discussion Father Dunham, who had nicely timed his annual visit with the Cooper carnival, gave a decision in favour of Horrigan. Dinny, primed with hard liquor and no great respecter of persons at the best of times, challenged the priest to a fight, whereupon Father Dunham, to the surprise and joy of the community, not only took on the hot-headed Irishman but promptly laid him flat. Dinny, scrambling from the dust amid the jeers of the onlookers, came adroitly to his own defence:

  ‘And what sort of a man is it atall would be hitting a praist?’

  ‘Fifty yards around a post’, a favourite novelty race, had man on horseback matched against man on foot, the latter on the inside, racing around the post and back to the starting point. A champion could run one hundred yards in eleven seconds and leave the horseman looking foolish, but the average good runner was hard put to beat a trained camp horse.

  Groups under every shade entered into noisy games of two-up, mumble-the-peg and stag-knife. Agile stockmen, the braver for rum, tap danced, turned Catherine wheels and walked on their hands. At night they thronged the gambling tables lit with slush lamps down the centre of the town. Accordions wheezed with flute and mouth organ and irrepressible bush songsters rendered numbers one to one hundred from The Australian Melodist, with a leavening of Moody and Sankey hymns. Ladies picked up their skirts and joined in Scottish and Irish reels on the dusty street but any man whose tongue ran loose with grog was thrown into the ‘dog house’ overnight.

  After five days the crowd gathered for parting words and reconciliations. The winners shouted for the crowd in a jostle of buggies and loaded packs, men leaning from horseback to shake hands and distraught parents searching for straying offspring. Most of the stockmen had empty pockets and sore heads and were content enough to return to work and save for the next meeting. Grandfather, upbraiding them for their spendthrift ways, knew that they would settle to the job better for being broke.

  18

  ONE THOUSAND MILES TO SCHOOL

  The years 1879 to 1880, Opal mania on the Cooper. Patsy Durack’s many journeys. He takes his sons to college in Goulburn. Reunion with the Costellos and Solomon Emanuel. College life for the bush boys. Letters from Patsy Durack to his sons concerning his return to Thylungra.

  Grandfather’s hope that the new townships would bring more labour to the Cooper stations was not realised, for opal no less than gold brought restlessness to the countryside. Even the blacks were smitten with the opal fever and walked with eyes on the ground looking out for the ‘pretty fulla stone’ for which the unpredictable white man was willing to pay in tea, sugar and tobacco. Grandfather and his brothers, however, though readily excited by any other form of mining, were little interested in opal fossicking. Although they did not share their sister Sarah’s superstitious dread of these multi-coloured gems of their arid land, they came, as their good men drifted off and undesirables flocked in, to see the opaling as a great nuisance.

  ‘If this is the populatio
n we are getting,’ Grandfather fumed, ‘we could have done better without it.’

  ‘But you do all right with those pubs of yours,’ people reminded him.

  Grandfather liked to think of his hotels as ‘public amenities’ and resented such references to their flourishing bar trade.

  ‘To hell with the pubs and the good-for-nothings that hang around them,’ he fumed. ‘I’ll burn them down!’

  But he continued to tot up the returns along with his other assets.

  In ’79, from an estimated 10,000 cattle on Thylungra and 2,000 on Galway Downs, Durack brothers marketed 2,000 head and netted £12,000. Horses brought in £6,000 and land rights £4,500. ‘Incidentals’, which included the hotels at Adavale and Windorah and now a third in Thargomindah, a butchery business and three houses in Roma, returned a further £4,500. Grandfather’s cheque butts are a permanent record of the travelling required to keep up with his ever-expanding interests.

  Jan. 3rd ’79

  Men on building at Adavale, £700.

  Jan. 18th ’79

  Paid land rentals in Charleville, £2000.

  Jan. 30th "

  Paid in Roma for houses repairs, £200.

  Feb. 7th "

  For swap of horses or road Thargomindah, one saddle (old) thrown in, £8.0.0.

  Feb. 16th "

  Paid for bulls bought in Thargomindah, less price of horse brought from me – £90.

  Feb. 30th "

  For the sheep I got in Bourke – £500.

  From this it will be seen that he covered well over a thousand miles by buggy in this fairly typical two months. It will also be noted that he had soon changed his mind about the sheep. The Tullys had done well with their wool clip and classers had expressed enthusiasm for its quality.