by Mary Durack
‘So it seems we must have the silly cratures,’ Grandfatler admitted reluctantly.
Cattle, horses, country, hotels, butchery, houses—and now wool.
Fond of travelling though he was, Grandfather missed the company of his wife and family and sometimes on shorter trips persuaded Grandmother to accompany him with the youngest boy Jerry—or ‘Sunny’ as they called him then. On one of these many journeys between Adavale and Thylungra Grandmother had one day become alarmed at the illness and pallor of the child in her arms.
‘Stop the buggy, Patsy,’ she said. ‘I think the boy has fainted with the heat.’
Grandfather pulled in the horses, protesting as always in moments of anxiety. ‘Why should a child faint? I’ve never beard of it.’
When they could find no stir of life in the limp little body they held a mirror to his lips.
‘We have lost him,’ Grandmother said, incredulously.
Grandfather whipped up the horses and galloped into Thylungra while his wife sat, holding her baby, numb with grief and shock.
The family, joyfully rushing to meet them as usual, stopped short at sight of the two gaunt, stricken faces.
‘Little Sunny has gone,’ Grandfather said as his mother took the baby and carried him to the house. It was in moments such as this that the gentle old Irish woman assumed command. Wordlessly she laid him on the verandah flags, took down the water bag and dashed the contents over the lifeless body.
‘Dead, is he?’ she said, gazing down at him. ‘Then what is he doing with his eyes open and the smile of an angel for his Grandmama?’
Later there would be ‘natural’ explanations of the child’s coma but for years it remained the miracle of Cooper’s Creek with each member of the community attributing it to the intervention of his or her particular patron saint.
There was much talk now of finding ‘nice little properties’ closer to civilisation. Stumpy Michael had promised his wife that he would get her to the sea before the end of ’79 and was constantly enquiring about holdings fairly near the coast. Grandfather agreed with Kate that the time had come when they might all think of establishing a base near the city. It was only Grandmother who now demurred.
‘Not that I was for coming here in the first place, Patsy,’ she said in her quiet, sensible way, ‘but we have made a home at Thylungra. What would become of the place if we were not here to look after it?’
‘Nowadays, with the coaches running,’ Grandfather argued, ‘I can be out two or three times a year until the boys are old enough to take over. We’ll get a good couple to look after the place.’
Grandmother, after much experience, was sceptical of ‘good couples’.
‘Still,’ Grandfather said, ‘the place is well established now, everything running smoothly and comfortably and the blacks well trained. A woman would have to do very little and any capable man could attend the stockwork.’
Galway Jerry who had not long since returned with his gay, red-haired bride, Fanny Neal, was all for putting on a manager as soon as possible and starting a racing stud near his wife’s people in the Ipswich district.
‘But with three of you out of the country and labour already so short—’ Grandmother ventured.
‘This opal mania will soon pass and all the boys will be wanting station jobs again,’ her husband assured her.
In fact there were already signs of waning enthusiasm among the opalers, for it was hard, tedious work digging shafts and cracking stones among the sunbaked rocks. Unlike gold mining there was no chance of bringing machinery to work on the opal fields. It remained a pick and shovel game since blasting shattered the gems more readily than the surrounding rock. The family regarded it as a hopeful sign when Dinny Skeahan gave up his claim at Eromanga, returned to contract work at Thylungra and displayed fresh enthusiasm for the Rasmore property which Grandfather, weary of paying fines for his brother-in-law’s noncompliance with the terms of occupation, had divided between Pat Tully and Big Johnnie Durack.
‘It’s an outrage,’ Dinny stormed. ‘The block belongs to me and only wait until all the country hears how the great Patsy Durack has robbed his own poor sister of her heritage.’
‘And when have ye ever paid the rent or done a hand’s turn to improve the place?’ Grandfather demanded, but for his sister’s sake he agreed that Dinny should once more have a share in it.
How this complicated arrangement worked out is a mystery, but for at least four years from this time Pat Tully and Big Johnnie continued to agist stock and pay part rent on Rasmore while Grandfather paid the remaining third for the Skeahans. Dinny at last built a shack there that was home of a sort for Poor Mary and her boys.
By ’79 Grandfather realised that he must take a firm stand about the education of his two elder sons and booked them in at St Patrick’s College, Goulburn, for the following year. My father was then fourteen and his brother John twelve and Grandfather was determined they should have three years at boarding school. Grandmother was broken-hearted at the prospect of so long a separation, for unless the family moved to Brisbane meanwhile there would be no chance of their returning home for holidays.
‘You can go down with me to visit them whenever you like,’ Grandfather consoled her.
‘And leave the place for four or five months at a time! Whatever would become of it?’
‘There’s always Kate here and Grandma to look after things and the younger ones. Why not come down now and see them settled in?’
A letter from Great-grandmother Costello in Goulburn finally decided her to go. The old couple had gone south from Cawarral some time before to visit their friends and relatives and in Goulburn Great-grandfather had been taken seriously ill. John Costello and his wife, already on their way to see him, wrote inviting Kate Durack to Cawarral with her children to enjoy a seaside holiday and also keep an eye on their own family. Kate was delighted and her husband, soon to leave again with a mob of cattle for South Australia, heaved a sigh of relief, but a new problem of what to do with Great-grandma Bridget and the other children had now to be faced. When she caught the coach at last from Adavale, poor Kate had with her not only her own three and her niece Delia Scanlan, but Grandmother’s three youngest, Mary, Birdie and little Sunny as well. The third boy, Pat, with Great-grandmother Bridget and old Mr Healy, went off to stay with Galway Jerry and his young wife at Galway Downs while a newly-appointed ‘married couple’, the aristocratic bookkeeper, three white stockmen and the blacks carried on at Thylungra.
Grandfather’s spirits rode high at the prospect of going with his wife and sons on a journey they had not taken together since they came north in ’67.
‘It’s not many boys will be able to say they’ve ridden one thousand miles to school,’ he enthused. ‘Ye’ll be heroes to them all down there.’
The party set out early in November, the two boys and the native stockman Willie riding with the fifteen packs and buggy changes while Grandmother and Grandfather rode in the station vehicle. Of all the journeys in his hard travelling life, none stood out more clearly for my father than this when he and his brother saw the great world south of the border for the first time in their memory. The country had been dry when they crossed the Bulloo, Paroo and Warrego but as they neared the little town of Barringun the wet set in and they were warned of flooded rivers further south.
‘But we’ll get there in time for the opening day if we’ve got to swim,’ their father said. And swim they did.
They found the Culgoa in roaring flood, sweeping down to the Darling with the driftwood and grass of Queensland prairies. The boys waited with their mother on the insect-ridden banks while their father and Willie forced the horses into the turgid water and each clinging to a horse’s tail, had been swept by the current, to come out on the opposite bank over a niile downstream.
A rough and ready pontoon bridge was made out of casks supplied from the nearest station. This was attached to an overhead rope slung across the river, and packs, buggy and family mounted and
hauled over. It had been splendid fun especially when Grandfather, trying to secure the buggy, had toppled off and narrowly escaped drowning by clutching a rope flung by the resourceful Willie.
The going had been tough to Brewarrina at the Bogan head, horses plodding through shaking quagmire and the buggy bogging all the way. The straining horses, sunk deep in mud and maddened by sandflies, kicked and plunged until their harness broke. Sometimes smoke fires were lit to ward off the stinging pests, but it was not always easy to find timber on the big, bare plains and when they did it was frequently sodden with rain. It had not been such fun riding in wet clothes through steaming heat. The boys’ bites itched and swelled and their mother had cried at the sight of their bung eyes. But when they reached Ridge’s Monagee Station everything had been wonderful. The owners were old friends of the family and had welcomed them lavishly, introducing the bush boys to the wonders of their orchard—pink bloom of peaches, gold of apricots, hanging bunches of purple grapes—such marvels as they had never seen before. They had gone on their way with brimming baskets.
From here the course had lain through more settled districts, down the Macquarie and on to Dubbo, their mother exclaiming all the way at changes and progress since her northward journey twelve years before. This had been a crowded and exciting stage on which they talked with fellow travellers, stockmen with cattle and packs, station people in buggies or waggonettes, sometimes a dashing Cobb and Co. outfit clopping and jingling on its way. When Grandmother grew conscious that her bonnets were outmoded and her dresses shrieked of the backblocks, her husband laughed and promised her the finest clothes in all Goulburn.
At Molong they put up at the Court Hotel, the lease of which had been taken on a year before by Darby’s widow, Margaret, and her bevy of much courted daughters. The bewildered Irish girl who had arrived in the colony with her husband and sea-born baby thirty years before was now a buxom capable soul with a jolly, hospitable manner combined with a keen business sense. The hotel was thriving under her direction and with some help from her sons in Queensland her younger children were already receiving the best education available.
‘A pity the others had not the same advantages,’ she said.
Grandfather who felt strongly himself on the subject of education was sincere enough in his consoling words:
‘But they will do well, my dear. They take their place among the best stockmen in Queensland and for looks there are none can hold a candle to them.’
Travelling down the Lachlan Grandfather had been in great form, telling tales of the gold rush days and the mad rides after brumby horses and wild cattle in his youth. To his boys the sight of the ever-changing landscape was a wonder and delight. Having known nothing higher than the red sandhills of the Cooper or the eroded summits of the Grey Range it seemed to them there could be no higher mountains in the world than the Abercrombies where their horses slipped and trembled on steep declines and the buggy made perilous descent with logs hitched on behind.
Then at last the roofs of Goulburn—the big town, all the bewildering bustle of metropolis and the excited embraces of a horde of relatives and family friends. There awaiting them were Great-grandmother Costello, her son John, his wife and the four children they were leaving at school in Goulburn. Old Mr Costello had died while Grandmother was on the road but her brother had been in time to see him before the end and to register his last wish that they should on no account dispose of their old home, Tea-tree Station, near Grabben Gullen, now in the hands of tenants.
‘Ye may be glad of it yet, son,’ he said, ‘though a thousand acres is small indeed to ye now.’
So the devoted old man who, when nearly seventy, had so cheerfully faced a new life with his children slipped peacefully away at the age of eighty-three.
‘There’s nothing left in life for me now,’ his wife mourned. ‘Ye’ll see how soon I shall be following him to the grave.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Grandfather told her. ‘I’ll guarantee you’ll see the rest of us out.’
He spoke more truly than he realised, for when the news of his death reached Goulburn in ’98 his mother-in-law, over ninety years old, demanded that the remains of the man with whom she had never exchanged a cross word be sent to rest where they ‘rightly belonged’.
John Costello spoke enthusiastically of his Rockhampton property.
‘A lovely home for us,’ he enthused, ‘especially Mary and the children.’
‘And how much will they be seeing of ye,’ his mother demanded, ‘when after all yere fine talk of getting into the settled areas they tell me ye have now taken up another Godforsaken place out west?’
‘It’s a beautiful property,’ her son said, and proceeded with a glowing account of this tract of virgin and unstocked country somewhere on the unsurveyed boundary between Queensland and the Territory, still part of the colony of South Australia. A good thousand miles west of his Rockhampton station, the Lake Nash lease had been taken up by a man named Frank Scarr who had given Costello first option of its purchase.
‘And why would he not be wanting it himself if it’s all that he tells ye?’ his mother asked.
‘Scarr went out to explore the country—not to settle. He’s moved on since into the centre to God knows where,’ Costello reasoned.
‘So ye’ll soon be out to have a look at it?’ Grandfather asked.
‘I’ve bought it already,’ Costello said. ‘Cash down, sight unseen. I’ll ride out and mark a boundary when I get back and bring the stock on later in the year.’
‘You must be letting me know more of the country out that way,’ Grandfather said wistfully.
Great-grandmother Costello left them in disgust:
‘It’s the mad craving on them for the land like the poor fellows that are possessed of the gold or the drink.’
As always on his visits to Goulburn, Grandfather visited the Emanuels. Samuel Emanuel had died in 1868 and his son, now a member of parliament, was running the business.
‘They tell me John Costello and the Duracks are rich men now, Patsy,’ Solomon Emanuel beamed, ‘on the way to your first half million if reports are to be believed.’
‘They exaggerate of course,’ Grandfather said. ‘We have done well enough since the first hard years but we need some reliable city property behind us for security.’
He expanded to his friend on the progress and prosperity of Queensland since confidence was restored with the discovery of gold. Brisbane had gone ahead by leaps and bounds during the past ten years, the little weatherboard bush-style houses and buildings pulled down to be supplanted by fine new places of stone, brick or well-seasoned timber. That the colony was still existing largely on the ‘golden stream’ of outside capital was of little concern to Grandfather, for the faith seemed well justified in the prosperity of her cattle, wool and sugar and further boosted by new gold strikes. Investment companies from Victoria and New South Wales were now eager to compete with the banks in extension of credit on overseas finance and land was booming. Every day columns of the Brisbane Courier were devoted to the advertisement of land sales, many with the added enticement of ‘champagne lunches’, while the fantastic prices obtained for city blocks were quoted as further proof of progress.
Emanuel was well in touch with the Queensland boom.
‘They have a fine aquarium in Brisbane, I hear,’ he said.
‘I had not yet heard of it,’ Grandfather said.
Emanuel smiled.
‘A great pool for little fish and big land sharks. I would go carefully if I were you.’
Grandfather was surprised.
‘And was it not yere own father first taught a timid Irish boy to tread more boldly in the world, telling me in this very room that credit properly used was a good friend?’
Emanuel nodded. ‘And so is fire.’
St Pat’s College, still austerely new, sent a chill of loneliness through the two young Queenslanders who stood about, awkwardly dangling bowler hats, in suits and matching waistco
ats over-large to allow for growth. Here time was to be measured by clocks and clanging bells, their hours marshalled into precise compartments, no longer to ramble through warm, carefree days with Mr Healy as eager as they to see the shadow at the door. Their father had said it would be three years before they could go home again, even for a holiday, but tears must wait until ‘lights out’ in the big dormitory.
‘What’s it like here?’ they asked their cousin, Patsy Skeahan.
‘Like hell,’ they were told, ‘but you get used to it.’
The Reverend Dr Gallagher, as plain as his revered Socrates and seeming to his pupils incredibly old at thirty-two, regarded the newcomers quizzically.
‘It will be a fine task now, plumbing the depths of your ignorance.’
He found the depths no doubt profound, but he discovered also two eagerly receptive minds and he warmed to the task of unfolding for them the mysteries of syntax, mathematics, Latin and Greek.
Many years later my Uncle John wrote in memory of this scholarly man:
He was a born teacher, a most profound and erudite scholar…His influence on the boys of his time was wonderful and years after his exhortations were recalled. He was a great believer in ‘Do what you are doing’, and his favourite motto was ‘Age Quod Agis’. There was a ‘sursum corda’ in his Excelsiors, his ‘man to know thyself’, and his never forgotten slogans. He kindled from the lamp of his own enthusiasm a lasting love for classical literature and opened windows upon mountain peaks that were remote indeed from the rolling plains of Cooper’s Creek.
Their companions, some from as far afield as New Zealand and Tasmania, to whom they were known as ‘the Queenslanders’, regarded them with curiosity and not a little awe, for ‘down south’ the northern State was still regarded as a wild and woolly land, refuge of long-horned cattle, outlaw brumby horses, wild blacks and escaped bushrangers.
‘Tell us about the blacks,’ they would say. ‘How many men have you seen speared? Ever see Darkie Gardiner? He escaped up your way, didn’t he? Tell us how you crossed the flooded rivers coming down!’