by Mary Durack
Thylungra 10th Nov. 1880.
Dear Children,
You did not let me know where are ye going to at Xmas and did anyone ask ye yet and if not ye can go to Sydney with Patsy Skeahan for a week or two and if ye want some money ask a few pounds from Father Gallagher and I shall send it to him at once. I never had so much to do in all my life as I have now with the sheep. They are commencing to lamb on today. There is 2050 to lamb now and the remainder 5759 to lamb in the middle of January next. I shall have more peace when ye are home again and can relieve me of so much writing also that grows all the time more pressing for that I have not the learning for to make light of it…
Uncle Michael came home last Saturday. He sold the cattle for about £6 a head. We have about 3700 calves branded now in this year and are to commence branding next week again as there are any amount of calves now. We expect to be able to brand 1200 more this year. All the cattle are in on the creeks now as the weather is very dry and hot. We got over 300 calves on one camp and are branding them on today. I have the sheep all on the Conna Conna above the three sandhills. Pat Scanlan has put up a splendid dam here. We have heard nothing of Pannick since he was taken, only what the blacks tell us. They told us who took him but we cannot believe them.
A generation later, correspondence between Sarah Tully’s youngest son, Frank, and the Scottish-Australian balladist Will Ogilvie revealed that the poet, while working on Belalie Station in his youth, had purchased a grey horse from a pound. Later a traveller identified its 7PD brand and recognised the fine animal as one that had been stolen from Thylungra in 1880. It was probably the horse named Pannick to which Grandfather refers in this letter and which, renamed Loyal Heart, was to inspire the dedication of Ogilvie’s best known book of verse.
To all grey horses fill up again
For the sake of a grey horse dear to me…
From Scotland Ogilvie wrote in his latter years:
I have ridden many hundreds of horses in Australia, America and over here hunting and in the Remount Department in the Great War, but there was never a horse like Loyal Heart. His old grey tail is here as I write, memento of many a glorious ride. I begin to think that when I am dead they will find 7PD engraven on my heart…
From a letter written on December 20, we gather that the boys were to spend Christmas with Great-grandmother Bridget, who was then visiting friends in Goulburn. After that they were to go to Blackney Creek Station near Yass where their Grandmother Mrs Costello was staying with her sister.
The simple details of these letters, not of much interest in themselves, give some idea of the family’s constant movement and shuffling about as though Sydney, Brisbane, Goulburn, Adelaide or Wilcannia were the merest step from Thylungra. Now that times had improved and coaches were linking western Queensland with New South Wales the women took these journeys, if not as often, certainly as lightly as the men, the formidable distances and difficult travelling serving only to strengthen their determination to keep in touch with their widely separated friends and relatives. This is the more remarkable when we consider that a coach trip from Thylungra to Goulburn in those days often took about the same time as a sea voyage from Australia to England today.
Dear Children,
I and your mama were more satisfied that ye are to have Xmas with yere Grandmother and Mrs Kelly, and ye are going out to Blackney Creek after to spend yere holidays. While ye are there ye must be doing anything said for ye to do by yere Grandmother Costello and Mrs Roach…[Here follows further general instructions on behaviour and remembrances to friends and relatives.]
We got a letter last mail from youre Aunt Margaret at Molong. She said she was going round to see ye all. Give her and Cousin Big Johnnie our kind love…Let me know which of ye three done the best at the Examinations…
If young Mr Quirk comes out he is to come straight out to Goulburn to see ye. If ye can get a horse for him bring him out to see all the friends at Blackney Creek and Grabben Gullen. Give him my kind love and his sister also if she is out. Tell Mr Cleary if he possibly can to get him into some billet in Goulburn and he will ever oblige yere affectionate Father until death,
PATRICK DURACK.
So on the surface life continued much as usual on Cooper’s Creek, except that the shearers had moved out and the supply teams that once bumped empty down to Bourke now swayed away under bales of wool. Mustering, branding and droving followed the seasonal cycle and a few men drifted back from opal prospecting to station work. It was obvious, however, that most of the young fellows who had sought adventure in what had been the farthest outpost of settlement were now looking to an even more distant west, referred to still rather vaguely as ‘The Northern Territory’, ‘The Centre’ or in journalistic phrasing ‘This Terra Incognita’. Its 523,620 square miles of largely unoccupied and only partly explored country were then under the jurisdiction of the colony of South Australia that for years had been trying to solve the problem of this top-heavy and controversial burden on her young shoulders. The Territory was a desert of gibber plains and shimmering salt pans. The Territory was a paradise of splendid rivers, rich soil and sweeping pastures. The Territory was an incredible potential asset. The Territory was a hopeless liability. Raffles Bay and Port Essington, those early outposts of trade and military strategy, has long since returned to the jungle. Port Darwin, or Palmerston as it was then generally called, was established in 1870 and two years later the Overland Telegraph had been rushed through from Port Augusta at the head of Spencer Gulf 2,000 miles to the little frontier port on the Timor Sea, overcoming the seemingly insuperable obstacle of communication in an eighteen months’ epic of human achievement.
Meanwhile, through much confusion of opinion, bubble pastoral companies were floated and dispersed, gold was being mined at Pine Creek, plantations were established and some thousands of Chinese coolies and hundreds of Manila men introduced to provide cheap labour. For two decades Australian investors had looked with speculative interest at this mighty tract of country where so many promising schemes had been stillborn and as many others died in infancy. Conditions of land tenure at 12s 6d an acre on a twenty-five year lease seemed attractive enough at first glance but distance from markets, the climate and natural hazards of the country cast shadows of doubt.
In 1870, not long after the formation of the port, a tough pioneer drover D’Arcy Uhr had pushed a mob of cattle 1,500 miles from Charters Towers to the beef-hungry settlers but it was eight years before anyone travelled that route with stock again. In ’76 the Prout brothers, Sydney and Alfred, whom John Costello had piloted to Kangi Station in the Cooper district some years earlier, forged north and west across the border hoping to stake the first claim on the Barkly Tableland. The well-known verses of Mary Hannay Foott commemorate the story of these men:
The creek at the ford was but fetlock deep
When we watched them crossing there;
The rains have replenished it twice since then,
And twice has the rock lain bare.
But the waters of Hope have flowed and fled
And never from blue hill’s breast
Come back—by the sun and the sands devoured
Where the pelican builds her nest.
Both brothers perished of thirst on the Tableland but a year later Nat Buchanan, then a partner in Landsborough’s Pastoral Company near Longreach, with that ‘man of wire and whipcord’, ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croaker, who appears in later stages of this story, rode right across the Tableland to the Overland Telegraph. There, wiring away for pastoral rights to the best of the land they had explored, they were speedily informed that city speculators, blind stabbing at blank spaces on the map, had taken up all the most likely areas. Most of these ‘spec leases’ changed hands many times during the three-year period allowed for stocking and men secure in city offices made money from a country which Buchanan and his mate had traversed at their peril, gaining only hard experience. But the Territory had got into Buchanan’s blood and in ’78 he undertook
to pilot 12,000 cattle from Aramac in Queensland to form Glencoe on Adelaide River, the first Territory station, thereby opening a stock route for the big overland cattle drives of the eighties.
John Costello had taken up the Lake Nash lease in ’79 as a first foothold in the Territory. It is hard to believe that he ever seriously entertained the idea of retiring in comfort to the coast at the age of forty-two. Not only would he have found it extremely hard to change his lifetime habit of constant movement but the sense of insecurity and its resultant land hunger that was obsessional with them all would hardly have allowed him to relax and invest his money in other ways. The process of taking up virgin country, stocking, improving, selling it and moving out and on was something he understood but he displayed little touch in handling business ventures of other kinds. The reputed quarter-million with which he left the Cooper was quickly eaten into when, not long after his arrival at Rockhampton, a bad drought hit the east coast. A tobacco plantation and factory which he had heavily financed went broke while stock losses on his two coastal places, Cawarral and Annondale, and his practical sympathy with the plight of neighbouring smallholders, made a further hole in his pocket. As in the hard times out west he was again pulling bogged cattle out of dwindling waterholes, sinking wells and shifting stock. Rain had no sooner relieved the situation on the coast than a dry year set in out west. News came from Lake Nash that dingoes were hunting in packs like hungry wolves, killing calves and even venturing into the men’s huts. Costello hurried out and rode the countryside, dropping strychnine baits, riding always wider and wider afield, magnetically drawn up the western waterbeds of the Milne and Sandover Rivers, on into the Hart Range, not far east of the Telegraph—300 miles south-west of his border property. Here he took up another 2,000 square miles which he planned to stock with heifers from Lake Nash. Not long afterwards, riding back to his family on the coast, he met up with Nat Buchanan whom he told about his latest acquisitions:
‘You might do all right in there,’ Buchanan said, but you’re getting into the chancy, low rainfall belt again. Now, I’ve passed through some country on that gulf route with cattle—splendid grass flats ard rivers that hold the year round—never miss out on the monsoon. A man would need a stout heart of course—there’s a lot of it jungle country and the blacks are bad. We lost a man out there—had his head chopped clean off from behind while he was mixing the bread. There’s a fair bit of fever too, and plenty ’gators in the waterholes. Don’t know that I’d advise a man to take it on, but when I think of those rivers and the big grass plains…’
‘Might ride over and take a look at it some day,’ Costello said.
…It is now three months since John left for the gulf country, and no word of him yet [Mary Costello wrote to the family at Thylungra in ’81]. He said he would let you know if it comes up to his expectations and is more reliable than anything he has struck yet, for you may want to come in with him…
But Grandfather had just then received the report of an expedition made in ’79 through the northern part of Western Australia and his attention was focused in this direction. Larger, by about one-third, than even the giant Queensland, Western Australia’s 975,000 square miles stretched from the grey skies and giant timbers of the south, through arid kingdoms of saltbush and spinifex to the wild ranges and palm-fringed rivers of her monsoonal north, her coastline curving for 4,350 miles. Vast desert wastes and 2,000 miles of ocean cut her off from the other colonies so that she had been from the beginning a land apart, little known to the rest of Australia, more in touch with London than the eastern capitals. Established forty years later than New South Wales, she had remained correspondingly forty years behind in her development, numbering, by the year 1879, slightly less than 29,000 of Australia’s two million inhabitants.
Established as a colony of free English and Scottish settlers, for the most part families of gentle breeding, who had come with their servants and all the appendages of upper class Victorian life, the western colony had, for the first twenty years of her existence, little in common with the raw, convict-built prosperity of her sister States. All these, excepting Tasmania, had already done with transportation before the West succumbed to the temptation of convict labour in 1850, but the system, carried on for eighteen years, had brought little of the hoped-for prosperity and caused many headaches. The gold discoveries in New South Wales and Victoria so drained her already limited free population that by the time some 16,000 convicts had arrived and been in due course emancipated, Western Australia, in fear of being overwhelmed by the riff-raff of British jails, had brought further transportation to an end.
Fighting against labour problems, limited population, distance from market and the inevitable difficulties of adapting old methods to a new environment, farming in the temperate south had met with only mild success and pioneer sheep men were spreading north of the capital of Perth into the Murchison district. Tentative efforts at settlement of the Kimberley division, that extended north from about latitude 19, had been made during the sixties at Camden Harbour, between Prince Regent and Glenelg Rivers, at Roebuck Bay and also at Sturt Creek near the Territory border. All three attempts had ended disastrously but although the district remained unessayed throughout the seventies, pressure of settlement in the eastern States was creeping steadily north and west, sheep pushing the cattle further out, wheatgrowers edging on the sheep. Cattle men, chafing at fences and the restrictions of closer settlement, grown nostalgic for the good old semi-nomadic days of the open range, had moved north to Queensland and were spreading now over the borders into the Territory. By the latter seventies men like Nat Buchanan, with his relatives the Gordons and the Cahills, ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croaker, Bob Button, John Costello and D’Arcy Uhr were already goading stock beyond the furthest outposts of western settlement, their eyes on horizons still further west.
Big rivers were now known to flow north into Cambridge Gulf and others to the western coast, but none knew in what ranges they rose or what type of country they watered. Queensland cattle men, battling with their land of extremes, were interested to find out. Sheep farmers in the backward south of the backward colony, troubled by scab-infested stock, were interested. Prosperous investors in the big cities were interested. Little men, since sheep-farming had become a game for the capitalists, looked to a possible field for expansion on limited outlay. Big men sought a wide new field of limitless monopoly.
In ’79 it was decided that a party be sent to find an answer to these questions. Alexander Forrest, the leader of the expedition, was a member of an early Western Australian family whose brother John was later to become the first Premier of his State and ultimately elevated to the peerage. The younger man, however, was no less devoted to his home State and as surveyor and explorer played an equal part in its development. It was the report he wrote on his return from this journey from the De Grey River on the west coast to the Overland Telegraph in the Territory that caused Grandfather such excitement when it came into his hands early in ’81. Here, it seemed, was the type of country he most desired—a land of splendid rivers, fine pastures and reliable rainfall.
‘But Patsy!’ his wife protested, ‘It’s every bit of 2,500 miles away. However would you get stock to it?’
‘How else but the way we have got stock to anywhere? By droving it, of course! Buchanan got stock to the Victoria River, and what are a few hundred miles more?’
‘But you always said you would not sell Thylungra!’
‘And neither I shall, but what sort of a father is it would hear of country like this for the taking and not be securing it for his boys? How could I expect them to settle down here knowing of this pastoral paradise out west?’
Grandmother knew too well the futility of argument.
‘Of course, you will do as you decide, Patsy. I only ask that you speak about it to Mr Emanuel when you are next in Goulburn.’
If Grandmother had hoped that Solomon Emanuel would dissuade her husband from his folly she had underestimated
Grandfather’s powers of infectious enthusiasm.
‘Read this!’ he said, flourishing the report at his friend’s door. ‘Can you picture a country where ye would not be haunted by the fear of long, ruinous drought or terrible floods? Can you see the deep rivers and the plains of sweeping Mitchell and Flinders grass?’
Emanuel read. He had two growing sons of his own, Sydney and Isadore, both of whom showed a taste for the land and already talked of the limitations of their sheep property Lansdowne near Goulburn. The Kimberley district looked promising, he agreed, but he thought it unwise to start cattle on the long and hazardous track without further investigation. There was a tendency with surveyor-explorers to fall in love on sight with country they discovered if it was in any way fertile and the fact that Mr Forrest had since set himself up as agent for Kimberley pastoral leases might have added something to the enthusiasn of his report. If Patsy Durack and his brothers could organise a private exploration of the country, Emanuel himself would share in financing it and might even feel disposed to select Kimberley country for his own family.
‘But meantime—what happens?’ Grandfather demurred. ‘The map graziers get in first just as they did with Nat Buchanan. Look at the way he battled out and discovered that wonderful Barkly Tableland only to find it had been taken up by city investors who had never set foot outback in their lives.’
Emanuel agreed blandly.
‘It seems then,’ he said, ‘we must become map graziers ourselves.’
A week later Grandfather and his brother Michael set sail from Sydney for the western State to interview Alexander Forrest.
Finding 2,520 cold sea miles more than enough for their land-lubbing tastes, they disembarked at the port of Albany, site of the first West Australian settlement of ’27, now connected by coach service with the capital of Perth. The 250-mile journey was full of interest and unexpected charm. Here was a softer facet of the Australian scene than any they had known—a land of towering forests that filtered soft sunlight on bracken-covered slopes. The people at the coaching stages were quiet-spoken, slow-moving; the sleepy townships, unlike the crude, dusty settlements of Queensland and New South Wales, were respectable as English villages. Even the coachman had no sense of urgency. He covered the distance in a leisurely fifty-six hours, clattering at last down the main thoroughfare of Perth with a curved post-horn to his lips. People came out of their houses, some to wave, others to follow to the post office and await the sorting of the mail. Flocks of sheep and little herds of cattle moved quietly through the streets, their shepherds clad in the blue smocks of old England. People stopped to talk in the thoroughfares while carriages moved out of their way.