by Mary Durack
Enquiries for a ship to take them to Cambridge Gulf brought forward one of the few really energetic inhabitants of the sleepy port—Captain Murray of the 120-ton schooner Levuka, who bustled about arrangements with every show of zest for the adventure. It was on his suggestion that they engaged two Aborigines of the local Larakia tribe—reputedly reliable fellows and good trackers revelling in the white man names of Pannikin and Pintpot.
A combined farewell and twenty-first birthday party for young Syd Emanuel was organised at the Palmerston Club, and ended uproariously when an improvised band, marching to the tattoo of kettle drums, escorted the wayfarers to their ship to catch the midnight tide.
All through the Timor Sea adverse winds lashed blue walls of water against the Levuka’s, frail hulk. The horses, whinnying in terror, were thrown from side to side in the narrow hold and the native boys, huddled together, too sick and frightened to eat, seemed likely to die before they could touch land. When Stumpy Michael spoke to them encouragingly they rolled hopeless eyes.
‘Finish, Boss! Finish.’
On the seventh day out two of the horses were so severely injured that Stumpy Michael was forced to shoot them. While hauling the carcasses up, the pole on which he was balancing rolled in a sudden pitching of the ship and he was hurled ten feet into the hold, badly spraining his shoulder and injuring his back. After eight miserable days, when the ship swayed towards Cambridge Gulf, he was just able to limp about again with his arm in a sling.
As the schooner rounded a small island, rugged and cleft with gullies and ravines, its beaches criss-crossed with turtle tracks, the Gulf channel could be seen swinging away between broken sandstone ranges.
‘The last man in here, as far as I know, was Phillip King, in the Mermaid, about sixty years ago,’ Captain Murray said. ‘I wouldn’t care to be navigating these shoals and reefs and tidal rips without his charts.’
Stumpy Michael, comparing these with the map of later years, picked up what he judged to be the mouth of the Ord River, but Captain Murray was doubtful.
‘It might be any one of a number of streams coming in from either side and this is hardly an inviting country to be lost in.’
Evening closed in over the lonely gulf. A dark cloud of vampire shapes, wheeling and squeaking, rose from the mangrove thicket and white cockatoos went screeching off into ranges whose fortress shapes, rising 1,000 feet sheer above salt marsh, King had well named The Bastions.
By morning, on a swiftly receding tide, the ship lay careened in mud. Flat-topped ranges, touched by the opal colours of sunrise, glowed like the mountains of dreams, lending false colour to the tide-churned waters of the Gulf.
Getting the horses ashore before the turn of the tide was an anxious business. The animals had finished all the water and hay aboard the day before and stood dejectedly in the hold with hollow flanks and drooping heads. They seemed scarcely fit to walk ashore, let alone carry men and packs more than 600 miles over rough country. Michael was confident that they would pick up after a few days’ spell on fresh feed and water but Captain Murray, now thoroughly sceptical about the whole venture, reminded him that King had failed to find drinking water thereabouts and had remarked even dingoes and kangaroos lapping from salt pits.
Stumpy Michael and his men, however, were already over the side with helpers from the ship’s crew, ploughing through the reeking mud to cut mangroves for a rough landing-stage to the shore. When all was ready the horses were hoisted from the hold and coaxed across the branches. They floundered and sank in mud and, as the tide turned, jibbed, weak and trembling, on the edge of deepening channels. Water was swirling over the mangrove bridge before all horses and equipment were ashore.
At once the search for fresh water was begun. Stumpy Michael and Captain Murray climbed a steep point to look across a vast expanse of marsh, shimmering like a hoar frost under a layer of salt, patterned with the tracks of wild creatures, scattered with the branches of trees washed down by rivers from far inland. Isolated ranges with the buttes and talus slopes of African table mountains rose from the level plain, intensely blue and purple in the hard light of afternoon, some seeming to float above the horizon on shimmering drifts of mirage. Captain Murray said he could hardly bring himself to leave his friends with their near-spent horses in so fantastic and desolate place and urged that, failing to find fresh water, they would abandon their project. Stumpy Michael informed him that he had many a time found water in more unlikely and barren spots than this, and pointed to where the others on the plain below were cooeeing and waving their hats.
A recent storm had filled a number of holes and shallow billabongs, and brought on isolated pockets of good grass to which the horses were led and hobbled out to graze.
A camp was made and a tree marked ‘D1.’, the first of twenty-four marked trees denoting stages between Cambridge Gulf and the Negri River. Nightfall found them in a circle of blacks’ fires, glowing in pinpoints of spinifex from range and pinnacle like a chain of festive lanterns. Faintly, from the darkness, came the sharp tapping of hardwood sticks, the hollow far-carrying throb of a didgeridoo, the wailing notes of Aboriginal chanting.
A homely sound [Stumpy Michael recorded], bringing me back in memory to our people at Thylungra. The boys, Pintpot and Pannikin, very much afraid and huddled in their blankets at the fire, for always with the blacks it is the same old story of the terrible tribes next-door, but after meeting them in many parts of the continent I must say I have found them everywhere much the same.
Having entered the day’s events in his journal he wrote his wife a letter to be cherished and preserved for the grandchildren he would never see.
Cambridge Gulf,
17th August 1882.
My dearest Kate,
I hope these few lines will find you and all my poor little children in good health as this leaves all of us at present…This is the 4th letter I have written you since I left home. Oh, how I would love to hear now how you all are…
Well, since we left Port Darwin till we came here we were eight days. Bad weather all the time so we could not sail and we had two of our best horses died on the voyage. I had a fall into the hold myself while hoisting one of the poor creatures overboard and have come ashore here with my arm in a sling. We have only twenty-one horses now.
We got goods and horses off on shore today and pitched our camp. We will have to give the animals a week’s spell here before we start. They are very poor, in fact it is a marvel they did not all die on the little schooner. The day we got here we gave them the last drink of water we had on board and the last bit of hay, so you see they had a narrow escape. Now they have plenty of grass and water, thank God. Although the country on the coast along here is very rough there seems to be plenty of fresh water in every gully. We had a great job landing the horses and were very lucky we did not drown any of them.
My dearest Kate, I think we will be much longer over this trip than I expected on account of the horses being so poor so I don’t think you need expect to hear from me now for about four months at least. The day I get to a telegraph office I will send you a wire and as soon as you get it send Patsy a wire that same day and let him know how we got on. The day you hear from me, wherever I am, you may depend I will travel as fast as the mail till I get home, if God spares me. Don’t forget to write every fortnight to Perth for the next three months and please God I will get your letters all together when I get there. Give me all the news of the children and how they are geting on…and has the baby begun to walk yet? Don’t forget to kiss them every morning and night for me till I get back to them.
My kindest regards to all the friends and a thousand kisses to you and all my poor little children and believe me, my dearest Kate,
Your fond and loving husband til death,
MICHAEL DURACK.
Three days later the travellers watched the departing vessel out of sight and resigned themselves to camp for another ten days while the spent horses recovered from their sea journey. John Pe
ntacost became absorbed in examining rocks and looking for the colours of gold while others amused themselves fishing and shooting at the big man-eating crocodiles that dozed in the mud or floated on the turbulent brown waters. Some of the party waded to the gulf islands at low tide, returning with hawk-beaked turtles and hats filled with turtle eggs. Stumpy Michael and Tom Kilfoyle, his second in command, walked for miles surveying their situation and became increasingly confident of having landed at the mouth of the Ord River. The stream ran west from the gulf but they had no doubt it would presently turn south and lead them to Forrest’s marked tree at its junction with the Negri.
They broke camp at dawn on August 24 and, saddling packs and riding horses, set off along the mangrove-bordered river. Four miles of rough country opened on to good grass prairies, ribbed with sandstone ridges and cleft with a bewildering network of nameless streams among which the original watercourse was lost. They ran up what seemed the largest of these many creeks until the jagged arms of cliffs dropped down to hold it to an impenetrable northward course.
Unlike the sprawling Queensland rivers that spread far and wide after the rains to disappear sometimes completely when the floods had run their course, the larger of these Kimberley streams had bitten deep, tortuous channels in the plains and worn towering gorges through the ranges. Expanses of dry bed alternated with deep green reaches where waters were held between high banks, creviced by centuries of wind and water, luxuriant with trees, creepers and trailing palms.
Disappointed, they crossed where the waters ran between heavy cedars, Leichhardt pines and drooping pandanus palms and where the horses, bending to drink, stiffened and drew back. The cause of their fear was not far to find—a party of natives on the bank above, standing solemn and withdrawn with their long barbed fishing spears. They appeared strong and well-made, like a people who lived well, their naked bodies heavily decorated with tribal scars, the men with hair pulled stiffly from broad foreheads and bound at the back in peculiar elongated knobs. A woman screamed and ran for hiding, dragging her child by the hand, but the men remained standing. Stumpy Michael stretched out a hand to them in a friendly gesture, whereupon they turned stolid backs and sat down, as though determined to show neither interest nor fear, hoping perhaps that when they turned again the apparitions would have passed on their way, out of sight and out of time, a thing for wonder and memory, a daydream to record in corroboree.
The white men rode on, through spreading eucalypts with trunks smooth and clean as though freshly white-washed, to where another river entered the channel from the north. They struck uneasy camp, for the water was salt here, the horses thirsty and nervous and the two native boys apprehensive of a night attack. They were not disturbed, but in the morning they found a maze of footprints encircling their camp.
Following the course of this new river they were cheered by the sight of open plains and abundant grasses—a wonderland of pasture and fine trees. Huge bottle-shaped boabs—friendly giants of the plains—dangled big velvet brown nuts from their dropsical branches silver-grey and leafless in the dry season. The slender stems of wild cotton bore a dazzle of saffron blooms and red-brown pods spilling a froth of white down. Bauhinia branches were heavy with the scarlet blossoms whose pistils swelled to gleaming seed pods that rattle on the wind. Cork-woods spurted fierce flames of flower from leafless branches. Between the trees the even spread of golden grass gave an impression of park land, artistically planned, a reserve of wild life where bustards strutted in stately families, pausing to regard the strangers with haughty surprise. Wallabies and kangaroos stopped in their tracks to turn soft bibbed fronts in curiosity. Brolgas rose in great flocks and with them many bright birds familiar to the Queenslanders, with some others that were new to them.
Stumpy Michael recalled how his wife had lamented the lack of colour and variety in the western Queensland scene and longed to tell her of this country—an artist’s paradise of scenery in the grand manner.
If one were to paint this country in its true colours [he wrote], I doubt it would be believed. It would be said at least that the artist exaggerated greatly, for never have I seen such richness and variety of hue as in these ranges and in the vivid flowers of this northern spring.
21
PROMISED LAND
The year 1882. A crocodile attacks. Durack River found and named. Hostile natives on Pentacost. Splendid grass country. Naming of Dunham and Bow Rivers. Marooned on a precipice. Loss of horses and worn boots. Shortage of provisions. Auriferous country. Failure to short-cut Leopold Range. Fever. Arrival at Minnie Station, Long wait at Beagle Bay. Arrival at Fremantle in the Mary Smith.
The river swung north, south and west on a tortuous route through plain and range, cutting through dense pandanus thickets and tattered cajuputs, cascading over rocky falls and into still reaches of pale blue lotus where jabiru and ibis preened and fished. When the water ran fresh they rode in to drink and leaning forward in their saddles dipped down their pannikins. The sudden, terrified scream of a horse, a wild lashing of water, sent the packs scattering up the bank and set the riders instantly on guard. One of the horses, seized by the nose between the teeth of a twelve-foot crocodile, was pulling and scrambling for a foothold on the slippery bed. Kilfoyle fired quickly, the monster unlocked its jaws and disappeared and the horse, shaken and bleeding, stumbled from the water and up the bank.
In an instant the quiet scene became pandemonium. Cockatoos and flying foxes rose in noisy alarm and what had seemed a forest of small charred trees on the opposite bank turned to running, gesticulating black figures, streaking off with terrified cries into the long grass.
The horse, caught half a mile across the plain, relieved of its packs, and the severe wounds on its nose, neck and shoulders treated with coal tar, was soon moving quietly along with its mates.
When the river turned north to be joined by a large creek junctioning from the west, it was realised that this too was not the Ord. Pentacost, sketching its course on the empty map, named it the Durack.
Now plains and parklands faded into rugged country where they rode in weird cities of termite strongholds. Scarcely a shape that human sculptors might devise had not been wrought by these myriad white ant builders, working in the dark, conjuring fantastic biblical images, hooded and cloaked, squat Buddhas, gorillas, and madman’s castles with domes, turrets and minarets. Each took its colour from the surrounding earth—red, ochre, dun-grey—some so small and fine as to crumble under the horses’ hoofs, others looming fifteen feet above the spinifex.
The party made camp on the Durack tributary and Stumpy Michael, Kilfoyle and Emanuel climbed a nearby vantage point to survey the lay of the land. Far and away to the north and west, ranges fell from flat tops or rugged pinnacles in folds like sculptured drapes of pallid gold studded with emeralds of spinifex.
Trapped in hills, there was no choice but to proceed on foot to the south-east, leading and driving the horses over dangerous ravines and sheer rock crevasses, with nothing to be seen from every summit but spinifex ranges and jagged rocks clutched by the talon roots of stunted eucalypts.
Anxiously they watched the horses falter, too tired to pull at the scattered grass, some casting their shoes and limping on bleeding hoofs.
When lower country opened at last they made painful progress downward to a good camp, resolved upon a two days’ spell to renew shoes and gather energy for a south-eastern march—time at last to shoot a wild turkey and cook it, feathers and all, in an earthen oven covered with coals
A river, running swiftly to the gulfs head, gave every promise of being the Ord at last. They ran it up for eight miles through rough country and rank kerosene grass towering high above their heads, where Pintpot and Pannikin, fearing ambush, rode warily, their eyes keen as hawks on every movement of grass and foliage.
‘Look out! Blackfellow come up behind!’
The riders turned to see over one hundred naked warriors, painted, befeathered and armed, stamping down the grass, springing
with flourish of spears and boomerangs from behind trees and boulders. Every man had his hand upon his firearm, but Stumpy Michael ordered restraint. He had faced angry blacks before but had never found them over-anxious to hurl the spears they brandished so bravely. Most genuine attacks took place under cover of darkness or from behind rocks or trees, when men least suspected their danger.
A cry of savage rage went up as he rode forward slowly with hand outstretched. Spears quivering in throwing sticks were sullenly lowered as a dervish dance of old men leapt from behind, waving branches of leaping flame. In seconds the rank, resinous grass along the river bank was blazing to the tree tops, fanned by an east wind. The frightened horses reared and baulked but the fire was blowing the other way.
‘Hold steady,’ Stumpy Michael told his men. ‘Don’t fire and don’t run.’
They remained as quietly as rearing horses would allow while the blacks, trapped between river and fire, turned in disorder, plunged into the water and disappeared.