by Mary Durack
The party followed the river until it dwindled into ranges to the south-east, whereupon they named it the Pentacost and camped to consider their situation.
While scouts went out to survey the countryside others caught barramundi, cat-fish and turtles in the newly named river. Sentinel tribesmen, perched at safe distances, watched quietly, ignoring peace messages shouted and mimed by the Territory boys who disdainfully pronounced them ‘myalls’ ignorant of a superior language.
The boys were less nervous now and found merriment in simple incidents, delighting in the discovery of familiar birds, animals and edible roots in this alien country.
Inspection showed that days of hard travelling had been in vain. Cut off by ranges to the south-east, they were forced to retrace their tracks and strike camp under the shadow of Mt Cockburn south. From here Stumpy Michael and Kilfoyle followed fertile valleys and fitful streams in anxious search of the lost river, camped on beds of grass without nets and with saddles for pillows, slept soundly within a circle of native fires. Their joy of beautiful country, the discovery of many of Queensland’s best grasses and remarkable landmarks such as the strange, bald hills they named the ‘Sugar-loaves’ was shadowed with grave concern. Coming on another good stream, they returned to bring on their companions, but seven miles up their hopes were shattered again when the river veered west. Here a horse died of a restless wandering disease and others were sickening. Stumpy Michael named this sturdy stream the Dunham, after the pioneer priest of western Queensland.
Anxiety deepened when a mare broke its hobbles and was lost and when Michael’s favourite horse, Doughboy, fell in a rocky pass and broke its leg. Forced to shoot his faithful mount, he named a hill nearby to its memory. Next day a mare they had been carefully nursing along died foaling and with other horses sickly and weak the situation began to look grim indeed. Winding and turning for over one hundred miles over range and plain and river they had still come no more than fifty—in a straight line—from their starting place. They were forced to abandon precious pack saddles and to cut down on rations. The salt beef ran out and tinned foods were low, but there was kangaroo and wild game and fish in yet another river which led them south on rising hopes that were rudely shattered when it turned in a capricious hairpin bend to the north-west. This stream they named the Bow, after the Irish river that marked the old boundary between Counties Galway and Clare.
They had realised now the truth of their dilemma. Captain Murray’s fears that the map maker’s ‘conjectured course’ of the Ord had been badly out were justified and it was obvious that the big river must enter the gulf from the eastern side.
Now, confronted with another range whose sheer slopes rose rugged and forbidding in the hard light, the men realised that their worn boots could not stand up to the climb. Kilfoyle, Jack-of-all-trades and master of makeshift, cut into leather bags and saddle flaps, marked out the size of each man’s foot and attached soles to uppers with copper rivets hammered out for nails.
Meanwhile Stumpy Michael and Emanuel rode on through speargrass foothills and climbed ridge upon ridge to a range summit broken like the battlements of an ancient castle. Far below stretched the golden Kimberley savannah lands, cut through by green ribbons of timbered gullies and creeks.
Seeking a short cut back Emanuel inveigled his mare down a steep pinch to a narrow ledge, only to find himself on the edge of a sheer precipice and unable to return the way he had come. Stumpy Michael, making a two-mile circuit, surveyed the perpendicular from 300 feet below and declared that Emanuel must leave the mare for the night and get down as best he could.
Emanuel removed the saddle, soothed his frightened mount and made hazardous descent. Next morning all hands, armed with Pentacost’s geological tools, cold chisels and tomahawks, cut a narrow footway upward from the ledge and coaxed the trembling animal to safety.
Fortified with Kilfoyle’s new boots, the party veered east and camped that night within two miles of the Ord which they came upon almost without warning early next morning—a twenty-chain width of water, reaching out of sight between luxurious trees. As they rode on, the unearthly stillness of noonday settled over the great river. Pelicans and cranes were still as though carved in stone and crocodiles lay log-like on the muddy banks. Six miles up another stream entering from the east clearly answered Forrest’s description of the junction of the Negri and the Ord. About 130 miles from their starting point on the gulf, they had trailed over twice the distance in their anxious search and although they faced another 500 miles and more of hard travelling the route ahead was already mapped, the long uncertainty at an end.
Our satisfaction at this discovery can be better imagined than described. Camped. Marked tree ‘D24’.
Here was the pioneer landseeker’s dream-come-true. High-water level marked by grass and brushwood caught up in river trees thirty or forty feet above the bed indicated the mighty volumes of water that swept the channels during monsoonal rains, but there was no evidence of inundation on the plains above and the vegetation was nowhere that of a country subject to long, rainless periods. Here the trees spread broad trunks and luxuriant foliage in marked contrast to western Queensland’s stunted mulga scrub, and the meagre outlines of lignum and boree. Only the remoteness of the district was against it, but the landseeker of the last century knew that where one man dared others had not been slow to follow. Men found more time and heart for long and hazardous ventures then than in the age of speed.
Already the travellers knew that Thylungra stock, with all the chances of the continent between, would graze on Kimberley pastures and drink the waters of the Ord. Riding along, they discussed ways and means of getting the stock across. Water was undependable on the direct route from the central Queensland border and through the Territory. They must take a roundabout route—up to the gulf and out west across the northern rivers. They might make it in eighteen months with luck, but what was a year or two here or there?
‘Finding the country everything that could be desired, suitable for all kinds of stock,’ they followed the Ord sixty miles towards its head. They would abandon a great deal of useless range and spinifex—already taken up ‘sight unseen’ on the map and concentrate on the open plains, though inevitably their holdings would include a good deal of rough and inferior country.
There was little time to linger, for flour and sugar were already very low and they were still 300 hard miles from Beagle Bay. Pentacost gathered specimens under protest from the others who declared he would soon have them all staggering under loads of stones and all else abandoned. He found his companions unappreciative of rock records of millenniums past while some, riding the sun-scorched landscape, were frankly sceptical when he displayed a fragment of sandstone grooved by a moving glacier. The down-to-earth bushmen had little time for reflections upon a geological past when rocky outcrops were reefs of a forgotten sea, when the table tops of eroded mountains formed the plateau level of a lost landscape, devastated by seething floods grinding and tearing at rock and soil, racked by convulsions of nature that mingled rocky strata in violent confusion. Interest quickened only when he drew attention to the auriferous quartz picked up from the dry beds of creeks that wound through the billowing Bay of Biscay hills—a range that in four years’ time would awaken to the roar and turmoil of a gold rush shanty town.
The weary horses had dwindled now to fourteen and the travellers were making most of their way on foot. When their boots wore through again Kilfoyle did what he could by cutting into the remaining saddle flaps, but the rough going ground them quickly into gaping holes. Cut and blistered feet were tied about at last with bags and pieces of clothing. Only Pannikin and Pintpot, swinging along on horny pads, suffered no hardship.
Today, looking down from the mail plane on the furrowed unshaven face of Kimberley, it seems incredible that men walked through those stony spinifex ranges, over sandy river beds, through ant-hill plateaux, and bald clay-pans, and across the undulating pastures of Nicholson Plains.
About thirty-five miles above the junction of the Margaret and Fitzroy Rivers the party was excited to come upon its first indication of white man’s penetration in this lonely land—a large white gum marked ‘WF 22, PA 9, ’81’. Curiously enough their subsequent enquiries both on the lower Fitzroy and later from Alexander Forrest in Perth failed to identify the initials. There can be little doubt, however, that they belonged to William Forrester and his companion who had been sent by the King Sound Pastoral Company to inspect blocks they had taken up on the Lennard River.
Their first sign of Forrest’s expedition was a tree marked ‘F137’, where Tommy Pierre, the faithful black companion of Forrest’s many exploring trips, had been so close to death that the mountain named after him might well have been his headstone.
From here on the party camped a few days at a time to rest the horses and examine the country to the south, since all to the north was hidden by the forbidding slopes and sheer rock faces of the King Leopold Range. Michael knew that Forrest had tried in vain to cross this barrier but where the Margaret, emerging from its gorge, lapped the canyon wall, he was tempted to see whether chance would reveal a pass on the other side. Crocodiles nosing the surface among cobblers, turtles and banded rifle-fish were of the long-nosed fish-eating variety, and, assured by the native boys that they were harmless and timid, Michael swam across and climbed the blackened 500 feet of precipice. Beyond lay range upon range, down-tumbling and upward-sweeping among scattered boulders, wild gorges and sapphire mountain pools. He followed the gorge for some miles, cutting his blistered feet on razor-sharp rock edges, but the range was unrelenting to any but the nomad tribespeople who came there to bury their dead in hidden caves, and to hunt rock python and porcupine. In a deserted camp he picked up some part-finished and broken spearheads, fashioned from the flint and agate of the rocks around, like relics of the stone age found in the drifts and caves of Europe. The camp had been left hurriedly, probably on his coming, and embers still glowed on a small cairn of stones. Hoping to find a bird or goanna, ready cooked in skin or feathers, to appease his hunger, he moved the hot stones to uncover in horror the part-cooked body of a child. He stumbled on, with darkness closing on the savage range, and slept in a cave among the droppings of bats and kangaroos. Next morning he retraced his steps to the precipice and swam to rejoin his company.
Fever broke out within 280 miles of Beagle Bay, but already behind schedule, there was no choice but to trudge doggedly in near delirium, with splitting heads and tortured feet. Only the two boys were little the worse for their journey and worked hard and faithfully to bring the white men through.
The Fitzroy, mighty river of the western plains, abounded in fish and game and the sight of its splendid reaches and pastoral country heartened them for 150 miles. A grey sea of stunted pindan and minnerichi scrub broke at last into red ridges, which the blacks climbed, hoping to find an easy route for the sick men. They returned excitedly with broad smiles and a gabble of good news.
‘Station that-a-way! House, yard, everysing. True-fella we bin find’m!’
Their surprise and joy was no greater than that of Will McLarty, manager of Minnie, an out-station of Yeeda, who made the little homestead of bush timber with its bark roof a palace of comfort and respite to the exhausted travellers.
While the Durack-Emanuel party had been organising in the east, sheep men from the south-west, also stimulated by Forrest’s report, had joined forces with Victorian investors, and the first pioneers had come with their sheep by lugger to settle in around the west Kimberley rivers. George Julius Brockman had brought sheep from the Nicol Bay area to Beagle Bay and had established Yeeda Station in 1880, long before news of his intention had reached civilisation. Soon other isolated stations were cropping up along the Fitzroy—Mundoona, Meda, Lulugai, with flocks of from two to four thousand sheep. Here too the first-footers were of sturdy pioneer stock, but mostly descendants of English and Scots landed gentry brought up in the tradition of fences and careful paddocking, vastly different in background from the rugged cattle men soon to press in from the east, tough overlanders schooled in the rough-and-ready New South Wales style of the open range.
Will McLarty, whose people were early settlers of the south-western Pinjarra district, related the story of west Kimberley development. Already, it seemed, a shadow of despondency, not yet touching the bright dreams of city investors, had fallen on the pioneers. After the first wild flush of enthusiasm it was evident that this was after all a hard land. Early reports of its fertility and abundance had deceived many that pioneering settlement would be a simple matter here. Terms of land tenure were more severe than were warranted for a remote and lonely land of long, dry winters and wet tropical summers. A port was needed desperately, a jetty for shipping and local stores.
‘Don’t exaggerate the value of the country or underestimate the hardships,’ McLarty advised his guests. ‘They talk down south as if we live in a sort of Eden here—everything handed us on a silver platter, but it’s a tough battle every inch of the way, as pioneering has always been, and little romance in it that I can see.’
McLarty took over the party’s sadly reduced outfit and the eleven remaining horses and saw them off on their eighty-mile journey to the coast at Beagle Bay, where, according to plan, the schooner Mary Smith should have been awaiting their arrival. There was, however, no sign of the ship and the party made camp in the bush above the tide-swept beach. Three weeks of speculation and worry dragged by, during which time a pearling lugger put in for water. The owner of the outfit, an Englishman with a crew of Aboriginal ‘skin divers’, men and women, invited the party on board, displaying a deck strewn with giant oyster shells—Pinctada maxima, the world’s finest mother-of-pearl. In a box lined with green felt and with a double lock was what seemed to the travellers a fortune in pearls—hard-earned, the skipper said, for there were many hardships and hazards in the game. Cyclones had already destroyed luggers, all hands on board. Sometimes divers were smitten with paralysis, attacked by sharks, giant gropers, rays or devil fish.
Stumpy Michael, fascinated by this new aspect of northern industry, recorded that the pearler seemed a ‘colourful but somewhat callous customer’ who maintained that the black women were gamer and could stay down longer than the men. Trouble-makers, he said, had now begun to talk of ‘exploitation’, and he was afraid they would soon have to import divers from overseas at great expense, no doubt causing the ruin of a budding industry.
The Mary Smith, a sailing vessel of 650 tons, turned up at last with a tale of accident and bad weather that had caused long delay.
In his diary Stumpy Michael made a brief concluding entry:
1st. Jan. 1883. Arrived Fremantle after a rough passage - 1400 miles from Beagle Bay, and half a year since our departure from Queensland. Received with the greatest kindness by everybody, especially Mr Alexander Forrest, whose warm hearted welcome we shall never forget.
The party still faced a 3,400-mile sea journey around the south coast and north back to Brisbane, another two to three weeks’ travelling, but Kate Durack, at Archerfield, had already received news of their safe arrival over the telegraph that had linked Western Australia with the east five years before.
COUNTRY FINE BEYOND EXPECTATIONS NO CAUSE REGRET COST.
The final cost, owing to delays and mishaps, was actually about £2,000 over their original estimate of £4,000 but neither Duracks nor Emanuels ever considered it misspent.
The two boys, Pannikin and Pintpot, returned to their country on the first ship Darwin bound and were later to share the honours of leading Queensland cattle into Kimberley.
22
START OF THE BIG TREK
The year 1883. Duracks and Emanuels divide their Kimberley holdings and plan to stock them. Organisation at Thylungra for overland cattle trek. Partnerships and agreements. Stores and equipment. Departure from Thylungra and Galway Downs. The cattle rush. Galway Jerry Durack and family retire to Ipswich. Patsy Durack’s eldest son Mi
chael returns from college.
Mr Solomon Emanuel and Grandfather were both in Sydney to welcome the exploring party on its return from Western Australia and big decisions were made with surprising speed. Stumpy Michael summarised the situation:
‘Part of the area we took up previously on the map we found to be inferior and abandoned in favour of what seemed more likely the pick of the Ord and Fitzroy country. You understand they want only genuine settlers over there—not speculators. Lord Kimberley, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, is standing firm in England against the locking up of undeveloped blocks. He has set the rental very high at ten shillings per thousand acres and rules that any who have not stocked their country to the extent of twenty sheep or two head of cattle to the thousand acres within two years will forfeit their leases. At present over fifty-one million acres are held in lease in various interests but few of them will be able to meet the conditions and a lot of land now taken up will soon be available if we want it. I have taken up with Mr Forrest no more than we should be able to pay for and stock within the required time or thereabouts. This covers roughly one and a half million acres in west Kimberley in the Fitzroy region and about the same on either side of the Ord River near the Northern Territory border. Both areas are untried but seem on the face of it to be equally promising, although west Kimberley is at present thought to be rather more suitable for sheep-raising both because of the type of country and because sheep can be got to the west coast by ship. The cattle will have to come overland, but since mobs have already been driven from Queensland into the Territory as far as Victoria River it should be simple enough to bring them a couple of hundred miles farther to the Ord.’
‘The question is, gentlemen,’ Emanuel summed up, ‘which of us, at the present juncture, is more interested in sheep and which in cattle?’