Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  On behalf cousins John Durack and Long Michael while on road with cattle by me P.D.

  John Durack sold 21 bullocks to George Ellms and my brother

  Jerry on the 15th of June 1885. Also 12 on the 12th June to above all at £5 per head.

  I have sold altogether to F. Cavangh 9 head of bullocks for £53 cash.

  Sold a mare and filly for Long Michael on the 21st June 1885 for £17 and received cash. (Have not paid Long Michael as yet.)

  The three brothers, Grandfather, Stumpy Michael and Galway Jerry, assembled in Brisbane to meet their cousin and hear first-hand details of the droving trip, found Long Michael somewhat low-spirited.

  ‘We should have got away six months earlier,’ he said. ‘We’d have been at the gulf then instead of in the middle of this God-awful drought. If you ask me, we’ll be lucky to get half the cattle through now.’

  In an effort to cheer him they took him to inspect their properties at Archerfield and Moorlands, and Grandfather showed him a block of land he had purchased for a home on the high bank of the Brisbane River, but it is doubtful whether these activities had the desired effect. Long Michael, well deserved as was his reputation for stockmanship and devotion to his job, had never regarded the bush life as his chosen calling. He had, as he confessed in later life, always hoped to work himself out of it before he was too old and establish himself in some less rigorous form of business. He was inclined to resent the turn of fate that had set him toiling on into the wilderness at much the same age that his cousin Galway Jerry had retired from the bush life to become a figure in the fashionable racing world. Long Michael’s branch of the family, although in Australia three years before the other and as hard-working as anyone in the colony, did not seem to have been favoured by fortune like their relatives. Darby Durack had never made money and had dropped dead slogging in the sun, while his sons had walked, penniless, out of the drought in New South Wales into another on the Diamantina and were still more or less broke. On the other hand everything their cousin Patsy touched had turned to gold since he dug up his first nugget on the Ovens in ’53.

  ‘I was born either too soon or too late,’ Long Michael said. ‘A bit earlier I’d have been in on the gold rushes and a bit later I would have come in on the college education we’re giving the younger boys.’

  ‘As it is,’ Grandfather consoled him, ‘you’ll be the first in on some of the richest country in Australia. You won’t regret taking on this trip.’

  Back on camp the drovers now had time to kill. Men off watch sat about whittling stockwhip handles from lengths of ironbark that had the pliability of whalebone and was known for some reason as ‘dead finish’. They spent hours patiently working bits of greenhide into their favourite types of whip, making rounded ‘snake belly’ plaits that would cut like knives in a straight thrust.

  Young Charlie Gaunt started a two-up school and Jack Sherringham played the concertina and sang the ‘101 bush melodies’ and a few of his own all to the same tune.

  Then there was ‘mumble-the-peg’, so much in vogue among stockmen of the day. Like knuckle bones but played with an open penknife, it kept the players amused for hours on end. Wild applause greeted feats of digital dexterity, with shouts of mirth for the loser who must worry a buried penknife out of the dust with his teeth. So great a grip had the game taken outback that James Tyson when advertising for stockmen added the curt advice: ‘No mumble-the-peggers need apply.’

  Still, the weeks dragged wearily. The cattle, forced to wander miles to grass, were falling away and the stockmen began to suffer from a mysterious skin affliction like scurvy. Other symptoms followed until, overcome by weakness and lethargy, they lay about in the shade of the scraggy coolibahs, some too weak to ride after the cattle and others too ill even to sit up. The boss drovers, sick themselves, doled out the nostrums of the bush -quinine, Epsom salts and Holloway’s mixture - but without avail. The nearest doctor was at Cloncurry, 200 miles away, but sicknesses such as fever, dysentery and Barcoo rot were regarded as part of a stockman’s lot. This seemed like all these common ailments in one, but only when two men died within a day of each other was its seriousness realised.

  Two black stockmen whose assistance had been called in to hold the cattle provided a clue to the problem by pointing out that the far end of the Parapitcherie waterhole had always been held taboo as a tribal camping-place.

  ‘That belong long time,’ they said. ‘Must be some reason. Might be poison.’

  Acting on tribal custom they dug sand soaks in the dry bed of the Burke and carried water each day in canteens and water bags to the sick men, who began to recover at once. Realising that the cattle and horses were also being affected by the water, they fenced off the death trap and sank large dry wells, hollowed troughs from tree trunks and filled them with whip and bucket for the perishing stock. Many beasts, however, were already dead or dying and although attempts were made to burn the carcasses the reek of carrion hung horribly about the waterhole.

  Later it was discovered that the Parapitcherie hole was fed by alkaline springs which attained a near lethal concentration as the freshwater-level fell.

  Light rain fell about the end of April ’84, just enough to make a little water and give fresh hope, but it caused the cattle to spread out, feeding over a wide range which made hard work for the weak horses.

  About a week later a rider from the nearest station came galloping at dawn.

  ‘Get moving, you fellows. The river’s down!’

  The drovers knew droughts and they knew floods—those sudden avalanches of water pouring from some distant part of the river into country where perhaps no rain had fallen for many months, filling the long dry channels of creeks and rivers, lifting timber and carcasses to go surging downstream, turning the parched landscape into an inland sea.

  ‘The river’s down!’

  Expertly the cooks had their equipment into the waggonettes and the stockmen were in their saddles and away. They were always competing over the time they took in catching and saddling a horse, getting a fire alight and a billy boiling, rolling a swag and hitching it to a pack—little things, seemingly unimportant, but on which at certain times might hang the fate of an entire mob and of men and horses too.

  The cattle but for the inevitable stragglers were taken at a run to higher ground where, minutes later, drovers watched the waters surging down, swirling into the topmost branches of the river trees under which they had camped for weary months…death-dealing, life-giving water, changing the face of the land.

  24

  ON TO THE TERRITORY

  The year 1884, Dividing the mobs. Long Michael rejoins party at Cloncurry. Pleuro camp on the Nicholson. Reunion with John Costello at Burketown. Blacks and crocodiles in the Territory. Fever camp on Roper River. The death of Jack Sherringham and John Urquart.

  The rain brought on a green haze of pig weed and ‘scurvy grass’ that the stockmen mixed with vinegar into a vile green mess and ate in great quantities. They swore by its curative effects and showed each other how their Barcoo sores were healing day by day. Horses and cattle too began to pick up, but over the long camp the four mobs had become in the stockman’s term ‘boxed up’. Six thousand head of stock, for they were now down over 1,000 head, must be mustered and redivided.

  Each boss drover had the task of cutting his own cattle from the big mob and cleanskins were held to be the property of whichever party ran them into his lot.

  This part of the story is Charlie Gaunt’s version. I had no chance of checking it with Long Michael or Black Pat but neither ever mentioned it to my knowledge. Perhaps they felt it reflected little credit on those who had since become heroes in the eyes of a younger generation. Perhaps Gaunt drew the long bow.

  Sometimes, he said, two or three men would get on the tail of a single unbranded beast, each trying to edge it out of the main mob and run it into his own. With nerves and tempers frayed through long waiting, sickness and tedium, personal antagonisms had arisen and wh
at might have been a merry sport turned to angry disputes. The drover’s weapon was his stirrup iron and swung on the end of a leather in the manner of a mace could be extremely effective.

  When a fight looked like starting a shout would go up. The men would gather, barracking and taking sides, until, as Charlie Gaunt had it, ‘a Connemara Fair was a piccaninny to the Parapitcherie cattle camp.’

  When Duncan McCaully and Big Johnnie Durack got into holds, Gaunt said he had to ‘holler’ for Duncan as they were both Kilfoyle’s men. Hopping around he saw a chance to ‘deal Johnnie a welt’ but Johnnie’s stirrup iron swung round in a flash and laid him low. He claimed to be as proud of that gash on the forehead as a Heidelberg student of his slash from a sword.

  ‘Every man jack of us had a brand of some sort out of it,’ Gaunt declared, ‘all except Tom Kilfoyle who somehow came out of the mêlée unscathed and with the most cleanskins to his credit.’

  With green feed and good water the cattle soon looked like the fine animals that had started from Mt Marlowe and Thylungra. They strung along up the Burke to Boulia, the same ones always in the lead of each mob, all taking their accepted positions with their particular cronies.

  The bar at the Drover’s Rest in Cloncurry overflowed with lanky, sunbronzed, bearded overlanders, swapping yarns, sketching maps on the bar counter or on the floor, forefingers wetted in whisky or rum. Among them was Long Michael, back from Brisbane with his plant of fresh horses and news of the big city. Before they moved on two of his drovers pulled out and he was forced to engage a young stockman who was eager for adventure but who looked too ‘flash’ in jodhpurs and sombrero to be any good. He hailed from Carrandotta on the Georgina, one of the young ‘Colonial Experience’ jackeroos from England who had erected a steeplechase course with stone wall jumps near the homestead, and he assuredly did not belong in that outfit of tough, efficient stockmen.

  From ‘the Curry’ the route ran over a deep crossing where the cattle were forced to swim. Half-way across, the leaders of Long Michael’s mob began to turn. So far the new hand had been given little chance to use his ‘flash’ outsize stockwhip but he chose this moment to wield it on the backs of the cattle. At once the panicked animals made a frenzied circle.

  ‘Straighten ’em there!’ Long Michael shouted, at which the newchum’s stockwhip swung again. In the swirling circus of heaving backs and panting heads some of the weaker animals had already been pushed under and drowned. Black Pat wrested the mischievous stockwhip from the newchum’s fist and set to work with the rest to force the cattle out of the mill by turning the horns and heading a lead for the far bank.

  Once on the other side Long Michael rounded on the new hand:

  ‘You in the b—f…ancy pants…’

  Words failing him, he wrote off his rage with a cheque. At least that was his version. Charlie Gaunt’s was rather more picturesque.

  Short-handed, and with now only two waggonettes between the four parties, they veered north-west into the teeth of biting south-westerlies that whipped up long clouds of red ‘Leichhardt dust’, famous even before the shadow of man-made erosion had fallen on a misused land. The route wound through bold outcrops of copper-coloured hills, over stony, treeless vistas—hard country, unfolding into open plains with welcome belts of messmate and shady silver box.

  Dawn upon dawn awoke to the rattle of hobble chains as the goaded mob slouched on across tenuous gulf streams. Spring followed on the heels of the rainless northern winter, trees blossomed and put forth new foliage. Palms, ferns and luxuriant creepers flourished along the water courses and Leichhardt pines gave deep shade to the cattle camps, but as the clouds banked up the raging heat pressed down. This time the optimists read their signs of an early wet aright. Storms broke in October of ’84 and the cattle strung out contentedly as lush grass sprang thick and fast on the broad plains.

  It was at a camp on the Nicholson that the first dread symptoms of disease appeared. John Urquart called attention to a sick-looking cow in Kilfoyle’s mob.

  ‘It’s when the grass is fresh like this we can expect trouble,’ he said and was laughed at for a Job’s comforter.

  Soon animals in the other mobs began to lag, their eyes glazed and sunken and nostrils streaming. This was a blow they had not bargained for. A skilled stockman could pull his mob through drought or flood, wheel it in a rush or turn it in a ring, but pleuro was a hazard against which they stood defenceless.

  Sick animals were quickly isolated and carcasses burned as they died, but the drovers knew the damage was done.

  John Urquart, whose veterinary knowledge was advanced for his day, had been laughed at for his ‘new-fangled’ kit that included an inoculating outfit. Now the overlanders’ only hope of saving their herd hung on its efficiency. A broken-down yard and cattle crush on the Nicholson was hastily repaired. Urquart obtained serum from cattle slightly affected and setting himself at the head of the crush inoculated each beast as it filed past.

  During the next three days a few more animals died but most got through with only a slight attack. In a week or more, to the frank astonishment of the sceptical drovers, all traces of the sickness had disappeared, but before moving on they nailed up a sign as a warning of possible infection to further droving parties.

  PLEURO CAMP. OCTOBER ’84. BEWARE!

  While here Long Michael and Patsy Moore took the waggons into Burketown, supply centre for the spearheads of northern settlement and then a little metropolis of the lonely gulf. To their great delight they found in the animated gathering of stockmen, teamsters and drovers, John Costello and his son Michael, who had been at St Pat’s with my father, on their way to Roper River with 1,700 head of cattle. Costello had recently sold his Rockhampton property, Cawarral, and his Gladstone interests—Emu Park, Tanby and Annondale—sent his wife and family on a trip to Ireland and set off with his eldest boy to carve a station out of a piece of country that then seemed to promise everything his former holdings lacked.

  Other old acquaintances, from Cooper’s Creek turned up and they could think of no better way to celebrate than to run a race meeting and yarn on into the night of the good old days and the fortunes they would make in Kimberley and the Territory.

  ‘We’ll get together every year,’ they promised. ‘We’ll have meetings with fooling and dancing all night like we used at Galway Downs and Windorah, women and kids and all.’

  A drover who had been with Buchanan to stock Wave Hill in the Territory smiled in his beard.

  ‘If it’s women and kids you want,’ he said, ‘you better head back the way you come—unless of course you prefer ’em black.’

  Settlement Creek, near the Territory border, was regarded at that time as the drovers’ point of no return. Those whose aim was to leave the past behind or to avoid the police breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the border camp. Those who had left families or sweethearts or who looked to the protection of the law thought twice before starting on the next stage. The boss drovers put the situation to their men in plain terms:

  ‘If you want to pull out this is your last chance. If you’ve decided to carry on you’ll have to take the rough with the smooth and no whingeing.’

  ‘That was how Big Johnnie summed it up,’ Charlie Gaunt told us. ‘Only thing was, I been in there before and I known there wasn’t gonna be no smooth. I don’t think they knew just where the border was in those times but after we passed Settlement Camp we sort of knew we had crossed it. There was always a special feeling about the Territory.’

  As they had talked of the dreaded drought and the pleuro scourge they now talked of the blacks. A day would come when men would visit the Territory for no other purpose than to meet the people of myth and dream, to learn what they could of their ancient way of life and the unwritten story of their past. To these first-comers, however, bound to the context of their times, they were simply ‘niggers’, another hazard to be overcome with the rest. If it was to be a battle for survival there would be no question of se
ntiment or the black man’s rights.

  ‘Look out for yourselves past Settlement Creek. The blacks are bad.’

  Punitive parties, meting out stern retribution for the death of Jack Travers, the cook in Nat Buchanan’s party who had had his head chopped off while bent over his baking dish, had done nothing to intimidate them. Lately they had taken to mutilating horses, skulking on the outskirts of the mobs and sometimes causing a stampede.

  One night Black Pat had heard stealthy footsteps approaching his swag and had let go the full contents of his revolver without further enquiries. There had been a wild shriek and in the morning they followed a blood trail to the river bank where it disappeared.

  Another night Long Michael, riding round the cattle, spotted a dozen natives rounding up some horses. Not wanting to fire his revolver so close to the drowsing mob he galloped towards them full tilt and they dispersed like shadows. Sometimes there were ‘nigger tracks’ around the camp in the morning and marks showing that the blacks had been dragging spears along in their feet as they often did to disguise the fact that they were carrying weapons.

  But even though they kept for the most part discreetly out of sight, the blacks were always there, a danger skulking in pandanus or tea-tree thickets, crouching on the ant-hill plains. Horses smelt them at the waterholes and riders sat alert in their saddles as the cattle drank.

  For four months the steaming wet held the gulf country in the grip of bog and ‘bankers’. Sometimes the party was held up for weeks on end waiting for the rivers to go down. Tempers grew frayed and personal idiosyncrasies strained taut nerves to breaking point. It was little wonder that seasoned drovers became known as men of few words and iron self-discipline.