Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  After tropical downpours great clods of sticky mud on the hoofs of cattle and horses made the going heavy and slow through rank, wet-weather grass often high above the backs of the moving herd. The cattle, which fed always against the driving wind and rain, had often to be pushed into the weather and forced along until they sometimes turned irritably and charged the drovers.

  After the intense heat of the day the night wind would blow cold and strong off rain-drenched country, and men on shift, holding the restless herd, would shiver in their saddles and coming off watch throw themselves down under their nets in their wet clothes and muddy boots. Bad colds and attacks of fever followed and they began to look back nostalgically to the good old dry stages of the Queensland track. But slowly they were ticking off the miles as river after river dropped behind them—Calvert, Robinson, Foelsche, Wierien.

  On McArthur River they found a station under the management of one Tom Lynott. He had almost completed a fine homestead from timber that had been shipped around the coast by the optimistic owners but he pointed out how before the roof was on the white ants were in the rafters and the blacks were chasing the cattle into the ranges.

  ‘Where are you making for?’ Lynott asked.

  ‘The Ord.’

  ‘Do you reckon you’ll get on any better over there?’

  ‘God knows.’

  A man known as Black Jack Reid had brought a schooner up the McArthur to form a shanty store at a spot the blacks called Borroloola—place of the paperbarks. With a stock of provisions and a tank of rum he hoped to make his fortune from overlanding drovers and prospectors making across to Pine Creek, and maybe soon, it was already whispered, into Kimberley.

  ‘A man ought to do well here on the stock route,’ he said and the drovers agreed, though so far ‘the route’ was more or less a figure of speech.

  Sometimes they crossed the trail of a previous party—probably that of Nat Buchanan—but they lost no time looking for tracks. Their compass course lay due west and one man’s guess was as good as another’s which way to deviate in looking for a river crossing or skirting a range.

  Sharks and crocodiles abounded in these swiftly running tidal streams. Four horses had been taken on the Robinson and while camped at the Limmen several beasts, wading belly deep as cattle love to do, had been lost. One cow had managed to shake herself free and struggle out, badly torn by hungry teeth and claws, and was afterwards known affectionately as the ‘alligator cow’, for in these times, before it was established that only species of crocodile are found in Australian waters, the blunt-nosed, man-eating kind were always referred to as ‘alligators’.

  At the Limmen John Costello’s party, held up by pleuro and other setbacks, caught up with the Kimberley-bound expedition. Sending their cattle on so they would not become mixed with Costello’s herd, Big Johnnie and Long Michael remained at the river for a day or two while Costello picked the site for his homestead. He had leased all the rivers of the Limmen Bight, he told them, and planned to form several stations.

  ‘Look at it,’ he enthused, with a sweeping gesture. ‘Did you ever see such country?’

  As they were now well into the wet season both pasture and water were plentiful and the homestead site Costello quickly chose was magnificent. Backed by ranges and with a foreground of lily-covered water, it was close to a remarkable valley, laced with streamlets, overgrown with tropical palms and creepers and the haunt of wild birds.

  ‘You will not get better country than this by going farther,’ he said. ‘If you feel like coming back at any time, just let me know.’

  Once he had the homestead up he planned to leave his men in charge and set off to meet his wife and family at Rockhampton on their return from the old country. There he would charter a ship and bring his family around to their new home, ‘The Valley of Springs’.

  ‘How will you get them all this way up from the coast?’ Long Michael asked.

  ‘They can ride,’ Costello said cheerfully. ‘I reckon the river should be navigable to Leichhardt’s Crossing and we can have the horses waiting there.’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve bringing women and kids out here,’ Long Michael told him dourly. ‘The Cooper was bad enough, but the Limmen…G…od Almighty!’

  ‘Well, if you think you’ll do any good over there without the women you’re making a big mistake,’ Costello said.

  Long Michael shrugged and rode off with his brother on their lonely trail. Big Johnnie, a tough man with a tender spot for family life, spoke yearningly:

  ‘How long will it be, I wonder, before we can bring our women to the Ord?’

  Long Michael had his own views on that subject.

  ‘I’m going to Kimberley to make money. Not to make a home.’

  Christmas ’84 was celebrated on the Rosey River where the party was held up again by heavy storms. A Christmas morning surprise in Black Pat’s swag was a death adder, twenty inches long with a tapering tail from which projected a silky yellow tassel. Everyone carried a snake-bite cure in his pocket but for all the hair-raising snake stories they all loved to tell, no one seems to have required the antidote.

  Here, horse tracks coming into water recalled the story of an unsuccessful venture of some years before when horses had been brought to the Territory to breed remounts for the Indian Army. On the journey inland from Darwin some of the escort died of fever and the rest, sick and dispirited, abandoned the project and turned their horses loose.

  By the time the drovers came across, hundreds of brumbies of good stock ranged the countryside, and almost every party from Nat Buchanan onwards had organised a brumby muster hereabouts with little or no success.

  Renovating one of Buchanan’s ingenious traps, the drovers hoped to be able to add a few good horses to their plant, but the swift-footed animals, quick and shrewd enough to have eluded blacks and crocodiles, were more than a match for such clumsy tricks. The sum total of the muster was a single stallion, a fine well-bred animal which continued with the cattle on the journey west.

  During ten weeks’ enforced spell, plagued by sandflies and with gear going mouldy in the packs, repairs were made to the two waggonettes which had become badly damaged on the rough track. Long Michael and Black Pat never tired of telling how they contrived and improvised, even making a new thread for a broken axle with a three-cornered file. Long Michael made an eight-strand stockwhip from the hide of a wallaroo, while others fished and shot game for the pot.

  Stockmen studied the bird life closely during the enforced camps. Here they watched the antics of native companions, jabirus with seven-foot wing span, glorious white cranes with flowing plumage. Game was plentiful, magpie geese, whistling duck, Burdekin duck went wheeling and calling in dense clouds over the lush wet-weather landscape. There were millions of painted finches, pigeons, bright parrots. Crows and wedgetailed eaglehawks gathered in great flocks around the camps to pick the bones of butchered or perished beasts. Bower birds filched spoons, spectacles or pieces of broken glass for their playgrounds in the scrub. Squall birds, mallee hens, wild turkeys and cuckoos provided the drovers with endless interest.

  The party came on to the Hodgeson River about where Nutwood Downs Station stands today. The cattle were brought across and camp struck on the other side, but the provision waggon could not be got over. The stockmen began swimming back and forth with rations tied to their heads until the knobby nose of an outsize crocodile appeared and the rest of the goods came by packhorse via a rocky bar some miles downstream. Here the waggon too was at last trundled across and a start made for the Leichhardt bar on the Roper where pioneer storekeeper Matt Kirwan was then running a depot.

  Here now was the lush, tropical north that returning drovers spoke of with mixed repugnance and fascination, the deep, oily green waters of the Roper with thickly bordering pandanus palms, bamboos, banyans and paperbarks. Some blacks passed them in a dugout canoe, the flood waters carrying them swiftly downstream while they poled dexterously to keep free of the banks, floating de
bris or overhanging limbs. At this stage anything with a black skin was a potential enemy to the drovers and they viewed with apprehension the strong, sinuous fellows with their raised tribal markings, bamboo belts and bracelets, woven neck charms and finely tapered nose bones. They judged them bigger, stronger and more savage looking—almost another race to the familiar Queenslanders—and read their seeming indifference to themselves as ‘audacity’.

  The Roper depot among thick tropical trees and creepers on the river bank had the unreal quality of a stage setting. A supply schooner was anchored among the mangroves waiting for the tide and the crew, Chinese, Aboriginal and Malay, was lounging about the little timber and angle iron shanty. The skipper, in tropical topee and whites, sat fanning himself in a hammock, drinking ‘square face’ with the storekeeper and some drovers from somewhere inland. A few sporting types were shooting at bottles and crocodiles, playing poker or mumble-the-peg and singing snatches of bawdy Territory songs, while black women hung about and cast sheep’s eyes at the newcomers. Two or three of these wore moleskin trousers and shirts and carried themselves with an air of importance. The newcomers learned that they were attached to various overland droving parties and were reputed to be splendid horsewomen.

  ‘You’re in the land of Black Velvet now,’ one of the loungers remarked. ‘Unless you go round to Darwin you’ll not find a white woman in the north between Burketown and Broome.’

  The storekeeper tossed them a bundle of mail and pointed from a bottle of whisky to the water bag.

  ‘Help yourselves—no measuring nips in this country. Just pay what you reckon’s a fair thing when it’s time to make tracks.’

  The system evidently paid in the long run as most helped themselves so lavishly that ‘time to make tracks’ was often when their cheque cut out. Long Michael and Tom Kilfoyle resolved to make their stay within reach of the depot as short as possible.

  They had pitched camp at McMinn’s Bluff seven miles upstream, but the heavily loaded waggons were blocked by flood waters on the way back and had to be left while the men made rafts from tent flies and got emergency rations across to their hungry men. It was a miserable camp, for the intolerable muggy heat, ceaseless rain, mud, mildew and plagues of every pest that crawled and flew had a bad effect on the men’s morale. A rule of the road that a stockman could drink what he liked in town but nothing must be brought into camp somehow broke down at this stage. Rum, smuggled in from the depot, increased the boss drovers’ work and anxiety and did nothing to alleviate the fever that had laid siege to the party.

  Desperate to get away, the four leaders decided to make a supreme effort to move the waggons over what now seemed a possible crossing. The blacks, however, had got in first. Bags of sugar, cases of tea, tobacco, rice and dried fruit had disappeared from the vehicles and the ground about was strewn with battered tins which they had not succeeded in opening and flour for which they did not then know the use.

  Cursing niggers, purveyors of rum and their ill-fortune in general, they made back to the camp before returning to the depot for fresh supplies.

  John Urquart was by this time so ill with malaria and the effects of 30 OPR that they hurried him in with them, hoping he could catch the schooner for Darwin and medical aid. By the time the boat arrived, however, the good old bushman had shot himself in delirium.

  When they returned to the camp they found that young Sherringham, likewise maddened by malaria and rum, had put an end to his misery in the same way.

  25

  END OF AN EPIC

  The year 1885. The Overland Telegraph to Victoria River. Black Pat and Tom Hayes leave the party for Cambridge Gulf. Last stage. Life stirring in Kimberley. The overlanders ride to Cambridge Gulf where Black Pat has set up a store. Early arrivals on the gulf. Tom Kilfoyle, Big Johnnie and Long Michael Durack ride back to Queensland.

  The Roper ran west to Red Lily Lagoon, a place of fantastic beauty with its massed water lilies, crimson and blue, green reeds and drooping paperbarks, haunt of wild duck, and, judging by the bark canoes floating on the water, of wild blacks.

  They pushed on to the Overland Telegraph line and the little post office at Elsey Station—symbol of hope and progress in the never-never. Palmer, the manager, welcomed them warmly and filled their depleted tucker bags when they rode in to send wires to their Queensland relatives. Telegrams and letters, advising of the deaths of Urquart and Sherringham and the loss of about 3,500 head of stock all told between Thylungra and the Roper camp, had gone off by the schooner from the depot to Darwin. These had been received when the following telegram reached Thylungra about May ’85:

  PARTY NOW OVERLAND TELEGRAPH AND TRAVELLING WELL CONDITION REMAINING STOCK REASONABLY GOOD EXPECT REACH ORD FOUR TO FIVE MONTHS TIME REGARDS AND LOVE FAMILY AND FRIENDS DURACK KILFOYLE HAYES MOORE.

  A sixty-mile stretch west of the Telegraph was heavy going through rough, heavily timbered but almost waterless country. The long wet was over and the grass quickly turning yellow. The smaller waggon broke down completely and had to be abandoned and around Dry River the cattle began to lag and show symptoms of red water fever. The decision to push on rather than rest the cattle was fortunate as they lost only a few head, whereas later expeditions, lingering in what proved to be a badly infected area, were to lose hundreds.

  It would be some ten years before the cause of this dread disease was finally traced to a small bug-like parasite that had come into the Territory with a shipment of cattle from Batavia. The drovers were not then to know the grip that cattle tick was already taking of the north, how the travelling mobs were spreading it across the Territory into Queensland and over to Kimberley. Their deadliest enemies were not after all to be the blacks but two species of insect smaller than a man’s fingernail—Ixodes bovis and the Anopheles mosquito.

  Hurried down the Dry River for about twenty miles, the cattle were again turned due west.

  Basalt ridges, swampy flats of tangled cajuput and gutta-percha trees, tantalising rivers that turned their tracks to north and south, led on at last to the Victoria. This river around which Nat Buchanan had stocked a vast holding comprising many millions of acres for the city investors Fischer and Lyons in ’83 was a major landmark in the journey. ‘Wait ’til we’re eating Johnnie cakes on the Victoria,’ they had said to cheer themselves back on the Georgina.

  ‘Call this a river?’ said a returning drover they had met on the McArthur. ‘Wait ’til you see the Victoria!’

  And here she was—queen of the north, sweeping majestically between the bending ranks of river trees with exultant escorts of wild birds.

  Long Michael, when telling me the story many years later on the Behn River, paused significantly at this stage.

  ‘Now here’s something you may never have heard before,’ he said. ‘Except for a bit of luck I might have gone down in history as “the man who shot Willie MacDonald”.’

  All the way along they had kept in touch with the MacDonald party that had at times been only a stage or two behind, and they already knew the story of their many misfortunes. Every beast of their original herd had perished in the drought of ’83. Most of their men and their MacKensie cousins had pulled out and gone home, but Willie and Charlie had taken up this land in west Kimberley and were determined to get stock to it somehow. Short of money, they had taken jobs here and there to help build up another mob and had battled on into the Territory against pleuro, fever and shortage of hands. On the Roper Charlie MacDonald became so ill with malaria that he was forced to leave the cattle and ride to Darwin with a party of prospectors. Alone with his little mob and a Chinese cook, Willie managed to engage two stockmen, Charlie and George Hall, from another party. Past the Telegraph their stores were rifled by blacks and they were for three weeks on salt beef and ship’s biscuits. Coming on the fresh tracks of a big mob, Willie inferred that the Durack party must be close to the Victoria and had ridden ahead to try to borrow a few provisions. It was late at night when he saw the fire by the river bank and not
wishing to create a disturbance had tied his horse to a tree some distance away and walked up to the camp. He had long since worn out his last pair of stockman’s boots and was barefooted so it was little wonder that Long Michael had mistaken the quietly moving figure for a native.

  ‘I had my finger on the trigger,’ he told me, ‘before he had the sense to speak up. Willie had eyes like a cat in the dark and he must have spotted me under my net. “Put that rifle away there, Durack,” he said. “It’s only another poor bloody drover like yourself, and a hungry one at that.” We weren’t too flush with the tucker ourselves, but we gave him enough to carry them on to the Ord.’

  Next day they passed the station on the west side and followed up the big river to its junction with the Wickham. About here they met up with Edward Weldon, an experienced drover who had overlanded with Buchanan, taking cattle for Osmond and Panton to stock the first cattle station in east Kimberley. That Weldon turned up at the Wickham junction was opportune for he agreed to continue with the party into Kimberley. This allowed Black Pat and Tom Hayes to return to the Roper depot and take the schooner to Darwin, from where they planned somehow to make their way by sea to Cambridge Gulf with stores for the party after its arrival.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of offsiders,’ Weldon said. ‘Territory boys and making back for their country, but I think they’d come if you want them.’

  And there were the inseparables Pintpot and Pannikin who, after their return from Perth, had constituted themselves authorities in chief on the Kimberleys and had already been across to the Ord a second time with Buchanan and Bob Button. The idea of leading the Durack cattle on to the country they had helped select three years before must have appealed to them for they cheerfully headed their horses west again.

  The route swung south up the Wickham and turned west.