by Mary Durack
At times he would shake his head over the Australian-born generation of his family, unable to express himself clearly on where the difference lay between their attitude and his own.
‘I will not criticise them in their stockwork or their bushmanship, for they were born to it and I was not, but in other things they do not seem to think beyond a day or a year. They will act upon impulse and make the law for themselves as they go along and hang what shall be the end result of it. They have been brought up in the faith but they do not return to it for advice. They look only to themselves as though they were Almighty God Himself, which they are not.’
To this ‘the young fellows’ in questions would reply with some scorn.
‘We have been brought up in a country where a man has to rely on his own judgement. We have no time to be riding a thousand miles to find a priest and besides, we don’t carry our religion on our sleeves like you Irishmen.’
‘You do not understand me,’ Grandfather would protest. ‘Ye must carry the faith in yere hearts and yere work will be blessed.’
And who could say that he had not been blessed when he rode into the lonely land with his hand in the hand of God? He had loved the country and its wild people and both had served him well. His family had grown up about him with strong bodies and good minds, his flocks and herds had increased and multiplied. He had brought people and life to the wilderness. There were homes now on the inland rivers and roads criss-crossed the vast, grass plains. He had been self-reliant, hard-working, purposeful, but every day he had acknowledged the help of God and his need of it. Some of the young people, like his own son Michael, could run rings around him in a theological argument, but their religion had become a formal thing and the saints who were so close and real to an Irish generation were far away from them—high and strange upon their heavenly thrones.
Would these young fellows, riding a new wilderness, be equally blessed? Had he done right to set them upon this adventure without wives and families to soften the harshness and loneliness of their pioneering work? Many may have considered John Costello and himself imprudent in bringing women and children to Cooper’s Creek and yet it would never have occurred to them to have left their families behind. Nor would they have considered postponing their marriages until life seemed plain sailing. It had seemed to them that little worth while could be achieved alone. How could the country have come to life without the families—the women he had sometimes wished to the bottom of the sea, the children who had not all been spared to them?
Without the inventive of family life, would these young men put up decent homes for themselves and live up to the standards in which they had been reared? How would they handle the blacks? Would they ride rough-shod, insensitive, or would they bear in mind, as he and Costello had done, that these too were the children of God? Had he been right after all in encouraging them to leave the Cooper country? Was he right in leaving it himself or should he, like his sister Sarah, have decided to remain and weather another drought?
Somehow talking to Pumpkin helped him to cast aside his doubts. He saw it as a sign of age to lose faith in youth, and remembered that after all they were fine, practical fellows, good-hearted enough and braver than the average. Big Johnnie had a nice girl in Molong—Irish-born, whom he would no doubt marry in a year or two and they would make a home on the Ord. Black Pat and Long Michael had a string of girls to choose from and meanwhile they had their Uncle Tom Kilfoyle also still unmarried, but a solid fellow, to keep an eye on them. Young Duncan McCaully should be all right too, for although simpler and more sentimental than the Durack brothers he had been one of the toughest fellows on Cooper’s Creek. Once there was a woman or two in the country others would come and soon there would be normal social life. It was a wonderful opportunity for them and they had one and all been keen to go. No one could ever say he had coerced them into it and in case that should be said of his own sons he was keeping them at college and equipping them for professional careers if such should be their choice.
Meanwhile Grandmother was quietly performing the final tasks, for however her husband might vacillate she knew with her woman’s realism that the die was cast. Their time at Thylungra had come to an end and for better or worse they must enter this new phase. She consoled herself that whereas she had not felt well-cast at first in the role of pioneer woman of the lonely west others now came to her for advice and called her ‘the Mother of Cooper’s Creek’. Perhaps in time she would come to feel at home in this new role as wife of a prosperous retired squatter in a city mansion.
When the buggy was packed at last and her pot plants and crate of precious ducks carefully settled in, Grandfather still sat on, his gaze wandering down the bank into the near-dry bed of Kyabra Creek where the white cockatoos and crows flapped and cried among the cajuputs and wild oranges.
‘We came into the drought, Mary, and we leave a drought behind.’
‘But you always said you would go in a four-in-hand and a rich man, so we must thank God for the good years between.’
‘The happy years, Mary.’
‘The happy years.’
Pumpkin was making a last adjustment to the buggy harness as old Cobby, now nearly blind and weeping unrestrainedly, held open the gate.
‘I’ll be back to see they’re treating you right,’ Grandfather said. The manager has it in writing that those horses belong to you now, Pumpkin, and he knows you’re a free man and as long as ye wear that medal I gave you St Patrick will look after you.’
‘I’ve got that travelling man too—that St Christopher,’ Pumpkin said.
Grandmother looked down at the scraggy old man beside the gate, the ‘guardian angel’ she had once taken for a crafty savage.
‘Good old Cobby,’ she said. ‘I will always remember…’ and let down her gossamer veil.
There now remained only the leave-taking with Sarah Tully and Poor Mary Skeahan who, since Dinny had finally given over the Rasmore run, was living with her sister at Wathagurra.
Grandfather, at sight of his sisters’ stricken faces, forced a heartiness he did not feel.
‘Whenever any of you want a trip to town there’s a home for you to come to and all expenses paid, and I’ll be back of course—I should say two or three times a year at the least.’
‘But it’s only I will see you, Patsy,’ Sarah said, ‘as I see my own lost little ones.’
Grandfather disliked what he called his sister’s ‘morbid prophecies’.
‘I don’t understand why you should be so fixed on staying on here,’ he chided her. ‘If it’s the graves you’re worried about why not send the poor little ones to lie with the others in the Goulburn cemetery—as Mary and I have done with our first little Jeremiah?’
‘And have them wandering lonely about the empty house and crying for us along the creek? No, never while there’s a Tully left.’
Not long after the family went away Sarah heard that stockmen were tying their horses to the railings of the Thylungra graveyard where her babies were buried. Grimly she set off in her buggy, dug up the crumbling bones with her own hands and reburied them at Wathagurra.
‘It is here your father and I will be lying,’ she told her children, ‘and each of you according to your place in the family.’
And so Sarah established her dynasty that would draw from the Cooper all those things for which her brothers sought so far afield.
Long after her death a fine modern homestead replaced the wattle and daub shack that was made in ’74, but it faces, like the first, into the prevailing wind of the west. That was as Sarah had wanted it—so that she could watch down the road to Thylungra for the brothers who never came back…
In Brisbane while settling into the new home came the happy news that both boys—Michael and John—had passed their matriculation and were returning home. Grandfather had cast off his depression in a fresh burst of enthusiasm. He called the new home Maryview, and early in ’86 threw it open for a housewarming party that lasted for several
days. Friends and relations flocked in to exclaim at so much splendour, at the view from the balcony and the newly planted lawns and gardens descending almost to the river’s edge, at the modern stables where Grandfather’s famous buggy horses that had carried him over so many thousand outback miles now munched and champed luxuriously.
Old Mr Healy, slightly tipsy with champagne, wandered among the guests announcing his decision to return to his sister in Kilkenny. Up to this time, he said, as tutor to the children and business adviser to their father, he had been indispensable. Now with the elder boys grown up and a credit to his teaching, the younger ones, Pat and Jerry, starting at Christian Brothers’ College near Brisbane and Mr Durack’s affairs at this satisfactory conclusion, he felt he had earned his retirement. It was his duty now, he felt, to put all his weight behind the Home Rule Bill for Ireland. Grandfather saw him on to his ship with mingled feelings of relief and sorrow, and to ease the old man’s grief at the final parting said that he and his wife would try to visit him in Ireland ‘in a year or two’. Mr Healy nodded through his tears:
‘I will wait for you.’
At home the old man told everyone of the rich relations in Australia who were soon to visit him and waiting, he held on to life:
‘Oh yes, they will come for sure. My cousin, Mr Patsy Durack, is a man of his word, you know.’
Items about the possibility of gold in Kimberley had now begun to appear in the Queensland press. It was revealed that as far back as ’82 three prospectors, Phil Saunders, Adam John and John Quinn, had found colours among ranges south of Nicholson Plains. John had taken ill at the time of the discovery and, tied to his horse, had been led back to the Territory by his mates, but word of the find had caused a government party, led by geologist Edward Hardman, to be sent to the site.
In his report, which appeared in August ’85, Hardman wrote of ‘a large area of country which I believe will prove to be auriferous to a payable degree…good colours of gold…distributed over about 140 miles along the Elvire, Panton and Ord Rivers as well as on the Mary and Margaret Rivers where indications are very good…sufficient to justify the expenditure of a reasonable sum of money in fitting out a party to thoroughly test the country…’
It needed no more to touch off the easily roused optimism of a gold-minded community. The more responsible papers published warning articles, pointing out the costs and risks involved in prospecting in this remote and still unsettled area but already a party had chartered a ship from Brisbane to Cambridge Gulf. Grandfather, as easily excited by rumours of gold as the rest of them but with more caution than some, tried to discuss the possibilities calmly with his sons.
‘It may prove another blue duck, of course, but if there’s to be a rush it means an immediate local market for the cattle. It would give us time to look around for other avenues. If you decide to go, the country is yours for the taking. If not…’
By this, as might be imagined, wild horses could hardly have kept the boys from their Ord River heritage. Grandfather booked their passages on the Rajputana, Cambridge Gulf bound, with the prospecting party, in a month’s time.
While preparations for departure were in progress a telegram from Longreach made known that Long Michael, Big Johnnie and their uncle Tom Kilfoyle had returned overland from Kimberley and planned to take the coach from Charleville to visit their family in Molong. Grandfather was on the next coach west and arrived at Charleville at the same time as the three overlanders rode in. He knew more about the news of gold than they.
‘It looks as though there may be more than has been published,’ he said, ‘for the South Australian Government proposed setting up a port just inside the Territory border to capture the new gold trade but the West Australian Premier decided to get in first. He is supposed to be already on his way up the coast to open a port on Cambridge Gulf.’
The travellers were greatly excited at this news.
‘Then Black Pat should be in the money with his store and there will be some people in the country after all.’
Big Johnnie reported his disappointment in the Forrest Vale run but declared the Ord River country taken up in the boys’ names to be the best he had seen anywhere in Australia.
‘If they have decided to take it on,’ he said, ‘I will help them start the place when I get back and we can select another block later when you get across yourself. Meanwhile I have left all the cattle in charge of Duncan McCaully on the Ord.’
Decisions for momentous journeys were made with the usual speed. Long Michael and Tom Kilfoyle, having seen the family at Molong, were to hurry back to catch the Rajputana with the boys, Big Johnnie was to return overland, this time with his younger brother Jerry Brice who had been running Grandfather’s hotel at Adavale and they would try to purchase a few hundred head of cattle on their way through the Territory.
‘If ye get married in Molong,’ Grandfather said, ‘the girls could go around to Wyndham on the Rajputana, There’d not be much time but ye’d have only to wire and I’d get anything they’d be needing put on board.’
Long Michael answered vehemently for them all.
‘It’s no country for white women, Patsy.’
‘If it’s no country for the women, then what use is it to the men?’ Grandfather demanded.
‘When the markets open up we’ll make our fortunes there,’ Long Michael said. ‘Time enough then to think about marrying. Just now women and kids would be nothing but a handicap.’
This was a new outlook to Grandfather.
‘And where is it any different to Cooper’s Creek in the early days?’
‘The isolation, the fever, the blacks. The women’d want company, get sick—maybe worse.’
‘But the fever should go when the living improves. Ye get it anywhere living in the open and no vegetables. As for the isolation and the blacks…’
‘I want to get married,’ Big Johnnie confessed, ‘but I’ll give it another year or two. It would hardly be fair to ask a girl just yet.’
Grandfather shook his head.
‘But a country without women, I cannot picture it! It will be a sad, barren place until they come.’
After the departure of the cattle Stumpy Michael had gone into partnership with a wealthy friend, Mr Lumley Hill of Brisbane, and had given Long Michael a third share in the stock he had driven for them into Kimberley. A few days before the Rajputana was due to sail, Stumpy Michael came up to interview his cousin but the sight of the preparations, the horses ready for shipment, the talk of gold, of the country he had taken up and the tremendous work of settling in, sent him hurrying back to Archerfield to pack his own bags.
‘It is all more than Long Michael and a couple of men can handle on their own,’ he told his distraught wife, now the mother of seven children. There is so much to be decided and gone into that can only be done on the spot and it seems ridiculous that I should be taking it easy here. I should not be more than two or three months at the outside.’
So when the ship sailed at last Stumpy Michael’s name figured on the passenger list, with his two nephews, his cousin Long Michael, Tom Kilfoyle, Jim Byrne (whose brother Mick was on his way overland with Thylungra horses for the Ord) and Mr Stockdale’s prospecting party which included several women. It was not realised at the time that young Jack Skeahan, Poor Mary’s son, was stowed away below with the horses. Determined on a desperate action to break the maddening monotony of the featureless miles beside his drowsing father, he had one day picked up a bag of mail and flung it off the moving coach. When the loss was discovered he had taken his punishment, told his father where to find the missing bag and made off on foot for the nearest town. Hearing that his cousins were leaving for Kimberley he presented himself at Maryview asking to be allowed to go along but his request was refused on account of his youth. The ship was three days out before they discovered him.
‘All right,’ he was told. ‘You’ve chosen a man’s life and you’ll have to do a man’s work.’
‘That suits me
,’ the boy said. ‘I never did anything else but a man’s work anyway—except when they sent me to that confounded school’
As the Rajputana steamed through tropic seas to Cambridge Gulf my father and his brother broached the riches of their library. On the fly leaf of the journal he was resolved to start at Cambridge Gulf my father scribbled:
April 25/86. At sea. John quotes sonorous passages on the Creation from ‘Paradise Lost’. Myself much taken up with Shelley’s translation of Homer’s ‘Hymn to Mercury’. Magnificent stuff:
The herd went wandering o’er the divine mead,
Whilst these most beautiful Sons of Jupiter
Won their swift way up to the snowy head
Of white Olympus, with the joyous lyre
Soothing their journey…
27
THE GOLDEN YEAR
The year 1886. The port of Wyndham proclaimed. Ride from the gulf to the Ord. Settling in. Gold rush to Hall’s Creek. Growth of a mushroom port. Sale of cattle for the fields. Picture of a gold rush town. The fabulous William Carr Boyd.
‘Welcome to Wyndham!’ Black Pat called up from his boab canoe when the Rajputana anchored off View Hill.
In a few hours low tide would deposit the vessel quietly on the mud so that stock and goods could be brought ashore, but Black Pat’s news was too hot to wait. The Premier, Mr John Forrest, had left by the SS Albany only the day before after proclaiming the port of Wyndham.
‘They called it after some toff in England,’ Pat explained, producing a sketch plan drawn up by Mr Ranford, the government surveyor. ‘It’s going to be a fine modern town, with public parks and terraces and streets named after the pioneers. You see the Duracks and the Emanuels both get a mention.’
The survey party, including Mr Ranford and Mr Nyulasy, had remained and were making a thorough inspection of the locality. A few prospecting parties had already arrived and Jock McPhee, who had piloted the cattle over the last stage, had ridden in and paid for his stores with a nugget his blackboy had picked up in the bed of the Mary River. Pat had put it in a tin and had it under his bed for safe keeping. He had intended keeping quiet about it he told them but of course the news had leaked out and by the time it reached the cities the golf ball nugget would probably have swelled to the size of a cricket ball.