by Mary Durack
All this was great news to Stockdale’s prospecting party and Mrs Wilkes, one of the miner’s wives, insisted on jumping ashore to be put on record as the first white woman to set foot on the site of the big gold town.
But the gold was mostly talk yet, Pat cautioned, and the field a good 200 rough, trackless, nigger-infested miles inland, so the women had best go back with the ship and await further developments. There was as yet no accommodation at the gulf and the mosquitoes and sandflies were ‘something cruel’. One of the three Chinese he had brought around from Darwin had become ill with fever, resulting it seemed from infected bites, and Black Pat had conscientiously dosed him three times a day with a patent mixture of his own which he called ‘The Kill or Cure’. This was a dark purple concoction of quinine, spirits of nitre, tincture of iron and laudanum with a dash of strychnine and water, but for all his tender ministrations, he told the new arrivals, the fellow had died—and Chinamen were tough. In later years Black Pat never failed to mention, as a remarkable phenomenon, due he thought to certain qualities of the salt marsh, that when the remains were dug up twelve months later to be returned to China they were completely fossilised.
A day or two yarning and loading up and the inland party, including my father and Uncle John, Stumpy Michael, Long Michael, Tom Kilfoyle, young Jack Skeahan, Jim Byrne, two native boys and a prospector named Robert Wolfe who with his squat build, moustache and imperial looked for all the World like Prince Edward jogging along to a point to point, set off up the Ord River with twenty head of Thylungra horses.
Father, in his journal of May ’86, recorded in some detail that 160-mile journey when he saw for the first time the white salt marsh vanishing in blue mirage, wild birds and pale cluster of lilies at the Twelve Mile lagoon, shadow-blue of House Roof Hill where the Ord swung out east, grass plains, stony creeks and a pass already known for its discoverer as ‘Button’s Gap’. From the billabong near the stony red hill where the Ivanhoe homestead was later to stand, thousands of wild whistling duck rose from among the reeds and lilies, and wheeled away, in serpent coils against the sunset sky. Half a mile on they camped among spreading wild figs, Leichhardt pines, pandanus and white flowering caesbania on the river that had swung in a great curve from the hills. Smooth grey rocks humped up like prehistoric animals above the still, green water where floating crocodiles presented irresistible targets.
Morning brought them over grass plains and grey ant hills into the scrubby sands where queer, rock outcrops jutted among the twisted eucalypts, squat boabs and quinine trees with clusters of astringently bitter yellow berries that Long Michael, who had been there before, persuaded the newcomers were good to eat. Father could never afterwards resist playing the same joke on anyone who travelled with him through ‘the sands’ for the first time, chuckling at sight of their revolted splutterings. Cockatoo Spring was a green oasis among cajuput and palms, like other pools among the red ochre spinifex hills. Scream of galahs and black cockatoos, spear grass high above the horses’ backs and ‘look out for niggers!’ Snowdrift of white wings above the brooding dome of Mount Misery and ‘ran down a wallaby for supper’.
Next morning they joined Duncan McCaully, Tom Hayes, Bob Perry, Harry Barnes and others of the overland party who had been left with the cattle and celebrated their reunion with the killing of a 7PD steer. It was at their meeting place on the Behn, across the river from the Argyle homestead, that Father in the last year of his life set up a memorial to his companions of that first ride, and to the pioneer associates who with him carved their stations from the wilderness.
The wording of the plaque, as I well remember, was a project that occupied several months and on which the advice of the family, collectively and individually, was sought and discarded. The legend now stands as follows:
This plaque is to commemorate those departed who first camped here on May 8th 1886. The party included my Uncle Michael Durack, my brother John, my cousins Michael J. Durack and Jack Skeahan, also Tom Hayes, Jim Byrne, Theodore Wolf and myself. Later in the same year my brother and I selected the site for the Argyle homestead. Here my Mother died and my Father spent the last years of his pioneering life.
Erected in the year 1950 by Michael Patrick Durack, born N.S.W. 1865.
Stumpy Michael, more impressed than ever with the country he had selected in ’82, set off with Long Michael to ride their boundaries. Tom Kilfoyle and Tom Hayes rode up the Behn to what they called the Rosewood camp after the town near Galway Jerry’s Queensland home, and the rest went tailing cattle and horses that had spread over a wide range and must needs be trained to keep within their lawful pastures.
My uncle John, nineteen years old, was rather preoccupied with duck-shooting during this period and recorded no more of his first inland journey than having brought down twenty-four Whistlers with one shot. His attempts at keeping a pioneering diary were spasmodic and apt to trail off into odd rhymes, conundrums and notes on ‘How to astonish your friends’, while Father’s ran on consistently for over sixty years. In time these journals may have something of the historical value of Pepys’ for they cover not only his life in Kimberley but his many journeys all over Australia and the outside world—in search of markets or simply travelling. His style seldom lapses from a formality more in keeping with the Victorian drawing-room than the full-blooded life of the outback cattle camps. There is, however, a certain charm in its incongruity, its quaint circumlocution and careful avoidance of calling a spade a spade. In Father’s language a man is never drunk; he is ‘suffering from over-indulgence with the God of wine—Bacchus’. The Aborigines are his ‘sable brethren’. Sundown is ‘the hour when majestic Sol declines to the western horizon’, and women as ‘fair representatives of their divine sex’. His notes are liberally interspersed with Latin quotations, proverbs, excerpts and reflections on his current reading but the comments, although somewhat laboured, are seldom pompous. Father was a modest man and although sensitive of criticism never boasted of personal prowess or talked, in the manner of the bush, of how he had got the better of this one or that. He was conventional but not hidebound. He dearly loved what he termed ‘discussion on a loftier or more intellectual plane’ of ‘man’s place in the scheme of things’, the nature of God and the views of rival philosophers. A firm believer in self-discipline, he observed the tenets of his Church, though hardly with the simple, unenquiring faith of his forebears. He had, as he often impressed upon us, seen many a good man ‘slip’ in the bush and observed that education and breeding were no guarantee against loss of self-respect under isolated conditions. For this reason he insisted on certain formalities in station life that he was prepared to relax in the city. Often an embarrassed and perspiring visitor at Argyle made a hurried exit from the pre-dinner gathering to borrow a coat and tie, or made the mistake of appearing late and dishevelled at breakfast. For a man of mild tongue Father had a peculiar power of inspiring respect and awe, though he lacked Grandfather’s sympathetic human touch and ability to make other men’s sorrows and problems his own. He neither gave nor encouraged simple confidences and his emotions, outwardly at least, did not range like those of the extrovert Irishman between exuberance and tears, but he inherited much of his father’s infectious enthusiasm, his optimism and his energy.
I find it hard to place my father positively for the reader, nor is this solely because I am too close, for people found him hard to place in life. Abroad, he was not easily picked as an Australian for although obviously of the outdoors, neither his brisk, rather formal manner nor his crisp almost accentless speech betrayed him.
Although an indefatigable chronicler and a good raconteur, he was usually reticent in his personal comments so that our picture of most of his early associates is limited to what they would have ‘gone’ on the scales. Tom Kilfoyle was a ‘bluff sort of character with no time for humbug’ and would have ‘gone about thirteen stone’. Duncan McCaully, generally known as ‘the scrub bull’, ‘went every bit of eighteen’ and was a very tough cust
omer indeed. In fact when Father and his companions joined him on the Ord after their week’s ride from the gulf, he was recovering from a spear wound in the chest that he had received while riding after cattle. He had wrenched out the weapon on the spot, broken off the jagged stone head, put it in his pocket and ridden back to camp. There he had filled the gaping wound with coal tar on the principle that what would cure a horse would likewise cure McCaully and the wound had healed over within three weeks. Later it was found that this display of white man sang froid had so impressed the blacks that Duncan went down as a hero in tribal legend.
Tom Hayes, partner in Rosewood with Tom Kilfoyle and Galway Jerry—one of the ‘wire and whipcord’ variety—had also narrowly escaped death during this time when his blackboy Ned Kelly intercepted a spear intended for his boss. From the scattered comments in Father’s journals we gather that the relationship between these two was somewhat turbulent. The boy quickly recovered and was never far away from Hayes although they fought most of the time ‘in a somewhat unseemly manner’.
In the six or seven months since their arrival in Kimberley the overlanders had somehow acquired a few native boys between eight and fourteen years old. How they got hold of them was nobody’s business, but whether by fair means or foul they were to stand a better chance of survival in the years to come than their bush tribespeople. Long Michael had three boys, Cherry, Davey and Billy, Kilfoyle an inseparable named Sultan, while Duncan McCaully had ‘secured’ two likely youngsters named Tommy and Charlie, who were to live their lives out at Argyle in positions of respect and authority.
These first-footers had made no pretence of coining to ‘an understanding’ or forming a sort of ‘treaty’ with the Aborigines like the early governors. They had not even attempted to establish friendly terms like the early pioneers of Cooper’s Creek. They had simply ridden in with their cattle and settled on the river banks. Sooner or later the blacks would learn that if they wished to survive their choice lay between working for the white man on his own terms or keeping out of his way among the hills.
Father, writing his journal under the tarpaulin camp by the river, told of ‘knocking up bunks and rough furniture’—and very rough it would have been from what I remember of his skill with hammer and nails—visiting Tom Kilfoyle, welcoming Billy O’Donnell and the prodigious native Pompey who sang popular songs hot from the London music halls, farewelling his Uncle Stumpy Michael off back to Queensland after inspecting his property, and at the end of June riding to the gulf with Long Michael and Duncan McCaully for supplies and news of the outside world. There were two tracks to Wyndham, one, the way they had first come, along the Ord and through Button’s Gap, the other over the Ord near Lissadell, across to the Dunham and into the gulf on a north-west line.
On this occasion they had chosen the latter route and it was when dipping his billy into a hole on the Dunham that Long Michael had been startled to see fresh boot tracks in the mud.
‘Might be some poor blighter got lost,’ he said and they climbed a ridge to scout around.
They had all heard of scenes like this from old hands who remembered the Turon in ’51, Ballarat, Bendigo, Ovens, Gympie. Skirting the ridges, dipping into gullies and creek-beds and out across the plain, trailed the ant-like procession of urgent men, the riders goading their packs, the horse-drawn waggons and caravans, the buggies and spring carts, the camel-men and the men on foot, pushing barrows, or packing cases on wheels piled high with gear, men plugging on, swags on their backs, swinging water bags and billy cans, one with a tin whistle, another with a concertina wheezing ‘John Brown’s Body’ and ‘The Wearin’ of the Green’. There were big fair-bearded fellows, Germans, Russians, Scandinavians, men with the dark features of the southern European, a few Chinese in coolie hats and dungaree blues trotting barefoot and carrying their boots, all raising between them a sound like a hive of angry bees.
The settlers cantered to the track and shouted excited questions to the prospectors.
‘When did the rush start?’
‘ ’Bout two weeks back.’
‘Where are you heading for?’
‘Place called Hall’s Creek.’
‘Move on there! Move on! No time for gossiping.’
All afternoon they rode downstream of the rush, and only after sundown, when the diggers stopped to camp, did they get any coherent news of recent events. A well-equipped party of adventurous young Victorians with a smart horse-drawn caravan invited them to join their picnic meal. The leader, one Hogan, spoke as though the whole thing was a splendid lark.
‘Some of them throw off at us—call us “the slap-up party”, as though prospecting and comfort should never mix. Name your poison—rum, whisky, gin or wine!’
Then came the story of the rush. Prospectors were coming in from all directions, some landing at Derby on the west coast and making up the Fitzroy, others overlanding from Queensland and the Territory—some even footing it from Burketown, poor as church mice and living off the country. Heaven only knew how many of these hatters would make the distance. Most of all were streaming into Cambridge Gulf, making a line of travellers 200 miles long, for rumour had it that there were not just reefs but mountains of gold in Kimberley, nuggets the size of footballs waiting to be picked up in the creek beds, ‘jeweller’s shops’ sparkling in the sun.
‘Who told you all this?’
‘Oh, it’s common knowledge. Carr Boyd seems to have been about first in with the really big news and he and Billy O’Donnell and that flash abo Pompey piloted some parties through for a pound a head. Must have made a small fortune. The rest of us are following their tracks.’
Another surprise awaited them at the gulf, for a willy-nilly settlement had sprung to life a few miles up from Black Pat’s store, and steamers, sailing ships, barques, schooners and launches lay at anchor in the muddy stream. Seven shanties, hastily thrown together from mangrove saplings, brushwood and slabs of tin, claiming to be ‘hotels’ were doing a roaring trade amid a mushroom growth of stores and private shacks. A rough landing stage had been put up on to which newcomers were still streaming ashore with their goods into the quaint little township that sweltered and palpitated with excitement at the foot of the stony Bastions.
‘This is just a makeshift place until the government men come to lay out the proper port farther round,’ his cousin Pat explained as Father helped him move the last of his original store from View Hill to the new site.
Letters from home awaiting them in the township told of the completion of Maryview, of Grandfather’s latest speculations and of land still booming on the coast. It seemed altogether a time of great progress and prosperity and the inlanders returned from the gulf with stirring tales of the big rush and the crazy makeshift port that had sprung up overnight.
If they had wondered at first where to start on the task of founding a station in this empty land the gold rush now dictated their immediate activities. For months they would be occupied mustering cattle and droving them to this fortuitous local market, riding back and forth to the fields in a state of constant excitement where otherwise they might have been quietly ‘pioneering’ in the slow, steady, usual way.
Bob Button, kindly pioneer of the overland tracks to Kimberley, then manager of Ord River for Osmond & Panton, rode in to Argyle with further tales. Yes, they were finding the alluvial all right, but the ‘jeweller’s shops’ and the outsize nuggets were probably a myth.
‘If the big stuff’s there we’re all made, and the country will shoot ahead, if not the crowd will soon move out and our local market’s gone west, so make hay while the sun shines.’
A few days later Father, watching a man leading his horse to the little Behn River camp, remarked to his brother:
‘I could almost have sworn that was old Jack Horrigan with his bandy legs and the big stockman’s hat strapped under his chin.’
Uncle John went one better.
‘And I could have sworn the fellow behind him was Georgie Lamond.’
> And so they turned out to be, Horrigan, lately head stockman on Thylungra and Kyabra, Lamond who had ridden at the Cooper race meetings and been for a while horsebreaker on Kyabra. They introduced their mate Jock McPhee and told how with another man named McKensie, they had gone into partnership in a butchering business on the fields, and had come to offer gold as spot cash for beef. Horrigan and Lamond, squatting on their heels for a ‘drink of tea and a yarn’, said they had joined up shortly after the cattle moved off from the Cooper, bought some horses and started with the idea of getting into land in Kimberley. At Boulia, Horrigan saw a news sheet on a bar-room door telling of the gold strike at Croydon. He had gold in his blood, like most of the stockmen of the times, if not from New South Wales or Victoria, from Gympie or Palmer River.
‘Come on,’ he had said to his mate, ‘let’s go!’
Lamond, a younger man and not yet bitten with the mining bug, still hankered after Kimberley, but what Jack said usually went. A notice on the other side of the door attracted his attention as they were leaving the pub:
W.A. Government geologist Hardman and party report good possibilities for gold in Kimberley.
So the die was cast and they pushed on into the Territory. Around the Overland Telegraph they had teamed up with two Englishmen named Marriott and Johnson and together they had come across to the fields. The Englishmen had gone into a show with old Billy Keelan and they were doing pretty well in Spear Gully until a few weeks before when a pack of niggers had crept up on them while they were peering together at the gold in their dish. Marriott was pierced through the heart, Johnson wounded in the head and Keelan escaped with a spear through his hat. Lamond told how he and his boy Friday had followed the murderers and in a dawn raid on their camp killed four and wounded as many more as they could hit, then silenced police enquiries by signing a statement that the blacks had shown fight and they fired in self defence. That satisfied everyone especially Lamond who felt he had struck a blow for justice in avenging a good mate.