Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  A tangy, wild smell of rain-wet spinifex and eucalyptus swept down from the hills, bringing a sense of mingled excitement and resignation. The wet had set in and men’s movements were subject to the caprice of the rivers, the bog and the quicksand swamps.

  Still a police constable with some thanks to good luck and his black trackers managed to bog through to Argyle with the mail including a letter from Grandfather:

  My dear boys,

  When ye receive this letter I should soon be on the way to ye and all the news can wait until I come, except I should tell ye that I will have Pumpkin with me, for that he turned up here of his own accord with the horses I gave him when we left Thylungra.

  I was at first for surprising ye, but he says ye might be thinking to see a ghost and it is better that ye know to expect him. He would not have it otherwise but that he should come to you, dear boys, and does not know how ye will be getting on before he is there to help ye and to look after the horses. It has been a great concern to him about the Thylungra horses and since the sad news reached us of poor cousin Johney’s death, I do not think that he has slept sound for the worry…Ye’re mama is delighted that the good faithful fellow is to come to ye afterall and we have been having Masses said for ye along with our poor cousin, God rest his soul…

  Speculation, as always after unspecific letters or telegrams in the bush, ran rife at the camp on the Behn. What did Grandfather mean by this vague statement that he should ‘soon’ be on the way? How soon and by what ship? Could he be so ignorant of the nature of a Kimberley wet season as to assume they could ride in and out of Wyndham for further news?

  In March the Ord still rode high and mighty between its banks, cutting the settlers’ world into ‘gulf side’ and ‘t’other side’. Father was looking for lost horses around the Behn Junction when Bob Perry came to hurry him back to the station camp.

  ‘That crazy old man of yours turned up with his black offsider.’

  And who, asked Grandfather, would be expecting any man to wait around in a hole like Wyndham when he had brought five good Thylungra horses on the ship with him? There was no mistaking the track since the diggers had strewn it with a litter of dead horses, tins and broken-down vehicles. They had got through to Lissadell without trouble and from there Long Michael and Jerry Brice got them across on a tarpaulin raft with the two strongest mounts swimming behind. It was like old times to be crossing a river in flood and fine fun had been had by all.

  Grandfather had brought with him one of his innumerable parchment ‘Agreaments’, signifying that his Kimberley interests, including those he had shared with his deceased cousin Big Johnnie, were to be sold to his sons on terms payable over a period of ten years.

  ‘So that if things go smash in Queensland you children will be all right, except that ye will have to be keeping your parents in their old age.’

  He spoke jokingly, for even though a run of bad seasons on the Cooper since the formation of the Queensland Co-operative had so far prevented the company from paying him any of his £130,000, he did not for a moment believe that ruin could actually befall so solid a combine in a boom State. In ’87 he was concerned about minor difficulties but not greatly worried for the future.

  From the time he appeared on the scene things began to take shape around the Behn. To start with he tossed out the pegs the boys had driven in on their homestead site.

  ‘Just as well ye were a bit slow off the mark getting the place up,’ he said. ‘Ye’d have had it too close to the bank.’

  He made quick ‘flood calculations’ and paced and pegged higher up. The place became a hive of purposeful activity as loads of grass and spinifex were carted in, horse-churned into the boggy, wet-weather soil and rammed between wooden stays. Timber was felled, carted and sawn to size, rafters, doors and window frames shaped and set in place.

  ‘What! Call that a yard?’ Grandfather exclaimed, examining his sons’ handiwork. ‘Ye ought to be ashamed of yereselves!’

  ‘It was only a temporary structure,’ Father explained.

  The excuse was swept aside.

  ‘Nonsense! Ye might as well do the job properly to start with. I know places where they’ve been propping up these “temporary” yards for twenty years.’

  He and Pumpkin worked together in the simmering heat from daylight to dark, as they had done in the early days on Thylungra. Mustering and branding continued meanwhile and the erratic journals began to read more like the day books of life at Thylungra.

  By August the house, outbuildings and yards were finished and the camp on Behn River could justifiably claim the title of a ‘station’. They called it Argyle after the county in New South Wales where Grandmother was born and where the family had its first holding on Dixon’s Creek. The main building was like the first Thylungra, verandahs shading its red mud walls and crazy paving of grey river flags, its roof a cunning thatch of grass, pandanus and spinifex. Inside the floors were a hardened preparation of ant-hill mud. Bullock and kangaroo hides served as floor mats, as table tops stretched over old cart and buggy wheels, were nailed to timber frames for the seats of chairs and window shutters, cut into strips for a criss-cross open weave that formed the ‘spring mattresses’ of the rough bush beds. Greenhide water bags swung on greenhide ropes from the verandah posts, riding and pack saddles, harness and leather or greenhide whips hung from the beams.

  Store and kitchen were one, with broad shelves for the provisions, a big, rough-hewn table for the cook and outside an open fireplace, mud oven at one side and ‘range’ on the other with its impedimenta of pots and billycans, a bucket of salt beef on the boil or cooling off with a deep scum of cooking fat forming on top. The meat house was a bough shade and timber trestle where the beef was salted and left to dry while ‘the fresh’ dangled on iron hooks, quickly forming a hard skin Nothing could prevent the flies finding the moist crevices, but no one was squeamish about blown meat in the bush. You cut out the infested areas in ‘the fresh’ and threw the blown pieces of ‘salt’ on the wood heap for the ants to clean.

  But all the time fever haunted the station camps on the rivers like the malignant spirit of a country that would repel the trespasser. The daily small doses of quinine were increased until the ears of the settlers buzzed and their heads swam. ‘A touch of fever’ was general lethargy and aching limbs, ‘an attack’ anything from uncontrollable ague, migraine and high temperature, to various stages of delirium.

  All over the country men rode after stock in an aching daze or lay on the creek banks with their hats pulled over their eyes, praying for the night to bring remission from the cruel light and the blazing heat of the sun.

  In April Pumpkin, out after horses, found a traveller camped across the Behn too sick to walk a few miles to the station camp or bury the native boy who had died a week before and lay rotting under the dark massed wings of eagle-hawks and crows. Pumpkin had hurried back for the dray and brought the stranger to Argyle where he was cared for until well enough to move on to Hall’s Creek.

  ‘Was it always like this here?’ they asked the blacks, but gathered little sense from their reply. Everyone knew there were ‘debbil-debbils’ around the waterholes in the wet and when a man got sick the tribe would sneak off under cover of darkness, dodging about and trailing branches to obliterate their tracks and so confuse the evil ones as to which way they had gone, while the sick man was left to recover or die as the case might be. In this there was no doubt much sound, primitive sense for the white men’s stations rapidly became hot-beds of infection, and if the blacks were reassured that their evil spirits were nothing more or less than the sprightly Anopheles, they sickened and suffered as never before.

  Work progressed, however, since there were plenty of hands in those months when a feeling of disillusionment with the goldfields had brought many ex-stockmen back to station work. It seemed in fact that with so much white labour available there would be little need to recruit further Aborigines. Grandfather’s idea of providing the blacks with r
egular beef to discourage cattle-spearing, establish mutual confidence and gradually absorb the younger people into station work was dismissed as impractical for Kimberley. The settlers declared they might soon find themselves impoverished by big native encampments demanding as their right not only beef but other provisions which, when withheld, would cause the blacks to become more of a menace than before. Most Queenslanders came west with a fixed idea of the inferiority of the Territory and Kimberley blacks to those of the decimated tribes of the other side, who were now seen to have had many admirable qualities. The Queensland Aborigines they declared could be quickly trained as loyal and efficient helpers whereas these, for all their cunning and treachery, were dunderheads in the stock camp. It was pointed out that their weapons were relatively clumsy, that they made no attempt to trap or net fish, and that in short they were best left as far as possible to their own devices since the more they learned of the white man’s ways the more crafty they became.

  My father’s attitude to the native question was somewhere between that of Grandfather and those of his associates who thought that any sort of human consideration for the blacks was sentimental and ridiculous. I find it easier to imagine Grandfather, with his quick, Irish temper, taking a stockwhip to a native than I can my father who was not impulsive or quickly roused to anger, and I can imagine neither of them shooting a man in cold blood or using a gun at all except when necessary. Both disliked anything in the nature of blood sports and in later years when Member for the Kimberley district, my father, appalled by the wanton destruction of the bird life he loved, brought in a bill for its protection north of the 20th parallel. Nonetheless he would have been embarrassed, in these early years, to have been thought ‘unrealistic’ about the blacks, and had many a brush with ‘the pater’ on the stand they should take.

  ‘Maybe if the government would subsidise us for feeding them there would be something in your policy of encouraging them about the place,’ he told his father. Later he became so attached to this idea that he wrote suggesting it, by way of reply to a storm of criticism that had broken out against the northern settlers in the southern press:

  I would like to ask our critics how else they would have us deal with the situation in which we find ourselves, other than by remaining out of the country altogether, a course rather late to decide upon, for when Australia was taken over in the name of the British Empire its purpose was surely that of populating and developing it? My father, a pioneer of western Queensland, held it as an ideal to absorb the aborigines into the white man’s economy and trained many natives successfully to this purpose. Others in the district pursued the same policy and the fact that so few aborigines now remain in those parts was in spite of their efforts. Had they been encouraged and subsidised to bring in and train many more natives the situation might be very different today for it was the behaviour of the outside or bush blacks who, in failing to co-operate with the new regime, in killing cattle, horses and sheep and committing a number of unprovoked murders that led to the settlers having to call in the protection of the police. I speak therefore from some experience and would regret to see the situation in Kimberley reach a point where the wholesale extermination of the aborigines would become inevitable.

  Grandfather, however, sniffed at the idea of government subsidy for feeding blacks whose younger relatives were employed on the station.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into the younger generation,’ he stormed, ‘forever wanting to be spoonfed by the government. In my day we were glad enough for the opportunity to strike out for ourselves and make good. We never expected anything for nothing—not even native labour. We provided meat and rations up to a point for the black families as a matter of course. It was our part of the bargain. We lived up to it and they lived up to theirs.’

  ‘They must have been a very different type of people,’ Father argued. ‘Where would you ever see a man like Pumpkin over here?’

  ‘Pumpkin was just an ordinary, average blackfellow who was properly trained and treated from the start and the boys you’ve got here now will grow up the same way if you go the right way about it.’

  Pumpkin, while agreeing in general principle about the inferiority of the Kimberley blacks, regarded the boys Charlie and Tommy as exceptions to the general rule and was a ‘proper father’ to them as they told us in later years. Like Grandfather he discouraged the careless ‘pidgin’ form of English and taught his apprentices good manners and good stockmanship.

  When he had been only a few weeks at Argyle he met a traveller coming through to the fields from Queensland with a black woman and a boy of about eight or nine years old. The child had a roguish face and a confident seat in the saddle and Pumpkin asked the traveller if he would care to exchange him for a tin of jam. The fellow considered the proposition:

  ‘I’ve trained him for a horse taller, and he’s pretty reliable,’ he said, ‘but I could do with some jam and that nice little mare you’re riding as well.’

  Pumpkin consulted my father, the bargain was struck, and Boxer came into service at Argyle, a companion for the other two boys Charlie and Tommy who camped on the river bank a short distance from the house. Pumpkin himself camped on the homestead verandah, being convinced that the ‘myall’ blacks were planning a night raid and that Father and Uncle John, being sound sleepers, would undoubtedly be taken unawares.

  The house completed, Grandfather set off for Hall’s Creek. The first excitement of the ’86 rush had passed and half the early diggers had already moved on to try their luck elsewhere but Grandfather was still impressed with the possibilities of the Kimberley fields. He thought it a great pity that the miners should be moving out after merely skimming the surface for the alluvial and he was determined to investigate further prospects with the aid of heavy crushing machinery. In this decision he was personally less interested in becoming a successful miner than in encouraging population to Kimberley and establishing a firm local market for the beef industry. Having pegged out a claim he rode back to Argyle and arranged with his son John, cousin Jerry Brice and two other ex-Queensland relatives, John Dillon and Jim Minogue, to leave the station for a while and work the claim until he came back with up-to-date equipment.

  He then packed up for his return and rode down to the gulf with most of the white population which was making in for the first annual Wyndham race meeting. For a week all cares, ills and anxieties were forgotten. Grandfather was happy in the company of so many fellows who had started their careers around Cooper’s Creek and who carried with them the traditions and characteristics of the Queensland cattle camps. Listening to the lively talk of cattle, horses, stock routes, country and prospecting he felt a resurgence of the optimism that had faded somewhat in the fever-stricken months at Argyle when it had seemed that the young fellows might be right in believing that Kimberley, for all its potential, was less suitable for white habitation than western Queensland. With a race meeting in progress and a few women and children in the offing, a sense of normality returned and he again foresaw the day when home life would come to the lonely hinterland. Again he saw the roads pushing out to the little bush towns and station settlements on the rivers. He heard the rattle and rumble of the coaches, the noise of the big house parties, the sound of music and dancing and the merry laughter that he had missed in this great, quiet land. Soon the boys would marry and the time would come when he could bring his wife and daughters to visit them and the vast distances that now divided the family would seem less than they had covered so often between Goulburn and Cooper’s Creek.

  29

  THE GOLD AND THE GRASS

  The years 1887 to 1888. John W. Durack writes of prospecting at Hall’s Creek. Visitors to the fields. Flood in the Behn River. Wyndham personalities. Voyage to Darwin. The brothers Patrick, Stumpy Michael and Galway Jerry Durack return to Kimberley. Black versus white

  Uncle John and his three prospecting companions set up their tents and a bough shed for meals on Butcher’s Creek, took out miner’s r
ights and got to work with cradle and dolly pan with plenty of time off for yarning with fellow prospectors and enoying themselves at the local hostelries.

  ‘A wonderful lot of fellows they were,’ my uncle would say with his crooked reminiscent smile, ‘all with their local nicknames and likeable ways.’

  Then would come stories of the Irish publican ‘Paddy the Flat’, who, unable to read or write, kept a pictorial ledger; of ‘The Bower-bird’, a quaint old kleptomaniac with corks around his hat who filched odds and ends from the miners’ tents that would be tactfully retrieved when he was not at home. Another old favourite was ‘The Tea and Tobacco Bushranger’, ex-squatter ruined by the drought who ranged the goldfields with his string of ageing horses and his hunchbacked gin, and best of all that incorrigible band of scallywags known as ‘The Ragged Thirteen’. To listen to them, my uncle said, you would have thought them the greatest band of desperadoes unhung, but they were very amateur bushrangers and never succeeded in terrorising the countryside as they dreamed of doing. One day Uncle John met their leader ‘The Orphan’ on the road and to draw him out remarked on the good breeding of his mount.

  ‘Yes,’ said the rascal, ‘her original brand was 7PD, belonged to old Patsy Durack of Cooper’s Creek.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence now,’ said Uncle John. ‘I got away with a few of his horses too,’ and indicated the brand on his own mount and packs.

  ‘You want to get to work on those quick,’ ‘The Orphan’ advised, ‘the bloody Duracks are thick as thieves in this country now, and a lousy lot they are too—clap a chap in jug for pinching a horse quick as you can say “knife”.’