Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  Nat Buchanan (‘Old Bluey’) and his son Gordon, then establishing the Sturt Creek and Flora Valley runs, were frequent visitors to the camp on Butcher’s Creek.

  ‘What a bushman!’ Uncle John would say of ‘Old Bluey’, as he remembered him, his incurably sensitive skin well muffled against the sun, his famous green umbrella always part of his saddle gear, a gaunt old fellow with an uncanny bump of locality and a stock-in-trade of amusing anecdotes and kindly banter.

  Uncle John had a profound admiration for bushmanship in which, having come straight from college to Kimberley, he had had little actual experience and for which he certainly had no natural aptitude.

  ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croaker was another of his bushman heroes whom he declared had senses of sight and hearing as keen as an Aboriginal’s. He had come to the fields on behalf of the manager of Wave Hill, who, desperate for an outlet for the cattle, determined to set up a butchery at Hall’s Creek. McPhee, Lamond and MacKensie, unable to withstand the competition, thereupon packed up and went a-droving to the Murchison.

  Others, however, who had previously talked of getting out now hung on awaiting the return of Patsy Durack with his heavy machinery. The station men, one and all, pinned their hopes on the new venture believing, like Grandfather, that it needed only faith and capital to establish Hall’s Creek as another Ballarat. They talked of him as a man of vision, sometimes, half jokingly as a man with ‘the Midas touch’ for whom nothing ever went wrong.

  Bob Button from Ord River rode in and out for stores, bringing cattle for the butchery and lingering to fossick about always in the hope of ‘dropping on a good thing’ by happy accident. Carr Boyd still breezed about the fields, keeping alive the flame of enthusiasm and talking big of what should be done to encourage settlement to Kimberley.

  By ’88 it looked as if things had begun to stir at last when a party came through to survey the route for a telegraph line, bringing rumours of proper cattle shipping yards and jetties to be established at Wyndham and Derby.

  Jim Durack, a young brother of Long Michael, Black Pat and Jerry Brice turned up from New South Wales and joined the camp at Butcher’s Creek. A clever rhymester, musically inclined and inventive in the subtle art of practical joking, he was a welcome addition to the sun-loving goldfields community.

  There were of course the inevitable tragedies and cases of ‘sandy blight’ and ‘fever’ which covered a multitude of ills. The diggers prescribed for each other and called on anyone who knew a prayer or two to preside at the burials. This task fell frequently to Uncle John and he told how when reciting The Lord’s Prayer over the grave of old Robert Owens, one of the diggers interrupted:

  ‘Spout it in Latin, Johnnie. The old b——would appreciate that!’

  The war between black and white continued intermittently, but it was now being whispered about that some of the natives had changed their tactics and instead of spearing a man for his tucker bags were offering their women in exchange. A few ‘low down’ types whose names were never permitted to defile the pages of a journal were said to have accepted the bargain.

  Antagonisms flared up between ‘the sandgropers’ of the western State and ‘the cornstalks’, ‘banana eaters’ and ‘crow eaters’ of ‘the other side’. Friendly allusions to ‘rough-neck convict stock’ hunted out of their own States by the police were countered by equally charming references to the ‘Nullarbor rats’ who knew more about kangaroos than horses and cattle. Europeans looked on while Australians of different colonies shed blood in the cause of ‘patriotism’.

  Typical of this spirit of interstate rivalry are the following verses found in the pocket of Uncle John’s goldfields notebook:

  AS OTHERS SEE US

  AS WE SEE OURSELVES

  (By Sydney ‘Truth’)

  (A Reply)

  Land of Forrests, Fleas and Flies, Blighted hopes and blighted ees, Art thou hell in earth’s disguise, Westralia?

  Land of Fortunes, easily made; The land where t’othersiders strayed, To grab the dividends that are paid—Westralia.

  Home of brokers, poor paid clerks, Nest of sharpers, mining sharks, Dried up lakes and desert parks, Westralia.

  The home to be of Dukes and Lords, In the near future—mark my words—This land shall beat all best records, Westralia.

  Land of humpies, cabins, inns, Old bag huts and empty tins, Land ob blackest, grievous sins, Westralia.

  You are but in your infancy, The time is near when you shall be, The strongest, richest colony, Westralia.

  They plugged on into ’88, finding ‘some stone with gold showing pretty freely’, ‘stone with no colours in that showed gold when crushed’ and ‘nice little pieces on the surface’. In December ‘Jim Minogue cashed two hundred dwt. in gold, being his share of the takings so far’, but that is the first and last mention of any division of spoil.

  Before Christmas Jim Dillon had decided he would make his fortune quicker by setting up as a pub keeper, a shrewd move, as Uncle John remarks afterwards that ‘Dillon is doing better in the spirituous than we in our more material pursuits’. A crowd gathered at Dillon’s shanty for Christmas when there was music on fiddle and tin whistle, recitation, song and sporting events in which the redoubtable Barney Lamond carried the day with ‘38 ft. in the hop, step and jump and 4' 9" in the running high’. It was a memorable celebration with an exciting finish for news came through of fresh reefs struck in Jackson’s claim and a great quartz find in the Mary River.

  Father meanwhile managed at Argyle with only Pumpkin, the younger native boys and a German cook, for the stockmen who had animated the station scene during the dry season had been attracted back to the fields by reports of the fresh gold strikes.

  Minor incidents had enlivened the monotony of the hot, wet days and nights, the drumming of rain and the constant hubbub of frogs:

  Roused out of bed just at daylight this morning [Father records] when I felt something very cold on my thigh. Partly awake I felt what I thought to be the cat…put my hand down and, mirabili dictu, found I had hold of a snake. I quickly slung it on the ground and as it was again coming at me jumped out of bed and called Pumpkin. Unfortunately it got away, crawled through the books and on top of the wall. Pumpkin hit it but did not succeed in killing it so it remains an invisible occupant of our domocile.

  A few days later Mille, the cook, began shouting one morning that the river was only fifty yards from the house. Father told him to get back to bed but an hour later Pumpkin, who had hitherto placed a sublime faith in Grandfather’s ‘flood level’ calculations when pegging out the house, decided they had best start digging a dam to save the kitchen.

  But before we had even one corner done the water was up to us. We abandoned the kitchen and tried to secure the house but without avail for the water was onto us too soon. We tried to secure the things inside and likewise the rations, but before we could do so the water was inside and destroying gunpowder, boxes of clothes and hats…While putting other things up higher in the house we could hear the kitchen coming down, so fearing for ourselves in the house we left, the water then being about one foot up on the walls. Taking with us a bit of bread, rifle and cartridges we left the house to its fate. During this time the rain is coming down but not heavily.

  In about an hour the water began to recede, to our great delight and was just past the verandah at the break of day. After breakfast we set to work getting what we could from underneath the ruins of the kitchen…Many articles completely destroyed…all the knives, forks, bucket, chisel and other articles swept down the river. Flood mark up to the door of our room. House undermined and our room partly falling down. Still raining…

  Father, however, had one glimmering of satisfaction in the incident.

  ‘I must write and tell Father we don’t think much of the site he picked,’ he told Pumpkin.

  The black man pointed reprovingly down the bank to where the brown water was swirling over the tops of the river trees.

  ‘Well, look where y
ou and young Johnnie had the pegs!’

  The days that followed were spent ploughing through the bog after stone to repair the damage and rebuild the kitchen, in riding after straying horses and cattle in the driving rain and slosh of one of the heaviest wets on record.

  Somehow Bob Button got through from the fields with a bag of gold, a letter from Uncle John and reports of fresh reefs. By this time the levelheaded cattle man had been well bitten with the prospecting bug and persuaded Father to spend a day or two fossicking around the quartz outcrops at the foot of Mt Misery. They found nothing but worked up some reason for going together into the gulf, a journey of which my father wrote on his return to Argyle at the end of March.

  We came to the Ord and found it too high to cross without a swim. After an anxious wait of eleven days we succeeded in getting across through the kind assistance of Long Michael who built a boat in which we brought all our goods and chattels across safely. It was pulled across by the black boys, one of whom, Long Michael’s boy young Billy, deserves special mention for his unremitting services. R. Button and myself piloted the horses across. Proceeded after a days rest at Lissadell, found the road very boggy and had some difficulty in finding a crossing over the Dunham. Got to Twenty Mile at dinner time on the fourth day. Received a letter from Father, the police being there with the mail. Stopped, enjoying the hospitality of August Lucanus. Black boy brought word that the S.S. Otway was in port so Lucanus, Button and self proceeded in…mosquitoes very bad…

  Sent telegram by Otway to be sent from Cossack, re rents to Alex Forrest…

  Subtle changes had occurred in the town of Wyndham since the rough and tumble months of its beginning. There was still no attempt to remove to the official site and the chances of the early investors ever realising on their ‘town blocks’ were beginning to look very thin indeed. Near the landing stage a few more permanent buildings had gone up, including a better class hotel owned and run by the Cable family, whose charming daughters, with the three lively Byrne sisters and the wives of a few of the more ‘solid’ citizens, were causing the young bloods of the district to look to their laurels. Wyndham was now rather more respectably ‘gay’, with tea parties daintily served, formal little dinners and dances. The naïve delight in ‘keeping the champagne flowing’ had passed into a more sophisticated phase and the few ‘demi-mondaines’ who had danced on table tops and generally ‘made free’ had been frozen either out of countenance or out of town.

  Most prominent among the dashing young blades were two Irishmen named Francis Connor and Dennis Doherty who had been attracted from Sydney to the gold rush, had set up a merchant and general agency business in the town and had recently acquired a pastoral lease adjoining Rosewood and Argyle which they had named ‘Newry’ after their mutual birthplace in Ireland. They were ‘charming fellows’ of dash and enterprise and their lusty affiliation with the north-west seemed to augur well for its future. To their neat little establishment opposite a row of Chinese shacks in the single street came cattle men and prospectors to do business and discuss the rosy prospects of Kimberley.

  Discussion revolved largely around the problem of markets for local cattle, for with the gradual drifting of the alluvial miners from Hall’s Creek the immediate prospects were beginning to look grim. Many, like Grandfather, believed that the real wealth of the Kimberley fields had not yet been tapped, but there was no guarantee of this and if that outlet failed—what then? To encourage the West Australian pastoralists a protective duty had been imposed on all livestock imported for slaughter from other States but there was little sense in encouraging a product that could not be got rid of. Even if jetties were built for shipping cattle from Derby or Wyndham, the southern market in a colony of little over 40,000 people could hardly be described as ‘unlimited’.

  Connor, however, already spoke of shipments of thousands of head of cattle a year from Wyndham alone. To where? Eastern markets probably—Singapore, South Africa, the Philippines, Japan! Doherty, genial and debonair, urged constant pressure for government facilities that must inevitably open the portals to boundless expansion and enterprise. Meanwhile they organised picnics, riding and shooting parties for which the ladies ‘prepared delectable al fresco repasts’. The hardier young women, in blouses and long tight-waisted skirts, gem hats with quantities of flapping gossamer veil, buttoned boots and gloves went ‘mountaineering’ with their gallants to the top of the stony Bastions where they placed little flags to flutter in the breeze, sipped tea, and thrilled to the awe-inspiring expanse of white salt marsh, flat-topped ranges and winding tide-churned gulf.

  When Father rode in with Bob Button in February ’88 Dennis Doherty, as no doubt others besides, was courting the charming and statuesque Georgina Cable and rumour had it ‘they would make it a match’.

  Father agreed to carry out some business for Connor and Doherty in Darwin while banking his gold and he embarked on the SS Active with Bob Button and Tudor Shadforth, a dashing young stockman from Ord River Station.

  Darwin on its cliff top at the jungle’s edge was a dazzle of colour under monsoon skies, the stilted latticed houses of a ragtag makeshift age picturesque in their setting of tropical trees, shrubs, creepers towering over the rank wet-weather grass. Poincianas—Flame of the Forest—glowed in spreading scarlet fans, beside hanging molten gold of the Cassia fistula, the pink and cream of frangipani—fragrant temple flowers of the East. Chinese lanterns, Mexican rose, quis quails, Bougainvillaea spilt a concealing glow of warm beauty over the dereliction of the shacks. Father was at this time attracted by the quaint exotic flavour and sheer wild fecundity of the untidy Territory port. At the botanical gardens, started in the seventies by scientist Dr Maurice Holtze, he interviewed the curator and staggered back to the ship with armsful of seedlings in jam tins, seeds in paper packets and cuttings carefully wrapped in wet cloth, for if these things would grow in Darwin why not at Argyle? He would plant a garden too, crotons, amaranthus, spreading ferns and glorious trees to rest the eye and shade the hot little mud-brick homestead on Behn River. And vegetables too, ‘acclimatised seeds’ of melons, cabbages, cauliflowers, maize, tobacco, sugar cane, cotton. Who knew that any one of them might flourish so well as to start a minor industry?

  He and his companions talked to officials of Territory markets for their beef, of mining and Chinese labour and blacks and the ‘potentialities of the north’ and finally hied themselves to an enterprising Chinese photographer who posed them in heroic attitudes with Shadforth holding a shovel as a symbol of ‘digging in’.

  Doherty met the SS Active on their return and hustled them off to a dance at the Byrnes’ Three Mile Hotel where they ‘made merry into the early hours’. Bluff Tom Kilfoyle had ridden in from Rosewood and surprised the younger fellows with his gallantry especially towards one of the Misses Byrne.

  Many years later I knew the two remaining ‘Byrne girls’, the Misses Maggie and Joe, when they came to visit their late sister’s son Jack Kilfoyle on Rosewood. Little elderly ladies, they had still about them much of the Irish sparkle and sprightliness that made these early day parties and dances at their Three Mile Hotel, among the big white gums on the marsh’s edge, occasions to remember.

  Miss Maggie painted religious statues for a living and could still coax from the old Argyle piano—all the way from Thylungra—some of the ditties woven around the happenings of her youth—words by all and sundry and the tunes her own. I regret now that I did not record as she sang these jaunty Kimberley folk songs that went with her into oblivion.

  Father’s plants travelled disappointingly. All the cuttings withered before he got home and most of the seedlings likewise curled up and died. Three poincianas survived and were carefully planted out under hessian shades while Pumpkin and the boys pegged, fenced and dug a kitchen garden on the river bank. Pumpkin put in the seeds and watered them in packing cases as he had done many a year on Thylungra, but the garden was doomed that season. Not many weeks after their return, fever, from which they had be
en fairly free since the previous year, returned to the Behn with renewed violence.

  Father, Mille the cook, even Pumpkin and the boys were intermittently struck down, until Father, on one of the rare occasions in his robust life, actually took to his bed and, oblivious of date and day, neglected his journal.

  It is now sixteen days since I have taken up my diary as today is the 29th of May. On the last day dated I had the worst attack of fever ever during my short time in Kimberley, being for days after beset with all manner of imaginations and as if labouring under some great, insurmountable difficulty. Johnny arrived with packs from the fields but scarcely knew him for seven days. Since then I have been but slowly recovering…

  By June he had rallied and was back in the now established routine of mustering, branding and riding into town. Next time he stayed so long that Uncle John, left in charge at Argyle, ‘presumed he had lost either his horses or his heart. Probably the latter.’

  Whether his suspicions were well founded I cannot say since the intervening three weeks of Father’s life are represented by two noncommittal dotted lines. But life returned to the Behn with him; since he was accompanied from the gulf by Grandfather, Uncle ‘Galway’ Jerry, Long Michael and several others, all excited and bursting with news.

  Dennis Doherty and Georgina Cable had been married just after the races and the whole of Wyndham turned out to the event. A man named Barnett, much loved on the fields, had been speared by blacks when on the road with the supply waggons and the police were out with a big party while other self-appointed ‘special constables’ were also riding the countryside to avenge the death of their mate.

  Furthermore, on the track to Argyle they had come upon the carcass of the beautiful Thylungra stallion, Count, wantonly speared and meat cut from its rump.