Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  Mary was already seventeen and Birdie fifteen but they were young for their years and had led extremely sheltered lives. Kimberley, their brothers insisted, would be no place for them at that time whereas in Goulburn they would be surrounded by old friends and relatives including their Grandmother Costello. For once old Mrs Costello had had no word of reproach for her son-in-law, for whether the land smash was an act of God or of the devil she regarded it, at all events, as a misfortune beyond the control of man. Her own son John had been hard hit at the same time but he still had certain ‘assets’. These were the 3,000-square mile Lake Nash lease where he had a manager in charge, another 2,000 square miles in the centre, and a chunk of country extending for about 300 miles from the McArthur to the Roper River, where he and his family were now established.

  ‘And you all still have your old home at Tea-Tree to come back to if everything else fails,’ Mrs Costello told her daughter.

  In the midst of the confusion Great-grandmother Bridget took to her bed in Galway Jerry’s home near Ipswich and died suddenly, sorrowing for the misfortune of her sons.

  Grandfather, unable at first to realise the sudden and complete evaporation of an estate reckoned at its height as nearly three-quarters of a million pounds between himself and his two brothers, rallied at last to write to his sons in Kimberley:

  …so ye’re Mama and me must now come to Kimberley to live at Argyle for ye understand that we have not at present any home of our own. When the markets are opened up and ye are getting a price for yere cattle I hope I can pick up again on the Ruby Queen where I am still satisfied we should strike it rich. Pat is to come with us and ye will be pleased to have his help and the girls are to school in Goulburn and little Jerry will stay at college in Brisbane.

  I know ye will be wanting them, especially ye’re brother Jerry, who is a smart boy and head of his class to have the advantages of education that ye have already received. But for this I am not now in a position to pay, for all that is left belongs to you according to the agreament made and to which I shall not be holding ye, as regards the payments, since ye must now be keeping the children at school and ye’re mama and me and other things of which I must talk to ye. For myself I have only now my old moleskins, riding saddle and pack and what experience I have at your disposal.

  Apart from recording the arrival of a letter from Grandfather telling of the decision to come to Argyle, Father makes no mention whatever in his journal of the financial disaster that had befallen the family. The only hint of misfortune is that from this time onwards he frequently refers to ‘poor Father’ in the way they always referred to ‘Poor Mary’ Skeahan. For Father the loss of estate seems to have implied a certain loss of status and he found the whole affair too painful ever to be discussed. Although he knew well enough that the long drought, the collapse of false land values and the resulting bank smash was a disaster on a national scale, he was always a little impatient with his father for having been so deeply involved and for having, at what he should have known to be a critical time, left his brother in charge of his affairs. Grandfather had always said himself that Stumpy Michael had little head for business and yet he had given him full power of attorney to buy and sell as he thought fit. Meanwhile precious time and money had been squandered on the Ruby Queen long after most responsible people had given Hall’s Creek up as a bad job. Grandfather accepted the scarcely spoken criticism with unexpected humility and with it the fact that neither of his two elder sons would ever afterwards quite trust his judgement.

  It was a quaint little procession that moved out of Wyndham and along the winding, rough track through Button’s Gap and the Cockatoo Sands. The buggy, driven by Grandfather, with Grandmother at his side, was followed by the horse-drawn station waggon containing a bedstead with elaborate brass knobs, a heavily carved sideboard, the piano, bookcase, iron press, writing desk with a green baize top, three ornamental clocks and a crate of Muscovy ducks.

  With a white woman installed at Argyle the black community began to grow. One day, shortly after Grandmother’s arrival, Pumpkin turned up with a broad smile and a shy young girl

  ‘My wife,’ he said proudly.

  Everyone was astonished, for since Pumpkin’s original wife, a woman much older than himself, had died on Thylungra he had appeared quite uninterested in romance.

  Pumpkin declared that the girl belonged to his ‘proper marriage skin’ and had come willingly. He had been carrying on negotiations, he said, since he first heard that ‘the missus’ was coming to live at Argyle and had realised she would need help in the house. The tribal wives whom the younger boys might have claimed were all old women, but he, being an elder, had the right to a young girl of amenable age, and here she was.

  ‘I pick her up over that way,’ he said, signing with his chin in the manner of his people, ‘in that Ord River valley. What about you find her a good whitefellow name?’

  ‘What would be wrong with Valley at all?’ Grandfather suggested. ‘Seeing as you found her there.’

  Everyone was satisfied, but young Pat who inherited much of his father’s simple-hearted exuberance felt there should be a ceremony of some sort to impress the happiness and importance of the occasion. He had them stand before him in their best clothes, dipped their heads in a bucket of water to make a lasting impression and read the marriage ceremony.

  From all accounts the marriage was a happy one, though seven years later a man turned up from some far country claiming Valley as his promised bride. He and his supporters came into the camp one day and speared the girl in the leg while another older woman, trying to protect her from further harm, was fatally wounded.

  Inevitably Valley’s relatives soon drifted into the station and some remained. The boys in the camp on the river were no longer lonely and cut off from their kind and at night from around their fire on the river bank rose the familiar sound of corroboree.

  ‘I never thought,’ Grandmother said, ‘I could be so happy to hear the noise that used to frighten me when we first came to Cooper’s Creek. It’s like coming home.’

  Grandfather’s old cheerful spirit returned as he dug and delved in the garden on the creek and the pumpkins and runner beans flourished under his practised hands. He made pieces of furniture for his wife, rode after cattle and horses and gave a hand wherever required, but he never for a moment accepted his financial disaster as final. He regarded it as no more than one of the misfortunes among the many ups and downs of life. He had been down often enough before, but by hanging on and keeping faith in God and in himself when others were talking ruin, he had always managed to come to the top again. It was important that one had a plan and kept to it steadily. Sooner or later the financial crisis would lift as depressions always did. The market for Kimberley cattle would open up and settlement would follow as it had done elsewhere. So much seemed only common sense. He would then borrow enough from the boys to start again in the deserted shafts and rusting machinery at the Ruby Queen. That there was gold there he had no doubt and he yearned to see the population come flocking back and the mushroom mining towns dotting the deserted land.

  ‘But what if you do not find it?’ Grandmother asked.

  ‘I will give it a few months only,’ Grandfather assured her, ‘and if I get nothing then I will give up, but by that time the boys should be in a position to make a home in Fremantle for ourselves and the girls and it can be a headquarters for them all when they come down; They should be shipping cattle south by that time and I will be able to look after their affairs for them at that end.’

  But there were times when he was haunted by the debts he had perforce left unpaid at the time of his downfall—the cheques he had written out before he knew that there was nothing left in the bank to meet them.

  ‘That I who have spared so many from the humiliation of debt should be unable to meet my own is the greatest affliction the Lord could have sent me,’ he said.

  To which Grandmother replied as always in times of stress and trouble, ‘
But affliction, you see, my dear, is the love of God. For how can you wear a crown if you have not borne a cross?’

  Everything was different for the boys with a woman in the house. Mattresses and clean linen appeared on their bunks in place of the rough greenhides and coarse blankets. Clothes were carefully laundered, meals daintily served. The water bags were never allowed to be drained and left to dry. The hessian safe, made by Grandfather, was kept damp and cool by a steady dripping of water from pieces of hanging saddle cloth. The black women, respectably clothed in loose, ankle-length dresses of turkey twill or calico with coloured borders, moved quietly about the place, working cheerfully under the gentle and expert direction of ‘the missus’.

  Shortly after Grandmother came to Argyle, Uncle Galway Jerry brought to Rosewood his wife and young family of two boys and two girls. Aunt Fan had with her, as companion and governess to the children, the charming little gentlewoman Miss Cameron, referred to frequently by Father in courtly terms. She appears to have been as often at Argyle with one or another of the children as at Rosewood and was the cause of a great deal of banter among the boys. Father made arch references, no doubt reciprocated, to his brother Pat’s ‘amorous intentions’, though Duncan McCaully, who was ‘like a bull in a crockery shop’ outside the cattle camp, does not seem to have been considered in the race at the time.

  Uncle Stumpy Michael and his tall quiet son Ambrose were to and fro from Lissadell, but Aunt Kate and her younger children, mostly at school, remained in Brisbane. For all his reverses Stumpy Michael was confident that ‘when the markets opened up’ he would quickly reduce his mortgage and that Lissadell would continue to provide handsomely for his dependants.

  A peacefulness, clearly reflected in Father’s journals, descended over Argyle.

  The evening is serene and calm [he writes]. Father and Mother sitting together outside on the verandah, their conversation of old associations. The piano emits sweet music from the fairy fingers of Miss Cameron who is here from Rosewood for a few days with little Patsy. Brother John and the youngster in mirthful mood tramping round the bouse without a care.

  Not long afterwards Tom Kilfoyle brought his bride, the former Miss Byrne, and her sister Miss Maggie to join the Rosewood establishment and life in Kimberley became more like that of western Queensland. A larger dining table was ‘knocked up’ and the piano was never left long enough, as in later years, to become a lodging house for cockroaches and bush mice.

  The year 1890 was disturbed by news from Queensland relatives of the prolonged and disastrous drought and of the ruin of so many of their old friends. Bullocks were bringing no more than £1 a head and boiling-down works coped with the surplus. The Tullys at Wathagurra had dug in their heels, determined at all costs to stick to their land. Poor Mary Skeahan was living with them while her husband and two younger sons ranged the countryside for work, and the Scanlans hung on to Springvale by the skin of their teeth.

  Reports from the Costellos were no more cheerful. After six years’ valiant struggle to build up their Territory properties, the family had at last retreated from their home on the Limmen River to their Lake Nash property near Camooweal. Costello had left his old employee Jack Farrar in charge at the Valley of Springs and hoped they might have suffered only a temporary defeat in that area. Perhaps in time they would find some means of controlling the growing scourge of cattle tick and the increasing depredations of the blacks. They might manage to shoot out the ‘’gators’ in the rivers, discover an antidote for malaria and even overcome the seemingly invincible, teeming, silent army of white ants. Perhaps, too, someone might persuade the government that the only hope of settling the Territory lay in decreasing the land rents rather than in raising them as had recently been done. Then it would only remain to find a market for Territory beef and all would be well.

  No doubt the family at Argyle lived better at this time than their Queensland relatives, but money was very short and lack of markets was a haunting fear. The goldfields were almost dead. There was no outlet from either Wyndham or Derby and letters to Darwin enquiring about the beef market in the Territory were unanswered.

  News that the State of Western Australia had been granted self-government, that Kimberley had been divided into an eastern and western electorate and that nominations were being sought for local representatives caused no great interest outback. Few bothered to enrol and the two candidates, Alexander Forrest for west and William Baker, a Wyndham storekeeper, for east Kimberley were returned unopposed. The sheep and cattle men were too worried about their immediate future to think in terms of political development. Adversity, however, drew the settlers together as prosperity would never do. Those hard put to find stockmen’s wages helped each other at mustering and branding times while the few men who were not fossicking around Hall’s Creek or following the golden trail to the Murchison found employment on company properties with capital to tide them over the hard times.

  Duncan McCaully, ‘The Scrub Bull’, took a job on Ord River Station while Bob Button, the manager, who ‘had the gold fever bad’, went prospecting. Here Duncan struck up a firm friendship with young Tudor Shadforth, the head stockman, who in August, when the two were mustering on Osmond River, was struck down by a spear. McCaully had drawn the weapon from the lifeless body, lifted it on to the saddle in front of him and ridden twenty miles on a dark night into the Ord. The tough old bushman never forgot that Shadforth’s last words, when they separated to muster opposite sides of the river, had been ‘See you anon’, and thirty years later, a dying man, he rode from Ivanhoe so that he might be buried beside his mate.

  Police raids and the inevitable unauthorised punitive expeditions followed the murder on Osmond River. The police left terse records for official files and the rest is silence.

  From this time on, however, the name of another boy, Ulysses, appears in the Argyle journals. Nothing is recorded of how he got there but Ulysses himself told me, many years later at Ivanhoe, that he and his sister Maggie were the only survivors of a raid on a big encampment of blacks around the Ord River after the spearing of Tudor Shadforth. Without a trace of rancour, in fact with the suggestion of a reminiscent chuckle, the genial old man in his pensioner’s camp on the river told how he and his sister had been discovered crouching behind a tree.

  ‘“Better shoot ’em,” one of the white men said. “This little boy only gonna grow up to put a spear in some poor whitefulla and this little girl—well she gonna breed more blackfellas.” Then big Duncan McCaully come up. “I can do with a boy,” he says, and he put me up on his saddle and somebody else take Maggie and by-’n’-by we come into Argyle.’

  It was a good day’s work on McCaully’s part since both Ulysses and his sister grew to become the backbone of station communities at Ivanhoe and Auvergne.

  Almost at once Ulysses appears in Father’s journals as his almost constant companion.

  The boy [he records] for his tender years undoubtedly bears the fatigue of late travelling well and on no one occasion have I had to upbraid him for lagging behind.

  This was really remarkable, for few men could keep their mounts up to the brisk pace that Father got out of his horses. He was undoubtedly a splendid rider and a good judge of horseflesh, but unlike Grandfather, who felt for a mount as part of himself, they were primarily tools to him. Frequently he records with a note of exasperation the sudden collapse of his horse which he attributes to excessive heat or the possibility of its having been exhausted by galloping from blacks.

  Young Boxer, generally conceded to be the cleverest of the Argyle boys, was at this time proving the least reliable. Sent after horses he would sometimes disappear for a week at a time, causing both inconvenience and anxiety for his safety, since he belonged to a Queensland tribe.

  Even if he could give a reason for his conduct it would not be so aggravating [Father writes] but he appears to have spent his time doing nothing but idly commune with nature or perhaps catch fish or lizards, though he declines to explain… />
  Father did not then realise that Boxer spent these stolen holidays with the bush blacks, and it later often puzzled him how the Queensland boy was not only so fluent in the various local tongues but so knowledgeable in their ways, projected movements and hideouts.

  All over the country young natives like this were being recruited for station work and the old bogy of ‘outside criticism’ was being raised against the settlers for ‘blackbirding aboriginal boys into slavery’. This was always a very touchy point with the station owners, for couched in certain terms their methods of native employment sounded as near to the general conception of slavery as might be. A black received no payment other than the basic necessities of life. His time off was at the convenience of the boss and his station activities. If he ‘cleared out’ he would be tracked down and brought back, while any other white man employing him without the consent of his original master would be breaking an unwritten law of the country. The station people, however, looked at the matter differently. In a letter of the time my father put the station owner’s point of view: