by Mary Durack
Let people who know nothing of the blacks and the conditions of the country come and learn for themselves in the hard school of experience. The station blacks are neither chained down nor locked up. They are out on their own every day after cattle and horses and they come back. Why? Because the new arrangement happens to suit them. They like the white man’s tucker. They like riding and mustering stock. Hunting is in their blood and this is a more exciting form of hunting than anything they have known before. The black boy feels like a king in the saddle galloping over the plains where his fathers footed it for thousands of years, and what’s more he likes his white boss, providing he is a man who knows his own mind, gives an order and sticks to it, even if it doesn’t make sense to the blackfellow.
As for being forced to return if he absconds—do we teach a white boy not to play truant from school by letting him turn up uncorrected when he feels so disposed? The station blacks have a great deal of free time and long walkabouts in the bush, but will never be given any sense of responsibility if allowed to come and go at their will. They are told that if they want to go bush without permission they have to stay bush, but they don’t want this. In tribal life they are used to having personal decisions made for them by acting in accordance with their ancient laws and are only confused if handled in a weak and indecisive manner and constantly given a choice of action.
Our monetary system is as yet a mystery to the blackfellow. Even were there shops where he could spend the money he would not know the value of it, but he values food, clothing, tobacco and such things and is willing to work for them. In so doing he feels a cut above his ‘wild-munjong’ relatives skulking in the hills. The station people should be subsidised, not criticised for training such boys for useful work.
When news spread over the ‘bush telegraph’ that young Gordie Buchanan was taking 300 head of Wave Hill bullocks from Sturt Creek into Derby and that ‘old Bluey’ was to take an experimental thirty head up to Singapore hopes again soared in Kimberley. Connor and Doherty, daily expecting word of a big market in the Far East, made tentative arrangements to act as agents for the primary producers. Buchanan, however, returned a disappointed man. Expenses had panned out at £5 a head. The bullocks brought no more than £8 each and even that ‘on sufferance’, for a local meat combine had stamped down on any continuance of the trade.
Following this, one or two small experimental shipments were sent from Derby to Fremantle, under primitive conditions, and obtained a fair price but there were heavy losses on the voyage and the demand was limited. Altogether an ironical situation now faced the Kimberley cattle man, for here was the country of their heart’s desire—seasons vastly more reliable than those that had defeated or threatened to defeat them in Queensland, rich pastures on which the stock fattened and multiplied to a remarkable degree, and no outlet for their produce.
In desperation old Buchanan and his brothers-in-law Hugh and Wattie Gordon started 1,000 head from Elvire River down the Ninety Mile Beach to the upper Murchison—blazing what is still known as ‘Buchanan’s Track’ from the De Grey River to the Gascoyne where Lennie Darlot of Birringarra purchased their entire mob. This result was encouraging, but the Murchison was a far cry from East Kimberley. Early in ’91 Father and Tom Kilfoyle, weary of waiting for replies from Darwin about prospects in the Territory, decided to test for themselves the goldfields market at Pine Creek, about 120 miles south of Darwin, with a small mob of 169 bullocks and 17 horses.
They were to pioneer a new route of about 350 miles, striking out north-east from Argyle, following the Baines River down to the Victoria, making out towards the Katherine and thence due north to the mining town.
Grandfather presented them on departure with a pumpkin from his garden and a sacred relic that he assured Father would keep him safe under all circumstances.
‘It is one I have always carried,’ he said. ‘I give it to you now because you are the pathfinder and I am the old man who stays at home and grows vegetables.’
Any one of Father’s many droving trips from this time on is a story in itself but this book would quickly become unwieldy were I to more than briefly summarise the journeys so closely packed with incident.
The two natives, Pumpkin and Sultan, were their only assistants on this trip.
Pumpkin [Father writes] each morning taking on the bullocks while we follow with the horses. We catch them up, leave him his dinner and go ahead to form a camp while he follows on at his leisure.
None of the party had yet visited McCartney’s Auvergne Station on the Baines River and it was little wonder that, misled by numerous very similar ‘Razor Back Mountains’ and branching creeks, they were three days locating it. Years later, when travelling the rough road to Auvergne by car, Father would speak of his first impressions of this station, then in his control, as ‘the weirdest place ever I struck’. Since its formation in ’86 it had already acquired a name for tragedy and the wonder is that after the violent death or grave misfortune of at least half a dozen managers they could get anyone to run it at all.
Barney Flinn, the man then in charge, welcomed the drovers to the little shack on the high, wild bank of the Baines and conversation continued normally until he confided in his visitors what Father describes as ‘a number of extraordinary hallucinations…’ Among these was that the station was nightly surrounded by wild blacks and that he was doomed to die by a spear.
About midnight, when all were asleep, he leaped from his bunk and yelling like a maniac ran into the yard where he discharged the contents of his revolver. A most nerve racking experience.
In fact Flinn left soon afterwards, declaring the blacks would surely ‘settle’ him at Auvergne. He went buffalo shooting in Arnhem Land where he was promptly despatched by a spear while asleep.
When the droving party arrived at the Victoria River Depot the supply boat was about to leave for Darwin and Bill Hutchins, the storekeeper, was observed hastily stuffing handfuls of cheques from a tea cask into a sugar bag. He remarked to the visitors that he supposed it was time he was paying the Darwin merchants for the supplies sent ‘on tick’.
‘Have you counted it?’ someone asked.
‘Can’t count,’ said Hutchins. ‘The blighters’ll let me know if it ain’t enough and come it’s too much they won’t be worrying me.’
From this stage Father was suffering from the effects of a severe jar to his right hand.
April 1. With a strong effort I take hold of my pencil, for the pain of my hand still intense, after eight or nine days, during which time, as Milton says, ‘Sleep hath forsook and given me over.’
April 7th…Six days have elapsed since last entry and now make an attempt to write with my left hand for the suffering of my right by no means eased…Blacks appear on hill close to cattle—seem friendly disposed and Sultan and Pumpkin have conversation with them.
April 8th. Find we are four head cattle short. Pumpkin starts back after them returning without them. Reports that blacks encountered yesterday had chased them over the range…
Got spill going down a bank to water stock. Heavy shock for the sore hand…Rain came on suddenly at night—no tent rigged, all got drenched.
April 15th. Last night blacks appeared close by on the hill and about daylight made a war-like uproar, one fellow challenging us to mortal combat: ‘Come on now, you white b——!’ They remained all the morning but kept very quiet after first greeting…Travelling on, precipitous hills on either side and somewhat apprehensive of ambush. Reach good open flat at last without further incident.
April 17th. Discovered this evening that I have lost the relic given to me by poor Father on my departure from the station. Whilst myself attaching little credence to its miraculous or safe-guarding qualities and suspecting that it was as likely sold to Father by some rogue masquerading as a man of faith I am reluctant to proceed without it or to tell him on return that I have lost that which he has valued so highly for many years.
April 18th. Resolve to ride back with
Pumpkin to yesterday’s dinner camp where I had stripped off for a dip, and mirabili dictu Pumpkin discovers it in the crevice of a rock whereon I had left my clothes. The good fellow as delighted at its discovery as myself and Kilfoyle equally pleased on our return.
April 30th. Reached New Delamere Station. Only one man here—W. Wade, but blacks camped around. Black arrived this evening with mail from Springvale. Latest news eagerly absorbed Pt. Darwin paper April 24th, Sydney Bulletin April 11th. Much bitterness over issue shearers’ strike in which labour appears to have suffered major defeat. Strikers disbanded with fines and imprisonment for rioting and industry may now be permitted to carry on. Wade most interestingly regales us with the history of his ups and downs on this planet. Pumpkin and I bring bullocks in here to drink, but they refuse water, smell of blacks camped about too repugnant for them.
Pumpkin rides back after ‘Goaty’, our heaviest beast, somewhat lame after coming through gorge.
May 4th. On to Sardine Creek…‘Goaty’ still very lame, doubt he can go much farther…
Passed large lagoon, surrounded by pandanus, crocodiles very numerous.
May 8th. Crossed large creek running into the Katherine…At last we have to leave poor Goaty, the pride of the Behn, at the mercy of blacks, disease and alligators. Was half a mind to destroy him but who knows he may recover and come through, and Life is sweet, no doubt to dumb animals as to ourselves.
This concern for ‘poor Goaty’ is typical of the affection with which drovers often came to regard certain beasts in their mob, though hardly logical in view of the fact that they were being driven to slaughter anyway!
Threading through bog swamps and ant hills over fourteen feet high the drovers noticed symptoms of disease in the mob and before reaching Pine Creek eight had dropped out, dead or dying. Anxious to dispose of the cattle before further losses, Kilfoyle rode in to Fountain Head to negotiate with the local butcher, Bill Lawrie, while the mob followed quietly on. The announcement that he had Kimberley cattle for sale, however, was received without enthusiasm, for beef was no longer at a premium with outside markets closed to the Territory cattle men. Kilfoyle brusquely turned down Lawrie’s offer of £5 a head and leaving Father to hold and inoculate the cattle, took the train into Darwin to negotiate for better terms.
Meanwhile Father interviewed a Chinese butcher named Ah Tin, ‘who being unusually big for his race, with pointed beard and a good seat in the saddle, might have been Genghis Khan himself in a somewhat unusual setting’. Father had a liking and respect for the Oriental that was unusual in the north at this time and he made no apologies for his enjoyment of the Chinese butcher’s company as they rode together inspecting the mines, ‘being hospitably entertained with Square Face and Lager’ and arriving, in a very roundabout manner, at a tentative agreement for the sale of beef at 4d a pound and the horses at £17 a head.
A complicated vendetta following the theft of a bag of nuggets from one Chin-ah-din was in full swing around Pine Creek, ‘the rights and wrongs of which’, Father writes, ‘are so far as I can make out, beyond human solution, but a source of endless discussion among our oriental friends’.
Father’s hand had recovered and he was back in form again, reflecting upon the irony of down and out Australians working for Chinese when
The Celestials as everyone calls them hereabouts were after all introduced by the South Australian Government to supply that cheap and servile coolie labour necessary to the development of a new colony. Of a local population two-thirds Chinese I see no evidence of any working but for himself and not in such ways likely to develop the country since the gold they find will be taken out, smuggled if possible, and the gardens they have grown will be abandoned to the wilderness when the gardeners have amassed such as will constitute a fortune in the Land of the Dragon. One must mention in all fairness, however, that we owe to the Chinese the rapid completion of the railway from Fountain Head to the port since white labour would have lacked not only in numbers but in hardiness and energy to have achieved a mile of it under Territory conditions.
Of the 10,000 Chinese who came to the Territory, perhaps half returned to their native land. The rest would remain to settle in Darwin, Wyndham, Derby and Broome or to drift about the country as station cooks. Great numbers died by misadventure, many while attempting to make back overland into Queensland to avoid the heavy poll-tax imposed on gold leaving Darwin.
Kilfoyle returned from Darwin where no one had been prepared to make any offer for the cattle at all. They thereupon ran up a bough shed and a butcher’s gallows and began slaughtering and salting their beef for distribution by Ah Tin around Brocks Creek and Yam Creek where most of the miners were congregated.
A June entry records the acquisition of a new stockboy in a casual manner typical of the times.
Black boy called Dick came to our camp this evening bringing with him nice little fellow named ‘Aled Meith’. He, Dick, consents to leave boy with me to care for him.
A few weeks later when Long Michael was returning to Wyndham after a short visit to his relatives in the Territory, Father sent the boy around with him to be left in charge of his brother John who was then managing Connor and Doherty’s store in Wyndham. By this time the child had become so attached to Father that
he most reluctantly stopped behind when I left on the train, caught hold of the bars endeavouring to get in after me. M.J.D. led him away weeping—poor little chap, unable to understand that he will see me soon again.
After three months in the butchering business, results seemed to justify Father’s returning for another mob while Kilfoyle, now joined by his wife, carried on at Pine Creek. Father and Pumpkin took the train to the port—still referred to as Palmerston
…that same rather unpleasant habitat where every person thinks himself wiser than his brother and bears himself with that same languid and sardonic air. Find myself looking forward to the return to Wyndham which monotonous shambles though it is has the friendly familiarity of one’s home town.
31
LIFE AND DEATH IN KIMBERLEY
The years 1891 to 1893. First Durack born in Kimberley. Mrs Patsy Durack visits Goulburn. M. P. Durack and Tom Hayes droving to the Territory. Stock disease. Further droving trips to Territory market. Murder of Sam Croaker at Auvergne. Controversy on the native question—Bishop Gibney versus Chas. Harper. Sergeant Lavery arrests natives on Argyle. Death of Mrs Patsy Durack from fever at Argyle. Rise of Connor and Doherty. M. P. and M. J. Durack drove cattle to Derby. Shipping to Fremantle.
Back at Argyle, where Grandfather and young Pat had been left in charge, news awaited of the birth of a fifth child to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Fan at Rosewood. ‘This making no less than eighteen Duracks in the district,’ Father writes, but he does not add a local wit’s description of contemporary East Kimberley as ‘the land of blacks, Sacks and bloody Duracks’, the ‘Sacks’ referred to being another prolific local clan.
A feeling of depression hung over the station, for Grandmother had taken ship around the north coast to visit her daughters in Goulburn. Grandfather thought the girls should return to Kimberley with their mother, for it now seemed that the house in Fremantle might not be possible for another year or two. So far there was barely enough money to carry on at Argyle and except for old Mrs Costello’s insistence upon paying for her daughter’s trip even that could not have been considered.
‘We’ll have them both nuns if we leave them in that convent much longer,’ Grandfather complained. ‘There’s Mary nineteen already and whatever chance of meeting an eligible man?’
‘I don’t think much of her chances of meeting one here,’ Father said, for he had already set an almost impossibly high standard of eligibility for his sisters’ suitors. ‘Besides, what on earth would they do with themselves?’
‘What do girls do anywhere?’ Grandfather asked. ‘Help their mother, make pretty clothes, go riding—’
‘In this climate? With skins like theirs?’
Father would no
t hear of it and already it was he who had the last word on family affairs.
At the beginning of October he was off again into the Territory with a second mob of 118 head. This time his companions, besides Pumpkin, were Tom Hayes and his boy Ned Kelly from Rosewood. This combination seems hardly to have been a successful one, for Father, the ‘book-reading’ young fellow who would not be told, and Hayes, the seasoned, opinionated overlander, were incompatible travelling companions. Since it had fallen to Father’s lot to undertake these rather tedious droving trips he saw no reason why they should not occasionally break a day’s travelling record or follow an unconventional procedure. Not so Tom Hayes, for whom there was only one way of handling cattle and that was as they had handled them ‘on the overland’. They came one day to a waterhole where Hayes considered the approach unsuitable for stock and insisted on riding downstream to find a better place, leaving Father, fuming with impatience, to hold the thirsty mob. After waiting half an hour Father, with Pumpkin’s help, started the cattle in to drink:
We have no difficulty whatever [he writes] in getting the cattle down where my friend tried to persuade me they could not be got in.
The boy Ned Kelly kept going to sleep on watch and letting the cattle stray and when Hayes took to him with a stockwhip retaliated by attacking his master with a tomahawk:
Indeed [Father remarks] had I not appeared at that moment to wrench the implement from the boy’s hands there may well have been serious consequences. Pumpkin in some disgust of the scene.
Blacks dogged their footsteps from the Territory border, set fire to the grass and disturbed the cattle continuously. Hayes was for firing shots to disperse them, Father for ‘making parley, since an understanding must be arrived at if this is to become a regular stock route’. A watering place where a bullock was speared and the mob deliberately stampeded they named ‘Humbug Camp’ as it is still known today.