by Mary Durack
A Sunday stroll on the domain to hear the stump orators expatiating on Temperance, Religion, Socialism. The trait of sincerity would appear wanting in many of them.
Attended a cricket match the enthusiasm showing that this game is regarded as the great national sport in N.S.W. as football in Victoria. A great number of ladies present not so much from admiration or understanding of the game as of putting in evidence their new Sunday frocks and hats…
Father records at some length his righteous anger when a young Sydney solicitor brashly deprecated the morals of the bush.
The most convincing practical argument would be to have felled him on the spot but I had to bring the philosophy of my silent hours in the bush to bear and so averted the enactment of a scene.
I emphasised that what he said might in some measure be true of the weak minded led by the dictates of others into giving way to their animal propensities in places yet lacking the elevating influence of women or of entertainment of any sort.
I remark that we assuredly lack such edifying influences as high kicking ballet girls and daily scenes of debauchery and lawlessness. The appearance at this stage of a depraved and drunken woman added some weight to my remarks on this boasted city morality. Should therefore, any casual reader peruse these lines, let him not hold up for my admiration the high standards of the city as against those of the bush nor yet accuse us of callous indifference to fellow beings who deal to the best of our ability and conscience and within the limits of our present circumstances with the daily exigencies of our isolated lives…
In Brisbane the inevitable family contacts included Aunt Kate, still in the throes of legal battle, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Pat Tully with stories of the recent inroads of rabbits to match the growing worry of tick infestation in the north. But things were improving in western Queensland. The Tullys with 22,000 sheep, 3,000 cattle and 400 horses were rapidly wiping off their debt to the bank and looking to a future where increasing knowledge of the artesian system would allay much of the constant anxiety of drought.
Father’s old Kimberley acquaintance Ernest Baynes had branched out in an experiment that was to solve yet another of the cattle man’s problems.
Am driven by Ernest to their chilling rooms and later to their meatworks at Queensport which I find indeed inspiring and thought provoking in its implications for the future of our industry. In this process not one iota of the beast goes to waste…The process of tinning I find amazing…
By this time, although drawn by associations to Queensland and New South Wales, the Kimberley branch of the family definitely regarded the West as home, and Father voices sentiments of warm satisfaction at returning to Fremantle to the hearty welcome of Connor and Doherty. Every year of their association had strengthened the ties of trust and friendship between them and an affiliation of their business interests had already been discussed. To Father there had never seemed any reasonable argument against it. They followed the same calling, knew the same people, went to the same church, shared the same politics, belonged to the same clubs and laughed at the same jokes.
Connor and Doherty, now in possession of both Newry and Auvergne stations, had a large area of country with its western border—unfenced of course—abutting on Argyle so that altogether the properties would form a sizeable pastoral empire of some six to seven million acres or roughly 10,000 square miles. With this asset and the Wyndham business, the firm of Connor, Doherty and Durack would be in a position to hold its own against even so powerful a combination as Forrest and Emanuel.
The proposed amalgamation and the troublesome topic of cattle tick occupied most of their time while awaiting the return ship to Wyndham.
In January Long Michael’s partner Lumley Hill had discussed with Connor and Doherty the danger of tick, supposed to have come into the north from Batavia in the seventies, being allowed to penetrate freely into Kimberley from heavily infested areas in Queensland and the Territory. The idea was rapidly gaining ground that the parasite Ixodes bovis was directly responsible for red-water fever that had decimated many good herds over the past ten or twelve years. So far Kimberley had been relatively free of the pest, but if unchecked it would no doubt soon become a major challenge to the industry.
Connor, Lumley Hill and other east Kimberley pastoralists had thereupon waited on the Commissioner for Crown Lands asking for an implementation of the Stock Diseases Act to prevent the import of cattle from the Territory—except from border properties owned by Kimberley interests such as Wave Hill, Newry and Auvergne. It no doubt seemed a shrewd move at the time to have protected the east Kimberley market at the same time as preventing the further introduction of tick, but no sooner was the regulation agreed upon than some busybody stock inspector reported cases of tick and resultant red-water fever as far west as Hall’s Creek!
East Kimberley pastoralists at once began clouding the issue by referring to the difficulty of distinguishing true cattle tick from other harmless varieties and of how many infested areas had never known a case of red-water fever, whereas red-water fever had occurred where no one had yet seen a tick. An entomologist named Helms had now been sent up to make a thorough investigation of all stations and it was hoped by his associates in Fremantle that Father would be able to bring to his notice ‘the many anomalies that appeared so far to have escaped the notice of the inspectors’.
And so began the battle of Ixodes bovis that was to rage between east and west Kimberley pastoralists for many years to come, uncovering the worst aspects of self interest on either side—a story actually more interesting to the psychologist than to the entomologist who was in little doubt from the beginning as to the true nature and implications of the pest. The fight was to drag on long after the limit I have set for this chronicle of the pioneering days, until the issue was resolved in the gradual immunity built up by the cattle against infection, when the regulations, quarantine lines and dipping troughs would fall, one by one, into disuse, almost without the participants in the long struggle realising that it was drawing to an end. By this time, however, little semblance of friendship would remain between Connor, Doherty and Durack in the east and their old associates Forrest and Emanuel in the west. Nor did it help to dispel the undercurrent of class consciousness that existed between the ‘old families’ of the State and the ‘Irish element’ from ‘the other side’.
In the first round the Duracks came out rather well, being put on record by the government entomologist Richard Helms as the only settlers in the district from whom he received any co-operation. This may not have been unrelated to the fact that Father and the scientist enjoyed each other’s company, finding much in common in their literary tastes. Together they rode around collecting specimens in tin match boxes and discussing the ‘anomalies of the tick question’ with the anomalies of various philosophers far into the night.
Apropos of the many abortive arguments upon which we mortals embark, [Father writes] I quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went.
Helms shares my admiration of the philosophy expressed, poor Father, on the other hand, somewhat contemptuous of ‘the heathen nincompoop!’
Grandfather had no patience with the pastoralists in deliberately keeping the tick question ‘anomalous’ and he had frankly laid before the inspector a number of aspects that did not favour the immediate policy of the east Kimberley cattle men. He had expressed himself on this subject forthrightly from the outset:
‘Why don’t ye get down to tin-tacks about this tick business?’
‘What do you mean—tin-tacks?’ his sons countered. ‘What would you do about it, anyway?’
‘I’d find out whether the tick really was the cause of this red-water and set to work to get rid of it even if ye sell no cattle for a couple of years.’
‘But we’re sure it’s not
the cause,’ the boys insisted. ‘It’s a big scare put up by the west Kimberley people to collar the market.’
Grandfather however had an inconvenient memory in some respects:
‘Ye were willing to blame the little creature when it suited yere own ends to keep the Territory cattle out. I tell ye ye’ll not solve yere problems by playing politics.’
‘But we’ve to sell our stock haven’t we? It’s a matter of business.’
‘It’s bad business,’ the old man told them. ‘There’s a cattle disease in this country and ye should be fighting it together, both sides of the fence, instead of trying to hoodwink the government for the sake of a temporary gain.’
But his protests carried little weight with his sons, or for that matter with any other Kimberley residents. An attitude had taken hold of the country that he could neither define nor understand. He could only shake his head in a bewildered way, wondering where the dream had failed, why this rich and beautiful land seemed loved by neither God nor man. The towns and the homes had not come as he had hoped. The only made road within hundreds of miles was one he had hacked out with his own hands. The boys showed no signs of marrying and it was clear that Argyle would be a home only as long as the girls remained. When they went away it would become a desolate shell of a place, full of dust and cobwebs and white ants like the womanless shack over the river at Lissadell. Was the lack of progress in the land a matter of the climate, the fever, the isolation, and the cattle tick or was there something lacking towards it in the hearts of the pioneers?
35
RETURN TO IRELAND
The years 1896 to 1897. Patsy Durack sails for Ireland, visits his birthplace in County Clare and Mr Healy in Kilkenny and returns to Australia. A broken romance.
Grandfather was depressed, restless and ‘inclined to be cantankerous’.
He complained that nobody now confided in him or took his advice. His suggestion for linking up the Kimberley properties with land in the goldfields district had been turned down, his recommendation that the boys purchase a piece of land known as Mt Eliza, overlooking the Swan River and city of Perth, then going for a song, swept aside as ‘another airy speculation’. His son now appeared more inclined to rely upon the business advice of Connor and Doherty and talked of an amalgamation that he regarded as the utmost folly. Let them remain friends and business associates, but partners, never! His brother Galway Jerry’s recent move in selling his Rosewood interest for an inferior lump of country on the Dunham River—for which he should have his head read, Grandfather declared—was nonetheless an example of the troubles that could arise in such partnerships.
In the middle of ’96 the old man was persuaded to act on his long-professed wish to visit the land of his birth and to see Mr Healy who, supposedly a dying man when he left Brisbane ten years before, was now well over eighty. A business angle was given the trip by commissioning Grandfather to purchase a couple of much-coveted stud bulls from a dealer in Penzance.
And so, after forty-four crowded years, Grandfather returned to Ireland and the scenes of his boyhood and to his few remaining relatives and friends. In most respects he returned to disillusionment, for although in the intervening years he had sent regular remittances to relieve the poverty of his people and had brought out and settled in Australia as many as possible, his welcome seemed less genuine than he had expected. He felt that after all his name had been associated mainly with a source of revenue, and that when he was found to be no more than an ageing and rather impecunious colonial there was little interest in his homecoming. Few cared to know what his life had been, to hear of his beloved wife or of his family, and even in the matter of politics he felt somehow let down. The high ideals he had upheld in the face of so much argument seemed, with many he met, to have dissolved in pettiness and the totally ‘unreasonable’ attitude of which so many complained. Even his hero Parnell had brought dishonour on the Nationalist cause through being cited as co-respondent in a divorce suit. Moreover, although well aware of historical causes he was grieved by so much evidence of apathy and neglect. Surely a stable door could be fixed ‘in two shakes of a cow’s tail’ without the purchase of a single pennyworth of new materials. All his life he had been fighting circumstances, contriving, improvising, calling upon St Patrick and all the saints for miracles and achieving them with his own bare hands. And now, out of the turmoil of busy years and forward striving he was back in the slow-moving changeless land of procrastination where, because there seemed so little future, people found solace and inspiration only in the past.
There is much idle talk [he wrote to his family from Scariff] of again shifting a boundary between the Counties Galway and Clare but nothing practical of removing the mess from the laneways and clearing of the ditches. This change will be putting the birthplace of yere Grandfather onto the Clare side and for that it is written he was a Galwayman on his tombstone and proud of it I would not have it changed.
I have seen the old home and the barn where I received what little schooling was then possible for the poor Irish. Of the Hedge schools, as we were after calling them, I have spoken to ye, for that they were sometimes indade held among the hedges for the fear of detection, but this before my time a little.
Of the sorrows of Ireland I have not spoke much for ye will not understand it, dear children, as here they will not understand that a property in Australia may be the size of all Ireland and a single paddock the size and more of Galway or Clare, so that I hold my tongue unless they be taking me for the millionaire I am not.
But some day ye must be seeing it that ye will know of the green that burns on the eye for that it is so bright and of the colour of heath that I am sending ye but will soon be dry. The snow on the mountains of New South Wales is not as here where it is in a white winter lying everywhere and very quiet in the frost.
The tinkers are here still with all their lies and nonsense for the tune of a coin and I believing them and all as a boy. From here I go to Kilkenny for to visit ye’re old tutor Mr Healy who is near blind I hear, but well enough by the grace of God, and all the years since ye’re dear Mama and me have sent him home to die after his terrible experience, all the skin burnt clean from his body by the sun and him shouting out and delirious. My dear boys, John and Pat there is no doubt ye’re Guardian Angels were minding ye on that day and do not be forgetting in ye’re prayers for to thank them.
I am in touch with the dealer in Penzanse from whom I shall purchase the bulls and will be bringing them with me on the ship and hope ye shall be to Sydney to meet me. I have a present for each of ye and from Father Feeney who got it from France some of the Water of Leward for to cure the sick.
I am not sure yet the ship only that it will be a finer one than brought me the same way in ’53 when we were glad of the passage alone without the luxury for those were hard times as ye would not understand or be needing now to know…
How should they understand since he himself had all but forgotten until he stood again on the mountain he had climbed as a boy and played upon his flute the songs of the bards?
Gold, silver and jewels were only
As dust in his hand,
But his sword, like a lightning flash blasted
The foes of the land…
For all he had worked hard, there had been time then to dream of heroes such as the valiant Boru and the noble Mahon but men did not dream of the past in the new land where life was a pressing forward and a riding on, to the next horizon and the next.
How should they understand that here a hundred years ago was as yesterday and that the Irish born, like a child of Israel, carries within him the past of his race? He felt now that he had spoken perhaps too little of the old land and of his own youth, telling few but the happy things—of trout fishing in the Shannon, of market days in Gort, of wielding the cudgels and ‘hurling’ and dancing ‘The Walls of Limerick’ as they used in the village of Scariff on the quiet Loch where he was born. He had spoken more of the splendour of the Galway Blaze
rs than of himself as the struggling farmer’s son—watching and dreaming.
He had said little of the blight of ’45, the curse that fell in the autumn and the next again, the foliage black overnight and the stems brittle to the touch and the potatoes but the size of pigeon’s eggs. And of how the memory was there then of all the famines of the past from the bliadhain an air, the year of the slaughter and other years when even the skies seemed hung with the dark draperies of death.
‘And what can the Irish be wanting now?’
‘They’re starving and dying, Your Majesty, some in barns and some upon the frozen highways, living and dead huddled beneath a covering of bags, and babies new-born with never a garment to wrap them.’
‘You cannot live in Ireland. To get up you must first get out.’
He had hardly spoken of the struggle it was to save from the sale of stock as various branches of the family went on their way to the colonies, of waiting for letters and hoping, with the winter coming on, for good news and a ‘little something’ in the envelope. He had told his children a simple tale of a shining sovereign tossed by an English nobleman whose carriage he had lifted from the bog—a magic coin that multiplied to a whole heap of money that brought them all to the land of opportunity. Why explain that ‘the fortune’ they paid as assisted immigrants was but £8 in all? It had been wealth to them then, when they had gathered, family on family, waiting in the cold with the dogged patience of the poor for a turn of the wind to send the sailing packet on its way.