The year 1849. Darby Durack, his wife and infant arrive in New South Wales. A brief background of progress in the colony, limits of penetration, the manner of early settlement. The work of John Dunmore Lang and Caroline Chisholm for immigration. Suspension of convict transportation. Depression of the forties. Revival of immigration and rise of the smaller settlers. Departure of the new arrivals for Goulburn.
Darby and Margaret had promised with simple confidence to write home the truth about the colony. ‘Sure, and we’ll be letting you know just the way it is.’ But what were they to say when contradictions faced them at every turn and they could form no picture whatever of this vast continent, roughly the size of the United States and into which the British Isles, complete with Ireland, would have fitted comfortably twenty-five times over? The colony of New South Wales, still unshorn of Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory, sprawled between the tropical Arafura and Coral seas and the cold waters of Bass Strait for over one and a half million square miles and yet contained, in the year 1849, no more than 400,000 people.
The shape and area of settlement was still largely undefined, the boundaries of occupation blurred with the straying feet of sheep and cattle in a fenceless land. The story of Australian settlement was yet to be written, and the inland penetration of the squatters and their herds could be traced only with uncertain fingers on the unformed maps. No one knew how far a man was going when he set out from the nearest depot with his loaded bullock waggons and his stock, nor did he know himself. He was off in search of good grazing and good waters for his herds, like as not beyond the last man out before, who would indicate to him the arbitrary boundaries of his ‘run’—a blazed tree, a ploughed furrow, a range or a river.
When the Duracks arrived in 1849 the process had been going on for thirty-six years, since 1813, when men had at last crossed the Great Dividing Range that had held settlement in check for twenty-five years after the arrival of the first fleet. Later Australian bushmen, reflecting on the tremendous obstacles they themselves had overcome, would wonder that the pioneers had remained daunted for so long, but the mountains had been a psychological as well as a physical barrier to settlement. Beyond had lain the great unknown believed by many to be an arid, wind-swept waste inhabited by wild cannibal tribes, and it was even thought among the convicts that if a man crossed the range and kept walking he might reach China or Tibet. When a pass was found at last and the explorers gazed enraptured on the vast sweep of the rich Australian prairies there appeared the first symptoms of a land fever that was to burn in men’s blood, driving them into the remotest and most forbidding wilderness.
The government had done its best to satisfy this urge in an organised way by issuing land grants to approved settlers within surveyed areas, but by the early twenties when the surveyors could no longer keep pace with the demand for land the flood of settlement had broken through. The land takers, with their herds and assigned servants, were over the hills and far away, past the reach of the law. Breathlesslv the authorities set about the establishment of nineteen counties where, it was declared, settlement must be contained. With the vision of tidy farms and patchwork fields, of county squires and a sturdy, respectful yeomanry they named their counties nostalgically—Gloucester, Cumberland, Glamorgan, Buckingham, Argyle, Durham, Northumberland—but only in name were they to resemble those of the old land. Fast as they worked, the pioneers on their indomitable westward march were even faster, pushing out the boundaries of settlement in a policy of their own. Undaunted by the government challenge that no police protection would be provided outside the authorised limits, they made their own rules, fighting out the battles of their boundaries with rifles, stockwhips and stirrup irons.
The Home Office was outraged, demanding that the colonial government recall these ‘self styled pastoralists’, these ‘lawless gypsies’ to within surveyed limits. Little they knew the conditions of the country or the fibre of the ‘gypsies’ they would have brought to heel. ‘Not all the armies in England,’ replied Governor Bourke, ‘not a hundred thousand soldiers scattered through the bush could drive back those herds within the limits of the Nineteen Counties.’ And so the tide of settlement, pressing on the tracks of the explorers, followed the rivers and tributary creeks, spreading fanwise across the countryside.
Provision depots became stores and shanty hotels that in turn burgeoned into dusty little towns. The settlers cut the tracks between them with their waggon wheels, and in time, as the centres grew, the convict gangs came out and built the roads. Within a decade the squatters, rising on the success of John Macarthur’s experiments in pure merino fleece, and the toil of their assigned labourers, had become virtually the ruling voice in the colony and were clamouring for title to the land they had commandeered. The term ‘squatter’, in its first Australian application, had referred to an illicit occupier of Crown land who plundered stock from legal holders. A squatter was then a common thief, ‘a bushranger with a base’, but the term became confused when robust and otherwise law-abiding pioneers broke bounds and ‘squatted’ where they pleased, wresting their little kingdoms from the virgin bush. In time, as their status became recognised and their demands for security of tenure were granted, the term lost all its earlier implication and tooth on the respectability that they had won for themselves.
They were the big men now, and governments were swayed by their insistence that what Australia needed was not more free settlers but more labourers, the cheaper the better, and convicts for preference. For the first fifty years free emigration had been discouraged in the colony, but during the thirties public conscience began to stir about ‘the system’ whereby men were reduced to the status of beasts and it was realised by the more far-seeing that, however the wool industry might prosper, Australia could never progress to nationhood without a healthy population of free settlers.
Among the most zealous advocates of family emigration were Dr John Dunmore Lang, a radical Presbyterian minister, and Mrs Caroline Chisholm, the English-born wife of an officer of the East India Company who had come to Sydney with her husband in 1839, ten years before the arrival of Darby and Margaret Durack. Mrs Chisholm, appalled at the miserable condition of many destitute women and young girls shipped out in a crude attempt to balance the colony’s largely male population, at once established a home for them, set up a labour exchange and soon a colonisation bureau. Realising the desperate need for family life in the outback, she personally escorted groups of young girls to the scattered inland settlements. A pretty little woman on a big, white horse, she had ridden before her cavalcade of bullock drays on one of the most remarkable match-making campaigns in history, teaching her timid charges how to live and like it in the Australian bush, prompting the squatter with his duty to his employees.
Only Dr Lang’s violently sectarian bias separated his aims from those of this Catholic woman whom he described as ‘an artful female Jesuit’ whose sole object was ‘to Romanise this great colony by means of a land flood of Irish popery’. Like others before him, Lang had striven hard to preserve Australia as a strictly Protestant dominion and was outraged to observe how the Catholics were quietly consolidating themselves in the colony with a growing network of churches and schools, and—worst of all—an Archbishop named John Polding who was as zealous and hard-riding as himself. His antipathy to Caroline Chisholm was, if not unfounded, at least unjust, for her message was quite unpartisan and carried no less to the poor crofters of Scotland and the struggling industrial workers of England and Wales than to the destitute of Ireland. Nonetheless, the combined voices of these two forceful personalities contributed largely to the suspension of convict transportation in 1840 and to the furtherance of a policy that in fifteen months brought over 26,000 assisted emigrants to New South Wales.
This triumph of reason and humanity over the viciousness of an inhuman policy was not, however, without its reverse side. ‘The bounty system’ and other schemes, too hastily devised, had brought out the undernourished and backward overflow of workhouses, orphanages and depressed industrial towns. People long since sapped of the qualities needed in a pioneering land had clung to the outskirts of Sydney town, living squalidly in bark huts, eking out a meagre living from their little plots. Timid and suspicious, confident only that ‘the lordly men’, ‘the squatters’ as they called them here, would somehow contrive to have all the good things for themselves, they believed nothing that had been told them of opportunities outback. Even the venturesome spirits, disillusioned by conditions not yet reassessed in terms of free labour, came flocking back, some to enter trades and build up little businesses, most to swell the ranks of the unemployed about the port.
The sale of Crown lands for the financing of immigration had encouraged land sharks to buy up tracts of country for the fleecing of small settlers, and the government, its funds ‘completely deranged’, was forced to suspend further assisted immigration. Drought struck the colony. Agriculture made no progress. The price of wool dropped and sheep were hardly worth the price of getting them to market. The pastoral industry, suddenly bereft of convict labour, hard hit in other ways, teetered for half a decade on the edge of ruin. Many pioneers walked off their properties. Others clung on, pinning their faith to a turn of the tide. Someone hit upon the plan of rendering down the sheep for their fat and reeking ‘boiling-down works’ sprang up in the outback towns.
When the price of tallow, mutton hams and hides rose from next to nothing to 16s a head, and good rains revived the land, salvation was in sight. The depression was already lifting by ’43, but it left behind it empty pockets and heavy hearts. It was none so easy to start again, and the call to gold and easy money in California fell upon eager ears. Now that the shackled mutes were no longer there to cushion the impact of men against the land Australia was seen for the hard precarious virgin country that she was.
Without labour, progress was impossible. Convicts were no more and free emigration seemed patently to have failed. Yet through all the chaos and seeming contradictions Dr Lang and Caroline Chisholm had plugged on. By 1846, having failed to enlist the support of a disillusioned government in her own improved colonisation scheme, Mrs Chisholm had personally settled 2,000 men and women in the colony and had returned to England to establish her own Family Colonisation Loan Society and charter her own ships, properly equipped and supervised. The first of these, the Slains Castle, was not to leave England until 1850, by which time many like the Durack couple and their Kilfoyle relatives, influenced by her propaganda for emigration to New South Wales, had already come out.
How much of this great continent, they asked, was still unexplored? A simple question, but no one could answer it precisely. The landseekers, moving swiftly out along the big westward-flowing streams, had left untouched wastes between, and all the while explorers had been slowly solving the mystery of what lay in the unmapped emptiness beyond. In 1840 a valiant Yorkshireman named John Eyre had forced his way towards the centre of the continent in search of a fabulous inland sea, but finding nothing more promising than the great, shimmering salt lake that bears his name, struck west along the blighted southern coast towards Swan River Settlement. Although he did not succeed in reaching his objective over land, the desert miles he covered threw another shaft of light into the unknown.
In ’44 Charles Sturt had penetrated to within 150 miles of the centre of the continent, and in ’48 the German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt, who had previously made his way from Moreton Bay over three thousand miles of hitherto unknown country to the central northern coast at Port Essington, disappeared for ever with his entire party when attempting to cross the continent from his previous starting-point to Perth on the far west coast.
By ’49, the year of the Duracks’ arrival, the more fertile river tracts as far south as Port Phillip were occupied and pioneers had pushed up the Darling in the far west of New South Wales almost to Menindee, but still the ‘great grey lands’ to the north and west lay largely unexplored. From Moreton Bay Settlement, six hundred miles up the coast from Sydney, pastoral occupation was spreading more slowly west to the Condamine River and north to the Burnett, but the remainder of that vast land, to be declared the independent colony of Queensland ten years later, lay empty and challenging. Scattered groups of ‘shepherd kings’ were expanding in the colony of South Australia with as yet little evidence of permanent occupation, while on the western side of the continent settlement clung sparsely to the southernmost corner between Swan River and the little port of Albany. For the rest, nomad Aboriginal tribespeople were still the undisputed occupants, those furthest from the line of settlement only half-believing the rumours of a new race, part human and part animal, like the tribal heroes of olden time, who strode upon four legs with long tails blowing in the wind.
The newcomers could not yet write home to Ireland of a land of opportunity for the little man, but it could not be said that the big men had it all their own way here. They had been defeated only a few weeks before in an issue that was still being much talked about. The pastoralists had kept appealing for the revival of transportation, but public opinion had been so loud in its disfavour that their requests had been reconsidered only when the gaols at home became full to overflowing. The humanitarians had their point, but there was another side of it. Not only would transportation put the colonial wool industry again on its feet but would give hundreds of lost men, rotting in overcrowded cells, a chance to reprieve themselves as had so many ‘emancipists’ or ‘ticket of leave men’ now successfully established in New South Wales. When news came that a shipload of convicts had been despatched to Sydney such a hue and cry broke out as had not been heard before in the colony. By this time the protests of disinterested idealists were joined by a chorus of thoroughly interested small people—shopkeepers dependent on the custom of free men, immigrants who could not compete against slave labour. Each side couched its arguments in high-sounding phrases. The big men talked of the ‘ideals of national development’ and of ‘giving the unfortunate convict a chance to redeem himself’, so the little men had talked back in the same coin. The transportation system was a ‘menace to the slowly emerging ideals of a young nation’ and a song of freedom had rung out in the streets:
Sons of the soil arise! Let this your anthem be,
Shout ’til it rend the skies—‘Australia shall be free!’
It was a crude strain but with a ring of triumph so different from the yearning songs of the Irish, conditioned to the unrequited wrong, protesting always, but with little hope of redress. It seemed that in this country the small men stood as much chance of gaining their point as the proud and powerful. They had laughed to scorn the suggestion of establishing a hereditary Australian aristocracy and, shaking their fists as the convict hulk Hashemy sailed into Sydney Harbour in June ’49, they had again won the day. The passengers were let ashore, quietly, as work was found for them, granted immediate ‘tickets of leave’ and let go their way as free men. It was the end of an epoch, for transportation was never to be revived in New South Wales.
By 1849 reception depots for immigrants were an established feature and bewildered newcomers were now met and organised. Immigration lists were published in the Sydney Morning Herald for the benefit of intending employers, and on August 14, 1849, the arrival of the Duke of Roxborough was duly noted with the information that:
Tomorrow the hiring of immigrants will be proceeded with…Besides the above there are about ten unmarried females by this vessel who will be lodged in the depot at Hyde Park where they can be hired between two and four o’clock tomorrow and on succeeding days.
Darby Durack, who had signed up for farm work, was forced to await the departure of immigrant coaches for inland, an irksome two weeks’ delay, since the raw and rowdy port of Sydney was hardly to the taste of these Irish country folk. The overcrowding of the town served only to stress the emptiness of the vast colony. The ill-sewered, dray-made thoroughfares were noisy with swaggering sailors, red-coated soldiers brawling with the native-born ‘currency lads’, hucksters, jugglers, street dancers and gaudy prostitutes. Chinese coolies—another unsuccessful experiment in servile labour—shuffled past with poles of fish, black men in tattered clothing sold wooden props, rush-made brooms and wild honey. Bullock-drawn waggons swayed through slushy wheel ruts with their top-heavy loads of wool and hides from far inland. And on everything the light, even in winter, fell hard and harsh.
On August 28 it was further announced in the press that thirty-seven immigrants per ship Duke of Roxborough were that day sent from the immigration barracks at Parramatta to the town of Goulburn, and Darby with his wife and infant faced their first inland journey with mingled sensations of relief and apprehension.