The year 1862. Patsy Durack marries Mary Costelio. The Free Selection Act turned to travesty. Bushranging reappears.
Grandfather and Grandmother were married in the spring of 1862 at Tea-tree, the Costellos’ station home to which settlers and townsfolk from far and wide rolled up in their buggies and fours-in-hand, since, whether or not she approved the match, Mrs Costelio was determined that her daughter should have the biggest bush wedding of the year.
What a flurry there was, smoothing down crinolines and adjusting millinery—prim leghorn hats for the younger girls, confections of flowers and feathers for the matrons whose tightly corseted bosoms bore a proud display of brooches and heavy cameos, festoons of gold chains over tucks and frills and bows. The men were scarcely less gorgeously arrayed in coloured waistcoats, flowing ties and a fashionable profusion of whisker and moustache. Even the small boys were splendid for the occasion in checked pantaloons, tight-fitting trousers, peaked caps or ribboned boaters. Fortunately for family records a maker of daguerreotypes—an enterprising American—had made his way to the district about this time. He must have done a roaring business, for the wonder of photography was novel and irresistible. Everyone was taken—babies decked like little high priests in long lace surplices, spread out upon skin rugs or precariously propped against pieces of baroque furniture, grandparents seated with hands upon knees or on heavily bound family Bibles. Maidens clasped posies of flowers or leant rounded chins upon drooping hands with elbows resting on betasselled plush table covers. Young men in party finery or riding attire stood stiffly ill at ease before painted forests of English trees, or amid a clutter of pot plants and ornate Victorian bric-à-brac.
It was clear from Mrs Costello’s picture that her stiffly boned, flounced and fringed taffeta would, as her family claimed, have ‘stood alone’.
Officiating at the ceremony was Father Michael McAlroy, one of those splendid apostles of the saddle who did so much to bring civilisation and community life to the scattered back-block settlements. He had known the Costellos since earlier days in Yass when they had been storekeepers and, although Mrs Costello would prefer to have forgotten these humble beginnings, her husband, mellowed with wine and sentiment, recalled the days when the big, practical priest had shown him how to keep his ledger and get in some of the money owing to him. The Costellos were not the only members of his flock for whom he had combined the roles of father confessor and business adviser, while everyone knew of the incident at Lambing Flat. A judge sent down to quell a miners’ riot had found himself trembling in the midst of 10,000 angry men shouting to have him strung up, when into the medley strode Father McAlroy. The hubbub quickly ceased and the crowd dispersed, for the influence of ‘the fighting Father of Kildare’ went far beyond the limits of his own flock, and men of many creeds contributed to the schools and churches he called to life in every country town within his sprawling parish.
The occasion of the wedding was marked with all the laughter, song and dancing of typically Irish gatherings, for the linking of the clans Costello and Durack had connected half the Irish population of the district. Mrs Costello’s four sisters, my grandmother’s aunts, were all married and living with ever-increasing offspring around the county of Argyle. These included the families Hammond, Abbey, Kelly and Moore with another big clan named Hackett related somewhere on the side. Add to this the families Skeahan, Scanlan and Kilfoyle with all their spreading branches and one will not wonder that in these days it is hardly possible to name a town or district in Australia in which we cannot unearth some family connection. Grandfather embraced them all, to the last link in the long chain, and as this expansive trait was hardly less marked in his wife’s family the stage was now set for the mass migration of the clans that was to follow. Grandmother’s chief bridesmaid was her cousin Frances Hammond who was later to spend so much time with her relatives in western Queensland. Best man and groomsman were the brothers Michael and Stephen Brogan, cousins of Grandfather whom he had recently persuaded to join him from County Clare, and who were later to figure among the young bloods of Cooper’s Creek and the early droving tracks.
But there were many besides Irish among the wedding guests, some also to remain associated with the family in various ways. These included the Emanuels from Goulburn and the MacDonalds from the Isle of Skye who had a property near Grabben Gullen and were, like the Duracks, to be part of the big westward cattle drive of ’83. The McInnes family who had come from Tarlo River were also destined to be relatives by marriage but the sixteen-year-old Stumpy Michael was then too gauche and shy to reveal any interest in their daughter Kate, a close friend of his youngest sister Anne. Anne, however, had already made up her mind about the match and was to play a leading role in bringing it off. At eighteen, petite and bright as a bird, she was now the only unmarried girl in the family. Unlike her elder sisters, who regarded such pursuits as waste of precious time, she was an avid reader and although she shared the others’ passion for horses had taken a position as teacher in a little Goulburn school. Naturally her qualifications for this job were modest but she was a fine needlewoman and wrote a good, clear hand.
The three married sisters, Poor Mary Skeahan, Bridget Scanlan and Sarah Tully, were there each with a first-born son, Poor Mary looking wan and tired from an unsettled anxious life with Dinny, the rolling stone, Bridget developing the forthright character of a bush matron. Sarah, married in Goulburn a year before to Mrs Costello’s cousin Pat Tully, had been more successful than her sister in persuading her husband of the folly of a miner’s life, and they had taken up mixed farming on a free selector’s block at Hume Creek, twenty-five miles from Goulburn.
Darby and Margaret Durack arrived from Dixon’s Creek with their brood of five sons and four daughters, having been ‘blessed’ in almost every year of their married life. Everyone remarked the sturdy good looks of their offspring, the usual Durack mixture of fair and dark. The eldest, already known at twelve years old as ‘Big Johnnie’ to distinguish him from a number of other smaller Johnnies coming on behind, already earned money when harassed station owners needed an extra hand. His father swelled with pride to hear the boy praised for his horsemanship and the younger brother ‘Black Pat’ lauded as a game young buck jump rider. Even the third boy, the ‘Long Michael’ of after years, was already at home in the saddle, but it had not then occurred to Darby that his ‘brood of young eagles’ as people called them would not long content themselves within the confines of his nest on Dixon’s Creek. His determination never to resort to anything that savoured of borrowing had been maintained only by almost superhuman toil. Since he had also to keep his dairy business going it had taken him some years to clear even a few acres of trees and wattle scrub and sometimes, to make ends meet, he had taken well-paid carrying jobs to the goldfields.
When Grandfather brought his bride to Dixon’s Creek his mother planned to spend most of her time with her married daughters but it never worked out that way. The two women lived always in complete harmony and grieved for each other in the years they were apart. The same can hardly be said for Grandfather and his mother-in-law who never made much pretence of getting on. Their frank antagonism, however, seems to have provided a good deal of popular interest and amusement. When she considered an argument had gone far enough, Grandmother, a placid woman herself but accustomed from childhood to the uninhibited venom and eloquence of Irish tongues, would clang the horse bell that served as a dinner gong.
‘Come now,’ she would say, ‘what diference will it make atall in a few years’ time?’
How right she was, for although her children always remembered their mother’s quiet rebuke and her ringing of the bell, the momentous issues that threatened to raise the homestead roof were forgotten long ago.
We do know, however, one point on which they argued frequently and that was Grandfather’s wish to ‘poke along up north’, as he called it, into the new colony of Queensland which had been separated from New South Wales in 1859. The unfolding of Robertson’s Free Selection Act was proving particularly unsatisfactory to men in Grandfather’s position who were neither big established squatters nor free selectors, but who were ambitious to expand without circumventing the law.
Two successive bad seasons had done nothing to help the successful working of the ‘agricultural revolution’ and many who had come in good faith to clear and cultivate the land, unable to grow wheat without rain, either set themselves up as small pastoralists or turned to ‘dummying’ for the squatters. It was soon obvious how the radical new Act, conceived by an upright man, was being turned to a travesty by the manipulation of rogues, although it is hardly to be wondered that Robertson’s simple conditions, carrying no penalty for default, put temptation in everyone’s way. The squatters, in order to even up the score against them, found little difficulty in bribing discouraged selectors to bid and sign on their behalf at the land sales, so that the old evil of ‘pre-emption’, outlawed in theory, was in fact continuing under another name. Many of these ‘dummies’ were only too happy to take up residence on ‘their’ selections thereby complying with the conditions of the Act while turning their houses into grog shanties and acting as go-betweens for horse thieves and cattle duffers. Other selectors meanwhile had hit upon the profitable ideas of making such nuisances of themselves, thieving stock, firing hay-stacks, poisoning water and similar merry pranks that their neighbours were forced to buy them out, often at a great price.
There was a song about it now outback that put the situation in a nutshell:
If we find a mob of horses when the paddock rails are down,
Though before they were never known to stray,
When the moon is up we drive them to a distant inland town
And we sell them into slav’ry far away:
To Jack Robertson we’ll say:
‘We’re on a better lay
And we’ll never go a-farming any more,
For it’s easier duffing cattle on the little piece of land
Free selected by the Eumerella Shore.’
In these conditions the old bushranging bogy, long since decapitated, had grown a secondary head and the settlers were menaced as never before. The new outlaws were of a different type, however, from the refugees of chain gangs, and their lawlessness sprang from a combination of other causes. Many were colonial-born sons of poor settlers, some feckless, some genuinely frustrated by the conditions of their times. Often spirited and resourceful, they were frankly sceptical that crime would not pay in a country of ever-expanding frontiers, where many small settlers were willing collaborators in stock-lifting exploits directed against the domination of the squatter class and where it required no great feat of strategy to hold up a gold escort or a mail coach on a lonely bush road. Names such as ‘Darkie’ Gardiner, Ben Hall and O’Meally became household words in the outback. Robin Hoods of the Australian forest, Dick Turpins of the southern highways, feared and hunted, they were as often sheltered and admired.
About the time of Grandfather’s marriage, Darby Durack, his brother-in-law Tom Kilfoyle and their neighbour Con MacNamara had been held up by bushrangers while returning with their teams from the Forbes gold rush. The outlaws proved none other than the notorious ‘Darkie’ Gardiner and his gang, who, on hearing that they were working for Charlie McAlister had let them pass unmolested.
‘A decent chap, McAlister,’ Gardiner told them, ‘once sold me a good horse, dirt cheap, when I was near down and out. That was before I made my way up in the world. You can tell him Frank Gardiner don’t forget a good turn.’
This well-worn family anecdote is also related by Charles McAlister himself in his autobiography Old Pioneering Days in the Sunny South where he reminds his readers how the same gang soon after got off with £7,000 of gold dust from the Eugowra gold escort.
It is not to be wondered that Grandfather, irked and restricted by his turmoil of conflicting interests, yearned to strike out into a new area that promised just such limitless grazing land as had lured the first squatters into the unknown of New South Wales. Although Australia throughout the fifties was still too absorbed in gold to give much attention to official exploration, the tracks of men and stock had been pushing slowly out, following the rivers and tributary creeks, skirting the gibber plains in search of permanent water and grazing country. Unsung pioneers were mapping many a new river and mountain range, filling in the details of maps outlined, remaining to make their terms with the land and its original inhabitants.
Since the disappearance of Leichhardt’s party in ’48 a lot of country had been opened up in vain attempts to throw some light on their fate, and also by Thomas Mitchell moving around the interior of Queensland intent upon solving the mystery of the inland streams. In ’46 Mitchell had described a land of pasture and water to satisfy all the needs of man and his herds, but Gregory, returning in ’58 from another fruitless search for Leichhardt’s party, had reported Mitchell’s paradise in the grip of drought, his mighty Cooper river system a chain of lost and dwindling waterholes. Still, up to ’61 the continent had not been crossed except around the southern coast and men were still haunted with the phantom of an inland sea. In that year two men had come forward to contest the prize for the first to accomplish this tremendous task. One had been the Scot, John McDouall Stuart, the other Galway-born Robert O’Hara Burke, lately police officer, with whom Grandfather had become acquainted at the Ovens diggings.
The fifty-year-old Scot, less heavily supported than the dashing young Irishman, was the more experienced bushman—and a scientist. A small man, with sun-calloused skin and eyes red-rimmed with ‘sandy blight’, he had taken up the challenge of the interior before and having been several times defeated, knew what he was up against. He had known when to turn back and when to start again, while his rival was bravely pushing himself and his party on to nemesis. Stuart, a walking skeleton, scarcely human and half-blind, returned 2,000 miles from Van Dieman’s Gulf to Adelaide on the same day that the remains of Burke were brought to the same city by the men who had solved the mystery of his fate. Stuart had lived to receive the prize money, but not long enough to claim the grant of land that went with it.
So at last the secret of the inland had been made known. Let them come now, knowing that her fabled inland sea was lost in the drifting sands of geological time, its bed the pebbled gibber plains that had ground down the hard hoofs of the explorers’ horses to bleeding quicks. Let them come knowing the state in which she had cast back the men who claimed to have ‘conquered’ her, and how others had fared following the mock waters of her mirage.
But that was not the whole picture. Stuart had found fertile valleys in a central range, and farther north a well-watered tropical wilderness of unknown potential, while search parties combing the hinterland for Burke and his men, converging on Cooper’s Creek from three States, reported upon thousands of square miles of good grazing land.
But Queensland had a bad name, especially with the womenfolk who associated it still with the ill-famed ‘Moreton Bay Settlement’, selected in ’23 as the dumping place of the tougher convict types—those ‘thrice convicted felons’, who, under the merciless regime of Captain Logan, had been reduced to murdering their mates so that they might end their hopeless misery on the gallows. Some who had escaped into the bush were befriended by the blacks, others tortured and killed while the blacks themselves had been shot at, fed strychnine in bread and flour, skinned and set up as scarecrows in the paddocks. It was not long since men were publicly flogged in the streets of Brisbane and up to a year before, coin of the realm being still unknown in the settlement, people had dealt in flimsy paper currency—IOUs payable in Sydney and sometimes scribbled cannily on tissue paper, or baked so that they would crumble in the pocket.
But into the muddle and viciousness of its beginnings, when the district stagnated in ‘the dead sleep of inane criminality’, had ridden the free men, the landseekers. In defiance of the ban on free settlement they had followed on the tracks of that Aberdonian ‘Prince of Bushmen’, Pat Leslie, who in 1840 pushed out with his bullock teams and his flocks to wrest a holding from the Darling Downs. Knowing from past experience the futility of calling back these tough first-footers in a tough land, cut off from control in Sydney by 500 miles, the government had officially thrown open the interior of this region in ’42, but already the sheep and cattle were spreading up along the coast, inland to the Thompson River, over the Plains of Promise and soon into the hinterland of Carpentaria where cotton and sugar plantations had sprung up on the alluvial lands along the coastal rivers and creeks. Since it seemed that men of enterprise should be encouraged into this vast and empty land, no effort had been made, as in the days of ‘The Nineteen Counties’ of New South Wales, to keep the pastoralists within definite bounds and during the forties and fifties the frontiers had expanded rapidly. Nor was it long before these sturdy pioneers of the north had begun to express themselves as a group whose special problems of isolation, climate, lack of labour and other hardships separated them from their fellows of the south. They held indignation meetings, clamouring for the re-establishment of transportation, pointing out how the southern counties, smug in their prosperity, had been built on the convict labour they now self-righteously denied the pioneers of the north. There was fierce opposition to their demands, but in ’59 the mother colony decided that this noisy minority had best be allowed to work out its own salvation.
At the time of her separation from New South Wales, Queensland, covering an area of 670,500 square miles, could boast no more than 25,000 of Australia’s population that had topped the million mark a year before and labour was still her most crying need. She began with the ludicrous sum of sevenpence-halfpenny in her treasury, but with an infectious optimism and faith in her future that brought in vast sums of borrowed capital to start her public works and encourage immigration.
John Dunmore Lang, still zealous in the cause of free settlement, had tried to solve the labour problem by a much advertised system of ‘land orders’ that in the next few years brought a motley collection of unfortunates flocking to Queensland as previously to New South Wales and Victoria. From the manufacturing towns of northern England came families driven from the cotton famine caused by the American Civil War, came more Irish drafted from the poorhouses, came assigned labourers, German farmers, Italian peasants, Kanakas ‘blackbirded’ from islands and sold to the sugar planters. The population more than doubled itself by ’61 but, as in New South Wales, too few were disposed to push out past the coastal areas to solve the labour problems of the squatters. Still, the lure of new country, coupled with an encouraging land policy that had profited by many mistakes of the mother colony, was strong enough to outweigh the inconveniences. The Queensland system of ‘supervised selection’ favoured the small man while an ideal of ‘expansion without speculation’ gave encouragement to bigger settlers by issuing fourteen-year leases only to those who, by stocking their land during a year’s probation, had proved themselves not mere speculators but genuine pioneers.
In a dogged regime of ‘do it yourself’, the root no doubt of the often ingenious but crude and inelegant Australian ‘makeshift’, the lonely advance guard pushed west to Cambridge Downs on the Flinders, out to Julia Creek, on the Cloncurry district of the State’s north-west. Further south stock had pressed out to Enniskillen on the upper Barcoo River by ’62 and Tambo and Terrick Stations quickly followed on its eastern tributary, but south and west of these outposts was still a no-man’s-land crying out, or so it seemed to Grandfather and John Costello, to be taken up.
‘Out there,’ Grandfather declared, ‘between the Warrego and the Paroo, are kingdoms waiting to be claimed.’
‘Out there,’ said Grandmother Costello, ‘ye will be having your bones picked white by the dingoes and the crows like those poor fellows Burke and Wills if ye haven’t the sense to know when you’re well off.’
Mrs Costello contended moreover that Patsy Durack was an unsettling influence on her son John but the boot may well have been on the other foot, for John Costello had the wanderlust and the land hunger in his veins long before Grandfather spoke with him of those empty kingdoms a thousand miles north.