12
LAND OF WAITING
The years 1868 to 1869. Drought and hard times haunt the settlers.
Into focus through the blur of years ride these hard, lean, bearded men, quick-moving in their days of slow travel, pitting human will and energy against a strange land’s hostility, dotting its great grey empty plains with their stock, their homesteads, their fences and yards; and beside them their women, wind-burned, sun-browned, wrinkled before their time, coping, normalising, dedicating to the will of God griefs and anxieties that pedal radio and flying doctor would spare the bush people in years to come.
Grandfather and his family settled on the Thillung-gurra waterhole while the Costello party moved south on a pot-hook trail twenty-five miles downstream to where Kyabra Creek swelled into a lake, seven miles long by half a mile wide. This was ‘Big Momminna’, another favoured camping place of the natives, abounding in water fowl, pelicans, duck, herons and cormorants. They called their place ‘Kyabra’.
During the months of settling in Grandfather and Costello must have driven themselves and others almost to breaking point. Stockmen were sent out to tail the cattle until they grew accustomed to their new camps, also as elsewhere to make friendly contact with the blacks and kill an occasional beast for them. A few they had met on first coming to Kyabra Creek, among them old Waddi Mundoai, Pumpkin and his brothers, Melon Head and Kangaroo, had turned up again soon after their arrival and remained as a matter of course. The three younger boys took readily to stockwork while Pumpkin also showed remarkable aptitude in the use of tools.
Drafting yards went up, barricades of split timber made to withstand the sieges of time, for Grandfather had become impatient of the colonial attitude of ‘good enough’. He built defiantly, as though with every blow of his adze he would reassert his resolution and the permanence of his occupation, and others about him must do the same. He always held that shoddy workmanship was an attitude of mind and betokened lack of faith in the future. He worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day and expected others to do likewise, checking on their labours with eagle eye, testing the staying power of rails, the depth of post holes, the hanging of gates, pacing, measuring, contriving.
Even the ‘temporary’ mud residence on the river bank was made so well that it was still in use until demolished for a modern homestead seventy years later. It was built of mud mixed with dry leaves and grass, horse-churned to a sticky clay, shovelled between upright board frames and rammed firm. When the mixture dried the boards were removed and the walls stood rough, red and durable. The house was bungalow style with hard, mud floors and sloping coupled roof extending to wide verandahs and thatched with a waterproof interlacing of straw and paperbark—a typical Irish farmhouse in the Australian bush.
Bullock and goat hides were carefully pegged and salted and later softened by patient rubbing with rough stones to make floor mats and bed coverings. This was work at which the black women excelled, sitting for hours in the shade pounding away in the ancient manner of crushing the hard nardoo.
The furniture was solid and rough-hewn, the bunks of unplaned timber and rawhide, the big dining table built in the main room so that it could never be removed in one piece.
But the crudeness of bush living was softened for the men whose wives went with them into this voluntary exile. A generation later people would remember the homely charm and comfort of the first Thylungra, its shuttered windows gay with chintz, the dining table meticulously laid with spotless damask and shining silver cutlery, the heavy oil lamps with their elaborate silver bases and globes embossed with deers’ heads.
There was no time yet for the relaxation and enjoyment of living that would come with the years, but through all the long months of toil Grandfather, his brother and John Costello learned to know the land they had claimed. Riding around, shifting and tailing stock, they had ranged as far out as the channel country—a vast flat area watered in good seasons by the westward-flowing system of the Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina Rivers. Only in time to come would the immensity and potential of these pastures be fully realised and man obtain a bird’s eye view of that sixty thousand square mile plain, eroded to an intricate pattern of shallow, braided channels, swamps, gutters, billabongs—a natural irrigation system for the rich fodders and clovers that followed swiftly on the rains. However, even these earliest pioneers, jogging over a weary panorama of broken country too complex to map, sensed something of its unique quality.
In the higher stony ridges they had been puzzled to find a number of small pits, two or three feet deep, holding an even level of water and so regular in formation that they had thought them man-made, like the desert wells of other parts. The blacks insisted that this was ‘dreaming water’, and the wells made by sky heroes of the time long past. One of these ‘spirit men’, they said, had banished a great river underground where it flowed deep down in the dark, a seepage rising here and there in holes like these to succour thirsty travellers. Years later science would tap the resources of this legendary stream—the ‘water underneath’—and bring it throbbing hot to the surface from deep artesian bores, but by that time these first pioneers had packed up and moved on.
Although they had put little credence in this story, the settlers were eager to learn all they could from the blacks of their country and its wild creatures, for like most bushmen they were ardent naturalists. They learned to distinguish the interlacing tracks of reptiles, insects and marsupials, to read significance in the habits and antics of birds.
At the end of August, Stumpy Michael and a native boy named Willie set off with two waggons to bring supplies from Bourke and put in their claim for the Kyabra Creek country. They had reckoned the journey of about five hundred miles there and five hundred back, as the track wound, would take them about three months but four months went by and there was still no sign of them.
When the wet weather clouds began banking up the family knew that if the travellers did not beat the rain, swollen rivers and boggy plains might hold them prisoners for months. Every day anxious eyes scanned the horizon for the homing waggons. Hopes were raised by spirals of whirlwind and dust, possibilities were endlessly discussed and hazards assessed. That they might be lost was hardly considered, for Willie was a native of exceptional intelligence and Stumpy himself a natural bushman. Sickness was a possibility, fever, snake bite, dysentery. Accident to one of the drays was a likelihood, for it was a simple thing to break an axle coming down a steep incline, over a gully or breakaway. Still, Stumpy was clever enough with his hands to have mended or improvised in a very short time. Attack by natives was a haunting fear and trusted scouts from the local tribe were sent out to discover whether any such rumour had circulated among their people. They returned always with the same story. The teams had passed unmolested on their way south but had not returned.
Sometimes settlers were beaten by nothing so much as the nervous strain of such interminable conjecture, of waiting for rain, for mail, for someone to turn up, by hope long deferred, or bitterly frustrated by clouds that passed away, the mail that was left behind, the man who did not come.
Beef and goat mutton was the settlers’ staple diet for as the waterhole dwindled the fish disappeared and the water fowl took off to other haunts. Sugar was down to the last few pounds, carefully rationed. There was no tea, no jam, no tobacco, little salt, and weevils riddled the few remaining bags of flour.
Scratches and insect bites festered and spread into big, oozing, scabby sores—‘Barcoo rot’ they called it, though other districts claimed and named the sickness as their own. It was not hard to diagnose the cause, but the yams, nardoo and parakeelia of the parched bush had little curative effect on the pampered constitution of the white. Grandfather quickly ploughed and fenced off a garden area and planted pumpkins, potatoes and runner beans and these, with patient hand watering, showed promise.
Through hard years of make-do Grandfather developed a number of pet economies and devised all manner of improbable substitutes, often convincing himself, if not others, that he had improved on the original product. When the tobacco gave out he made a dry hash of gum leaves and pituri, recommended by the blacks, not good, but better to some tastes than nothing at all. Tea was eked out with the dried leaves of wild marjoram and other herbs—a brew commonly known as ‘posts and rails’ because of the little sticks that always came floating to the top. There were endless experiments in preparing ‘bush tucker’ to give variety to the salt meat menu. Grandmother did her best with kangaroo, emu and even, under strong persuasion, with lizard, but she put her foot down when it came to snakes, frogs and witchetty grubs, which Grandfather insisted were delicacies if cooked on hot coals as the blacks advised.
In the station store there were always criss-cross stacks of home-made soap, concocted of a mixture of fat, caustic and resin stirred over a slow fire, candles made in moulds shaped to a point at one end with string wicks pulled through and held in place as the liquid tallow was poured around to set. Everything was grist to the settlers’ mill. Even their ammunition was home-made—the leaden lining of the tea chests melted in a crucible and poured into bullet moulds, later to be filled with gunpowder. Grandfather also made ‘gammon’ bullets loaded with coarse salt or flour to fire at the marauding crows and eaglehawks.
The new year of 1869 came in under the shadow of two haunting fears, one for the safety of Stumpy Michael and black Willie, the other for rain. The hired stockmen, unable to tolerate the isolation, and the shortages, had soon gone on their way and neither Grandfather nor Costello could leave their places. They could only wait, watching the sky for clouds, the plain for the dust of the waggons. They could expect no news from passers-by for none came that way in those early days. Their nearest neighbours were over 200 miles north on the Thompson River, 150 miles south on the Wilson, 200 miles north-east at Tambo while out west lay only the mighty loneliness sweeping over 350 miles to meet the drifting sands and gibber plains of the Simpson Desert. Once during these heavy weeks of waiting and anxiety there had been a shrill outcry from the blacks as two horsemen emerged from the horizon dust.
At first they were thought to be Stumpy Michael and Willie riding home after for some reason abandoning the teams, but it was a stranger who dismounted and came to greet the family. His name was Welford, a polished young Englishman whose father was a judge in Birmingham and who had come to Australia in search of fortune and adventure. From a few thousand pounds capital he had purchased a mob of 500 breeding cattle and some horses from Roma, hired three white stockmen, two native boys and a cook and pushed out to take up the first good unoccupied country he could find west of the Condamine. From the Bulloo his party had picked up the tracks of waggons and stock and he and his boy had left the party some miles back to follow them into Thylungra.
My grandparents took this brave-hearted English boy at once to their hearts. He was their first contact with the outside world for many months and they were anxious to see him established as their first neighbour. Grandfather rode with him to the head of Kyabra Creek, about 120 miles north of Thylungra homestead, to a good piece of country he had thought of taking up for himself. Welford was pleased with its possibilities and having sold Grandfather twenty-five female calves to boost the small Thylungra herd, moved on to settle in.
Now the blacks predicted there would be no rain that season, for the chattering hordes of budgerigars that so delighted the eye with acrobatic displays, now darkening the sun like a storm cloud, now turning in a conjuror’s vanishing trick on the knife edges of a million wings, were congregating too thickly about the remaining waterholes. The nankeen plovers, rising in the furnace blast of rainless summer with long-drawn cries of ecstasy to circle and dive through the racing whirlwinds, were no good omen either, for these birds revelled in drought. Aboriginal heads shook dolefully at sight of nests abandoned, half built, and others with broken eggs, at emus and brolgas rearing singleton chicks in the same law of the wild that prompted the tribespeople to kill the newborn babes of drought.
Every morning clouds piled up to the north to melt in midday heat and evening skies were agate-bright fading to amethyst. Cracks widened on the parched plains and hot winds filled them with the brittle remnants of precious grass. The kitchen garden languished and died.
Stock fed but did not fatten on mulga, spinifex, salt-bush, blue bush and cotton bush—hardy stand-bys of drought years. Wells were sunk into the creek beds and water fed by means of whip and bucket to lines of rough-hewn troughing.
In mid-January rain fell at last in an earth-shaking storm that raised a film of green on the bare plains. For two weeks thunder rumbled among threatening clouds, then came two days of searing wind, sweeping up the red dust and darkening the sun. Fat lamps burned all day in the stifling house while stockmen with handkerchiefs tied under their eyes rode out to urge the bewildered cattle on to water in the face of the stinging, howling gale.
Grandfather’s horse stumbled in a breakaway and rolled on its rider as the maddened mob thundered past. He lay in agony until the tearing wind had spent itself and the sun blazed out on the red land turned white under a shroud of desert sand, when he was found by the blacks, half-conscious and almost buried alive. He was riding again before his ribs had mended or his cuts and bruises healed. He had no faith in the efficacy of lying up while one could still stand, but Grandmother contended that the ‘sciatica’ which was to plague him for the rest of his days dated from that time.
It was nearly six months before the long awaited waggons came swaying into sight with Stumpy Michael and Willie cracking the whips on the last stretch, smiling stiffly through the dust on their beards.
And oh, there were sacks of flour, casks of black sugar, cases of medicine—those panaceas of all ills, Holloway’s ointment and Epsom salts—a cask of rum, kegs of salt, kegs of nails, bolts, cases of currants and raisins, garden seeds, spices, bolts of calico and turkey twill, needles and thread, men’s slop clothing, barrels of gunpowder, clay pipes, rank plug tobacco, boots and tins of jam. There was prepared leather for saddles, and heavy saddle cloth, and for the children a tin of boiled sweets.
Stumpy related how, on reaching Bourke, he had found the single general store almost depleted by the rush of prospectors to the Gympie diggings.
Apparently few had learned caution from the Canouna stampede of ’58 when 20,000 prospectors met with bitter disappointment, for no sooner had a fossicker named Nash reported rich specimens in the bed of the Mary River than settlers were again leaving their runs and labourers their assured jobs to join the rush.
Stumpy Michael had put his bullocks out to grass and settled down to await the further supplies expected any day. Three weeks passed and no one had shown up except a few impatient and frustrated settlers like himself. Tortured by thought of the family’s need and anxiety he decided at last to push on down the Darling, 150 miles to Wilcannia, but here too provisions were short and many necessary items unprocurable.
It was three weeks before the supply boat came up the river, and then he and the faithful Willie had faced the long, hard home journey, zigzagging to find water in the drought-stricken land, toiling along the sandy courses of dried up rivers and creeks.
On steep inclines they had had to stage the load, bringing it on part at a time and toiling back for the rest, coping with panicking cattle when the ropes twisted or the load slipped. On abrupt declines they had felled trees and hitched them behind the drays. One of the leaders slipped and broke its leg and had to be shot and several others died from eating poison bush. Michael had purchased replacements from a station but these were unbroken to team work and the going was slower and tougher than before. It needed no more than one trip on the road with the drays to learn why bullockies were notoriously hard-mouthed men, but Michael was to face this journey until he became a familiar figure at every station and township on the road.
For twelve years his life was to be spent mostly on the track with the supply teams or droving stock. The Thylungra cash books are full of brief, revealing entries: ‘Michael, for cash to Goulburn…’ ‘On the road Wilcannia…’ ‘Cash going Adelaide with cattle…’ ‘Exes on roads bringing cattle up.’ ‘Exes to Cootamundra with horses…’ ‘Cash to Sydney with cattle (flood-bound four weeks)’. Flood-bound—waiting for some river to subside, sandflies and mosquitoes torturing his permanently sun-burned skin, centipedes and scorpions crawling from the closing cracks in the ground, sometimes causing agonising bites, snakes wriggling in to share his refuge from the driving rain. ‘Give it to Stumpy Michael,’ people said. ‘He always gets through,’ and there was never a trip that his memory and his pockets were not taxed with special messages, letters and commissions.
A great load of anxiety had lifted with his return, but still the rains held off. Light showers, two months after the big dust storm, had brought another film of grass to wither on the plains in 112 degrees and after that the cold weather set in with a sudden drop of temperature to freezing point. In the mornings there was ice on the horse troughs and water frozen in the pails and they knew then that there could be no more rain before the next monsoon.
In July Great-grandmother Costello, who lived mostly with her son at Kyabra, came to Thylungra to her daughter Mary who gave birth in August ’69 to her fourth child. Grandmother considered herself lucky to have had a white woman with her at a time when many bush women had no help at all. Sometimes a gin was. summoned hurriedly from the camp, or a woman gave birth alone while a frantic husband rode to the nearest neighbour fifty to a hundred miles away, perhaps returning to find mother and baby dead. But these were times to be spoken of in whispers, in female company only, and a woman tried not to cry out in labour lest her intimate distress be heard by menfolk and children.
The baby Jeremiah had been lusty enough at birth, but he became fretful with prickly heat rash until too exhausted to suck or even to cry and died at six weeks old. Great-grandmother Costello, standing grim-faced beside the first grave in the little Thylungra cemetery, looking across at her son-in-law had voiced her reproach with terrible restraint:
‘The poor bairn never had a chance!’
