19

WESTERN HORIZONS

The years 1880 to 1881. Patsy Durack’s letters to his sons at college. A lawsuit. Will Ogilvie and his Thylungra horse. Growing interest in the Northern Territory. Further adventures of John Costello and his expanding Territory interests. Patsy Durack reads report of Alexander Forrest on the Kimberley district, discusses it with Solomon Emanuel and goes to Perth with his brother to interview Alexander Forrest.

Grandfather’s letters to his sons show his life in some detail over this period and also indicate the way in which he was training his eldest boy for the position of head of the family.

Dear Michael,

Now I am sending ye £6. 10. cheque and you are to go to the bank and get a draft for £6 to send it to John Quirk Esq., White Gate County Galway Ireland. You will have discount to pay also and the very day ye receive this letter send this money home…Send him a nice letter and send me a copy. Tell Mr Quirk that you hear from me every week and that I send them all kind love and I hope his children are on the way to Australia and this £6 is to fit the girls out he is to send to me and £1 to be kept by his youngest son from yourself…

Father Gallagher now gives a fine character of ye and Patsy Skeahan and Michael Costello to everyone and there is not one he talks to about ye but lets us know and not one from Goulburn to here but is expecting they will hear ye taking a prize at Xmas next…Mr Hopson says he is quite shure he will see yere name in the papers for a prize and so does Mr Fitzwalter and Mrs Baird and Mr Webb on the Macquarie is on the look out for ye also.

My father accepted such commissions conscientiously and began to enjoy a sense of importance as the son of a big squatter who ‘brought people out’ from Ireland and whose name stood high in the community.

On August 3, 1880, Grandfather wrote from Brisbane:

Dear Michael and Johnny,

Ye will be surprised to get a letter from me here. I had to come down concerning the country I sold to Pollak and Hogan. They summonsed me for one of the blocks of country I sold them being differently situated to what they expected. My solicitor tells me that he never heard of such a case before. He thinks they only want to friken me, and that they will not do very easy—to see what they could get out of me. The case is to come off in November next when your Uncle Michael and me are to come to Brisbane again. If God spares me I shall go down to see ye then. If I was to go now I would not be home for the races next month… I have Jerve Storier training for me and another man with him which rides Whynot over the jumps…

I took up a lot more country since ye left. For Thylungra 148½ sq. miles on the Bargo Bargey and 100 sq. miles adjoining Sultan on the head of Thunda Creek and I took up for Galway Downs about 200 square miles. When your Uncle Jerry came home I bought in with him in Galway Downs again and am to put on 1000 head of cattle and 5000 sheep and we are to be halves in everything on the station. I have the sheep partly bought on my way down and am to inspect them on my way home.

I hope in God ye will devote your whole time to yere study while ye are in school for you know I badly need yere help as soon as ye have yere education received. Uncle Jerry is in a great way to have Michael back to go with him and I suppose 1 will require Johnny. I do not intend to take either of ye from school until ye have received a good education. If God spares me, and Pat we will manage with Sunnie’s help until such time as ye are home…

Your mama was very lonely when I was leaving. When ye are writing cheer her up by telling her ye will be home soon again with the help of God.

Tell Patsy (Skeahan) Woods has Gaslight and he is to run in a big race at Thargomindah 10 days after Galway Downs races. Tell him his father is going to get some sheep with mine. I am to start for home after tomorrow…

James Pollak and Thomas Hogan were partners in Comeongin Station about eighty miles south-west of Thylungra and adjoining the original land taken up by the Duracks and John Costello on Mobel Creek. The dispute ran on for some time with an exchange of enraged claims and counterclaims which, reduced from their colourful original wording to bald legal summary, ran as follows:

The Plaintiffs … claim £5000 damages from Patrick Durack for the reason that the land he sold them having Mobile (or Mobel Creek) as a boundary not being what he represented it and they having lost through this misrepresentation buildings and stock they had put upon it.

Defendant denies misrepresentation of country in dispute. He alleges that Pollak and Hogan inspected it themselves and pronounced themselves satisfied with the situation at the time of the sale. Defendant further alleges that Pollak and Hogan having mustered cattle on this country over a period of years could not have been ignorant of the nature of the property disputed. Defendant moreover counter-claims and charges the plaintiffs with unpaid debts and the loss of a horse lent to them by the defendant during formal inspection of the country in question.

The Plaintiffs file in rejoinder to above complete denial of debts and loss of borrowed horse. They allege that only that part of the land inspected by them was properly represented by the boundaries stated the remainder of the land purchased being useless.

Defendant files in rejoinder to above that if Pollak and Hogan are not satisfied with the country he will refund purchase money being the sum of £800 and again take over the rights of the disputed area. He states that the disputed land was a gift at this price.

Plaintiffs allege that on discovery of misrepresentation they had asked Patrick Durack for return of purchase money which he had refused since when they have sustained losses to the extent of the £5000 claimed. They did not wish to surrender rights to the whole area only that which was misrepresented.

Eventually the matter was settled out of court, the bold strokes with which Grandfather recorded the payment of £900 to Pollak and Hogan and £300 to his solicitors betokening his moral indignation.

Having unearthed this account of a long-forgotten quarrel I wrote to my cousin Francis Tully of Ray Station (earlier known as Wathagurra) asking him about the country in question.

Grandfather and Stumpy Michael, finding themselves in Brisbane with time on their hands between legal engagements, had made their first ventures in the purchase of city properties. Grandfather purchased the Bowen Hotel in South Brisbane and he and his brother between them some blocks of city land at already inflated values that they were not wrong in supposing would shortly be doubled.

The temptation, while in the city, to take ship a mere 510 miles south to Sydney and thence by rail to visit his sons in Goulburn, proved too strong for Grandfather, as is seen from the following letter written after his return to Thylungra at the end of August.

Dear Children,

The day I left ye on that day fortnight I reached home and spent one day out of that in Sydney and two clear days where I bought the sheep inspecting them. So you see I lost no time…

On tomorrow I am to go out to Galway Downs. The horses are all out there…The races…are to come off on the 1st and 2nd September. You know the grey colt that John Horigan broke in before ye left—He called him Tarigan. He has beat mostly everything here and has got only a fiew gallops yet. He beat Silvery and Bachelor over 100 yds. hard held…The four that was in to train before 1 left is out at Uncle Jerry’s. John H. is gathering the horses. There is about 250 head gathered now and all look very well…

I had a letter from yere Uncle Michael since he left Wilcannia with the cattle. They are all well and by this time very near Adelaide. All here at Thylungra and Wathagurra are well and were very glad to hear from ye…Grandmother wishes to tell ye she prays for ye night and morning and I hope ye shall pray for her. Do not be forgetting to write to yere Grandmother Costello at Blackney Creek…

An account of the races followed ten days later.

Dear Michael and Johnny,

I am just after coming home from the races on yesterday…Whynot did not stand training well. He was rather weak when they started for the hurdle race. Going over the second jump Whynot and Colman’s horse cannoned and my rider fell. Whynot could not be cot until he went to the camp about one mile from the coarse. He was brought back again and went over the jumps 4 feet high like a bird they all say. He is the best jumping horse in Queensland, and then he came in second and only got £8. Colman’s horse came first. Shamrogue won the maiden plate and the big handy cap. Curnell won the ladies purse. Saladden another race and Silvery another. All the horses we ran was either first or second, and we beat all Redford’s cracks and won the most part of the money. We won £151. The only big money we lost was the Steeple race.

We had three days racing and everything went off well only Tom Kilfoyle and Edward Hammand had a bit of a fite. Ned came off second best. James Hammond and Simpson had a smawl row—only one nock down and all was over. James was no match for Simpson. Any amount of all other sports and dancing…

Mr Hambleton asked me why you did not rite to him. I told him you wrote to him and sent him yere portrait, dear Michael and Johnny. Now let both of ye send Mr Hambleton and tell him ye wrote to him and I will send him one of yere portraits. He is going to buy the house at Corongla. Direct youre letter to Himself. He is living at Corongla station, Cooper’s Creek, near Thargomindah, and enquire for his Mrs and also Mr Colman and Mrs Colman. Make it a nice letter and let him know what ye are learning…

Pat was at the races. John and Michael Skeahan rode all the races for us. Gaslight is to run in a few days time at Thargomindah…

Letters later in the year indicate the rapid increase of sheep on Thylungra and the state of the beef market in 1880, which was a fairly poor year on the Cooper.

A generation later, correspondence between Sarah Tully’s youngest son, Frank, and the Scottish-Australian balladist Will Ogilvie revealed that the poet, while working on Belalie Station in his youth, had purchased a grey horse from a pound. Later a traveller identified its 7PD brand and recognised the fine animal as one that had been stolen from Thylungra in 1880. It was probably the horse named Pannick to which Grandfather refers in this letter and which, renamed Loyal Heart, was to inspire the dedication of Ogilvie’s best known book of verse.

To all grey horses fill up again

For the sake of a grey horse dear to me…

From Scotland Ogilvie wrote in his latter years:

I have ridden many hundreds of horses in Australia, America and over here hunting and in the Remount Department in the Great War, but there was never a horse like Loyal Heart. His old grey tail is here as I write, memento of many a glorious ride. I begin to think that when I am dead they will find 7PD engraven on my heart…

From a letter written on December 20, we gather that the boys were to spend Christmas with Great-grandmother Bridget, who was then visiting friends in Goulburn. After that they were to go to Blackney Creek Station near Yass where their Grandmother Mrs Costello was staying with her sister.

The simple details of these letters, not of much interest in themselves, give some idea of the family’s constant movement and shuffling about as though Sydney, Brisbane, Goulburn, Adelaide or Wilcannia were the merest step from Thylungra. Now that times had improved and coaches were linking western Queensland with New South Wales the women took these journeys, if not as often, certainly as lightly as the men, the formidable distances and difficult travelling serving only to strengthen their determination to keep in touch with their widely separated friends and relatives. This is the more remarkable when we consider that a coach trip from Thylungra to Goulburn in those days often took about the same time as a sea voyage from Australia to England today.

Dear Children,

I and your mama were more satisfied that ye are to have Xmas with yere Grandmother and Mrs Kelly, and ye are going out to Blackney Creek after to spend yere holidays. While ye are there ye must be doing anything said for ye to do by yere Grandmother Costello and Mrs Roach…[Here follows further general instructions on behaviour and remembrances to friends and relatives.]

We got a letter last mail from youre Aunt Margaret at Molong. She said she was going round to see ye all. Give her and Cousin Big Johnnie our kind love…Let me know which of ye three done the best at the Examinations…

If young Mr Quirk comes out he is to come straight out to Goulburn to see ye. If ye can get a horse for him bring him out to see all the friends at Blackney Creek and Grabben Gullen. Give him my kind love and his sister also if she is out. Tell Mr Cleary if he possibly can to get him into some billet in Goulburn and he will ever oblige yere affectionate Father until death,

PATRICK DURACK.

So on the surface life continued much as usual on Cooper’s Creek, except that the shearers had moved out and the supply teams that once bumped empty down to Bourke now swayed away under bales of wool. Mustering, branding and droving followed the seasonal cycle and a few men drifted back from opal prospecting to station work. It was obvious, however, that most of the young fellows who had sought adventure in what had been the farthest outpost of settlement were now looking to an even more distant west, referred to still rather vaguely as ‘The Northern Territory’, ‘The Centre’ or in journalistic phrasing ‘This Terra Incognita’. Its 523,620 square miles of largely unoccupied and only partly explored country were then under the jurisdiction of the colony of South Australia that for years had been trying to solve the problem of this top-heavy and controversial burden on her young shoulders. The Territory was a desert of gibber plains and shimmering salt pans. The Territory was a paradise of splendid rivers, rich soil and sweeping pastures. The Territory was an incredible potential asset. The Territory was a hopeless liability. Raffles Bay and Port Essington, those early outposts of trade and military strategy, has long since returned to the jungle. Port Darwin, or Palmerston as it was then generally called, was established in 1870 and two years later the Overland Telegraph had been rushed through from Port Augusta at the head of Spencer Gulf 2,000 miles to the little frontier port on the Timor Sea, overcoming the seemingly insuperable obstacle of communication in an eighteen months’ epic of human achievement.

Meanwhile, through much confusion of opinion, bubble pastoral companies were floated and dispersed, gold was being mined at Pine Creek, plantations were established and some thousands of Chinese coolies and hundreds of Manila men introduced to provide cheap labour. For two decades Australian investors had looked with speculative interest at this mighty tract of country where so many promising schemes had been stillborn and as many others died in infancy. Conditions of land tenure at 12s 6d an acre on a twenty-five year lease seemed attractive enough at first glance but distance from markets, the climate and natural hazards of the country cast shadows of doubt.

In 1870, not long after the formation of the port, a tough pioneer drover D’Arcy Uhr had pushed a mob of cattle 1,500 miles from Charters Towers to the beef-hungry settlers but it was eight years before anyone travelled that route with stock again. In ’76 the Prout brothers, Sydney and Alfred, whom John Costello had piloted to Kangi Station in the Cooper district some years earlier, forged north and west across the border hoping to stake the first claim on the Barkly Tableland. The well-known verses of Mary Hannay Foott commemorate the story of these men:

Both brothers perished of thirst on the Tableland but a year later Nat Buchanan, then a partner in Landsborough’s Pastoral Company near Longreach, with that ‘man of wire and whipcord’, ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croaker, who appears in later stages of this story, rode right across the Tableland to the Overland Telegraph. There, wiring away for pastoral rights to the best of the land they had explored, they were speedily informed that city speculators, blind stabbing at blank spaces on the map, had taken up all the most likely areas. Most of these ‘spec leases’ changed hands many times during the three-year period allowed for stocking and men secure in city offices made money from a country which Buchanan and his mate had traversed at their peril, gaining only hard experience. But the Territory had got into Buchanan’s blood and in ’78 he undertook to pilot 12,000 cattle from Aramac in Queensland to form Glencoe on Adelaide River, the first Territory station, thereby opening a stock route for the big overland cattle drives of the eighties.

John Costello had taken up the Lake Nash lease in ’79 as a first foothold in the Territory. It is hard to believe that he ever seriously entertained the idea of retiring in comfort to the coast at the age of forty-two. Not only would he have found it extremely hard to change his lifetime habit of constant movement but the sense of insecurity and its resultant land hunger that was obsessional with them all would hardly have allowed him to relax and invest his money in other ways. The process of taking up virgin country, stocking, improving, selling it and moving out and on was something he understood but he displayed little touch in handling business ventures of other kinds. The reputed quarter-million with which he left the Cooper was quickly eaten into when, not long after his arrival at Rockhampton, a bad drought hit the east coast. A tobacco plantation and factory which he had heavily financed went broke while stock losses on his two coastal places, Cawarral and Annondale, and his practical sympathy with the plight of neighbouring smallholders, made a further hole in his pocket. As in the hard times out west he was again pulling bogged cattle out of dwindling waterholes, sinking wells and shifting stock. Rain had no sooner relieved the situation on the coast than a dry year set in out west. News came from Lake Nash that dingoes were hunting in packs like hungry wolves, killing calves and even venturing into the men’s huts. Costello hurried out and rode the countryside, dropping strychnine baits, riding always wider and wider afield, magnetically drawn up the western waterbeds of the Milne and Sandover Rivers, on into the Hart Range, not far east of the Telegraph—300 miles south-west of his border property. Here he took up another 2,000 square miles which he planned to stock with heifers from Lake Nash. Not long afterwards, riding back to his family on the coast, he met up with Nat Buchanan whom he told about his latest acquisitions:

‘You might do all right in there,’ Buchanan said, but you’re getting into the chancy, low rainfall belt again. Now, I’ve passed through some country on that gulf route with cattle—splendid grass flats ard rivers that hold the year round—never miss out on the monsoon. A man would need a stout heart of course—there’s a lot of it jungle country and the blacks are bad. We lost a man out there—had his head chopped clean off from behind while he was mixing the bread. There’s a fair bit of fever too, and plenty ’gators in the waterholes. Don’t know that I’d advise a man to take it on, but when I think of those rivers and the big grass plains…’

‘Might ride over and take a look at it some day,’ Costello said.

…It is now three months since John left for the gulf country, and no word of him yet [Mary Costello wrote to the family at Thylungra in ’81]. He said he would let you know if it comes up to his expectations and is more reliable than anything he has struck yet, for you may want to come in with him…

But Grandfather had just then received the report of an expedition made in ’79 through the northern part of Western Australia and his attention was focused in this direction. Larger, by about one-third, than even the giant Queensland, Western Australia’s 975,000 square miles stretched from the grey skies and giant timbers of the south, through arid kingdoms of saltbush and spinifex to the wild ranges and palm-fringed rivers of her monsoonal north, her coastline curving for 4,350 miles. Vast desert wastes and 2,000 miles of ocean cut her off from the other colonies so that she had been from the beginning a land apart, little known to the rest of Australia, more in touch with London than the eastern capitals. Established forty years later than New South Wales, she had remained correspondingly forty years behind in her development, numbering, by the year 1879, slightly less than 29,000 of Australia’s two million inhabitants.

Established as a colony of free English and Scottish settlers, for the most part families of gentle breeding, who had come with their servants and all the appendages of upper class Victorian life, the western colony had, for the first twenty years of her existence, little in common with the raw, convict-built prosperity of her sister States. All these, excepting Tasmania, had already done with transportation before the West succumbed to the temptation of convict labour in 1850, but the system, carried on for eighteen years, had brought little of the hoped-for prosperity and caused many headaches. The gold discoveries in New South Wales and Victoria so drained her already limited free population that by the time some 16,000 convicts had arrived and been in due course emancipated, Western Australia, in fear of being overwhelmed by the riff-raff of British jails, had brought further transportation to an end.

Fighting against labour problems, limited population, distance from market and the inevitable difficulties of adapting old methods to a new environment, farming in the temperate south had met with only mild success and pioneer sheep men were spreading north of the capital of Perth into the Murchison district. Tentative efforts at settlement of the Kimberley division, that extended north from about latitude 19, had been made during the sixties at Camden Harbour, between Prince Regent and Glenelg Rivers, at Roebuck Bay and also at Sturt Creek near the Territory border. All three attempts had ended disastrously but although the district remained unessayed throughout the seventies, pressure of settlement in the eastern States was creeping steadily north and west, sheep pushing the cattle further out, wheatgrowers edging on the sheep. Cattle men, chafing at fences and the restrictions of closer settlement, grown nostalgic for the good old semi-nomadic days of the open range, had moved north to Queensland and were spreading now over the borders into the Territory. By the latter seventies men like Nat Buchanan, with his relatives the Gordons and the Cahills, ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croaker, Bob Button, John Costello and D’Arcy Uhr were already goading stock beyond the furthest outposts of western settlement, their eyes on horizons still further west.

Big rivers were now known to flow north into Cambridge Gulf and others to the western coast, but none knew in what ranges they rose or what type of country they watered. Queensland cattle men, battling with their land of extremes, were interested to find out. Sheep farmers in the backward south of the backward colony, troubled by scab-infested stock, were interested. Prosperous investors in the big cities were interested. Little men, since sheep-farming had become a game for the capitalists, looked to a possible field for expansion on limited outlay. Big men sought a wide new field of limitless monopoly.

In ’79 it was decided that a party be sent to find an answer to these questions. Alexander Forrest, the leader of the expedition, was a member of an early Western Australian family whose brother John was later to become the first Premier of his State and ultimately elevated to the peerage. The younger man, however, was no less devoted to his home State and as surveyor and explorer played an equal part in its development. It was the report he wrote on his return from this journey from the De Grey River on the west coast to the Overland Telegraph in the Territory that caused Grandfather such excitement when it came into his hands early in ’81. Here, it seemed, was the type of country he most desired—a land of splendid rivers, fine pastures and reliable rainfall.

‘But Patsy!’ his wife protested, ‘It’s every bit of 2,500 miles away. However would you get stock to it?’

‘How else but the way we have got stock to anywhere? By droving it, of course! Buchanan got stock to the Victoria River, and what are a few hundred miles more?’

‘But you always said you would not sell Thylungra!’

‘And neither I shall, but what sort of a father is it would hear of country like this for the taking and not be securing it for his boys? How could I expect them to settle down here knowing of this pastoral paradise out west?’

Grandmother knew too well the futility of argument.

‘Of course, you will do as you decide, Patsy. I only ask that you speak about it to Mr Emanuel when you are next in Goulburn.’

If Grandmother had hoped that Solomon Emanuel would dissuade her husband from his folly she had underestimated Grandfather’s powers of infectious enthusiasm.

‘Read this!’ he said, flourishing the report at his friend’s door. ‘Can you picture a country where ye would not be haunted by the fear of long, ruinous drought or terrible floods? Can you see the deep rivers and the plains of sweeping Mitchell and Flinders grass?’

Emanuel read. He had two growing sons of his own, Sydney and Isadore, both of whom showed a taste for the land and already talked of the limitations of their sheep property Lansdowne near Goulburn. The Kimberley district looked promising, he agreed, but he thought it unwise to start cattle on the long and hazardous track without further investigation. There was a tendency with surveyor-explorers to fall in love on sight with country they discovered if it was in any way fertile and the fact that Mr Forrest had since set himself up as agent for Kimberley pastoral leases might have added something to the enthusiasn of his report. If Patsy Durack and his brothers could organise a private exploration of the country, Emanuel himself would share in financing it and might even feel disposed to select Kimberley country for his own family.

‘But meantime—what happens?’ Grandfather demurred. ‘The map graziers get in first just as they did with Nat Buchanan. Look at the way he battled out and discovered that wonderful Barkly Tableland only to find it had been taken up by city investors who had never set foot outback in their lives.’

Emanuel agreed blandly.

‘It seems then,’ he said, ‘we must become map graziers ourselves.’

A week later Grandfather and his brother Michael set sail from Sydney for the western State to interview Alexander Forrest.

Finding 2,520 cold sea miles more than enough for their land-lubbing tastes, they disembarked at the port of Albany, site of the first West Australian settlement of ’27, now connected by coach service with the capital of Perth. The 250-mile journey was full of interest and unexpected charm. Here was a softer facet of the Australian scene than any they had known—a land of towering forests that filtered soft sunlight on bracken-covered slopes. The people at the coaching stages were quiet-spoken, slow-moving; the sleepy townships, unlike the crude, dusty settlements of Queensland and New South Wales, were respectable as English villages. Even the coachman had no sense of urgency. He covered the distance in a leisurely fifty-six hours, clattering at last down the main thoroughfare of Perth with a curved post-horn to his lips. People came out of their houses, some to wave, others to follow to the post office and await the sorting of the mail. Flocks of sheep and little herds of cattle moved quietly through the streets, their shepherds clad in the blue smocks of old England. People stopped to talk in the thoroughfares while carriages moved out of their way.

Perth, set on the dreaming blue waters of the Swan River, was patterned on an English country town. There seemed less here of what had come to be known as ‘the Australian twang’, nothing of the hurly-burly of Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, those vigorous, jostling cities of opulence and poverty. Secure behind her desert barrier, pretty little Perth, like a staid Victorian damsel, sighed for the progress she at once envied and despised.

People looked curiously at the two bearded Irishmen in their stout moleskins and broad-brimmed hats but were not, on introduction, slow to extend the warmest hospitality.

Alexander Forrest, continuing in the comfort of his own home discussions begun in his office, enlarged on the conservative outline of his official report. Kimberley was, he declared, without doubt the coming pastoral land of the continent.

‘I can hardly describe,’ he said, tracing on an outspread map the route he had taken from Beagle Bay on the west coast, ‘the grandeur of that northern scenery—vast open plains heavy with pasture, cut across by creeks and rivers, girded by ranges of unbelievable colouring.

‘This Fitzroy country should prove an extremely rich pastoral area, suitable for all kinds of stock, but it is clearly subject to inundation in certain seasons. Farther over here to the east would be, I should say, a cattleman’s paradise with vast plains of splendid pasture, much of it well watered and not subject to flooding since the land is higher and the rivers contained between deep banks. This river, which I have named the Ord in honour of our Governor, may yet prove to be the Queen of Australian rivers and is probably the same observed by Phillip King to enter Cambridge Gulf a little to the western side of its head. I have sketched here its most probable course since sickness and shortage of rations prevented our following it farther.’

The Queenslanders were already acquainted with many details of that expedition, the sufferings of some members of the party from fever, sunstroke, and sore eyes, of how with dwindling rations they were reduced to killing some of their precious horses for meat, of how grateful they had been for an occasional meal of snake or kangaroo, and how when Forrest and one companion had forged ahead of the rest on a thirsty trek to the Overland Telegraph they had shot a hawk for its blood with their last ammunition.

The visitors enquired how Forrest’s companions had fared since their return.

‘My brother Matthew and James Carey quite recovered,’ they were told, ‘but poor Tommy Pierre, the faithful aboriginal, whom we were forced to tie to his horse in his delirium, lived only long enough to die back here in his country and among friends.’

Forrest did not think the Kimberley natives would prove hostile to settlers, although no doubt they would have to learn that sheep and cattle were not to be regarded as the huntsman’s quarry. Those encountered by his party had been surprisingly friendly, except a few so frightened and surprised as to be deprived of their power of speech.

‘I should think them decidedly less warlike, probably more backward, than the Queenslanders,’ he said.

He was enthusiastic about the suggestion that a private expedition be organised to trace the course of the Ord southward from Cambridge Gulf and carry out more detailed exploration of the country than had been possible in his hurried cross-country trek. Meanwhile, it was wise, he agreed, to secure tentative holdings on the map as others were already doing. Some of the Fitzroy country had already been selected, while two speculators, O’Neill and O’Connor, had marked themselves off about a million acres each along the supposed course of the Ord on the understanding that when the river was eventually mapped the same areas would be transferred as accurately as possible to the true course.

In the name of Durack, Emanuel and one or two other interested associates, including Tom Kilfoyle they reserved, therefore, eight adjoining 50,000-acre blocks along the conjectured banks of the Ord, 150,000 acres around the Negri Junction, further blocks along the upper Ord, on the Nicholson Plains and Margaret River, and large chunks on either side of the Fitzroy. Some of these blocks adjoined those of the Kimberley Pastoral Company and other interests to remain closely associated with the development of the district, and those of various outside speculators, including the Duke of Manchester, whose names would fade from the map with their dreams of quickly flourishing pastoral empires. In all, the tentative Durack-Emanuel selections covered about two and a half million acres, a comparatively small area to that over which their respective interests would extend in the years to come.

There was every indication, Forrest said, that occupation of west Kimberley had already begun. The King Sound Pastoral Company had not long before sent a man to inspect their blocks on the Lennard River, while rumour had it that young George Julius Brockman had already taken sheep by lugger from the north-west to a landing point used by the pearlers at Beagle Bay.

‘So your expedition may find a station or two by the time it gets to the lower Fitzroy,’ Forrest predicted. ‘Many of these whose names you see here, however, will be unable to stock their country within the required time, so that soon you should have the chance of selecting from their land as well. City investors in the eastern colonies are finding it almost impossible to obtain experienced drovers for such a trek, whereas you are fortunate in numbering many competent to undertake it in your own family.’

Grandfather agreed.

‘But my brother and I have given enough of our lives to pioneering. We can organise and finance, but the conquest of this new country is for the younger generation. They shall make a pastoral empire of their own.’