The years 1881 to 1882. Organising for the expedition to inspect the Kimberley district. Leavetaking of Stumpy Michael Durack and party from Brisbane. A disastrous beginning and a second start. Arrival at Port Darwin and hiring of the schooner Levuka to Cambridge Gulf. Rough passage. Arrival in a strange land. Letter from Cambridge Gulf. Hard travelling and hostile natives. Deep rivers and open plains.
It was agreed on the return of the travellers from the western State that the proposed journey of inspection called for a party of expert bushmen of proved toughness and resource, including at least one scientist, and that their horses must be the best procurable. A supply of rations and equipment must be selected with an eye to weight and with foresight to any possible emergency and arrangements made for the chartering of three vessels—one to take men, horses and gear from Brisbane to Port Darwin, another to convey them from there to Cambridge Gulf and a third to pick them up when they had battled through to the west coast. Distances and travelling times had to be nicely calculated, for once in the unknown wilds of Kimberley they would be cut off from all means of communication until their journey’s end. The estimated cost of the expedition was £4,000 which Grandfather and Emanuel agreed to share equally.
That Stumpy Michael was to be leader of the party was already a foregone conclusion since he combined all the necessary qualities of bushcraft, leadership and sure judgement of country with a reputation, amounting almost to a local superstition, of always ‘getting through’. There remained only the difficulty of breaking the news to his wife, who with their three children was then awaiting his return in Brisbane. Kate Durack had already said goodbye to the home at Thylungra and she and her husband had been inspecting small properties within reasonable distance of the coast when Grandfather had wired from Sydney suggesting the interview with Forrest: in Western Australia. Leaving his family comfortably enough accommodated at his brother’s recently acquired hotel in South Brisbane, Stumpy Michael had obeyed the call with his wife’s words ringing in his ears:
‘Go to Perth if you must, but remember, Michael, your pioneering days are over. We are settling down in a comfortable home as you promised, where the children can go to school and you can have a rest from all this travelling.’
Even with the support of his elder brother, Stumpy Michael found the interview with his wife one of the hardest hurdles to sumount.
‘It’s an imposition, Patsy!’ Kate gasped when they broke the news. ‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that poor Michael has a right to live his own life?’
Grandfather was astonished.
‘But my dear sister, Michael has always led his own life!’
‘If I was your sister, Patsy, I would probably agree with you, but I am a McInnes and a Scot. We never lived each other’s lives like you Duracks. Besides, Michael hasn’t the strength any more. There’s that chest trouble of his and the doctor said…’
‘Nonsense!’ Grandfather scoffed, irritated as always by any suggestion of ill health in his family. ‘Anyone’d think he was an old man to hear ye and what is he?—thirty-five and never fitter in his life!’
‘Just this last time, Kate,’ her husband promised. ‘I’ll select the finest piece of country in Kimberley for young Ambrose and get someone to manage it until he’s old enough to take over.’
‘And by that time my boys and probably Uncle Darby’s too, will be there,’ Grandfather enthused, ‘all making their fortunes. What would your son be saying if he knew ye had spoiled his chances?’
Kate made a final bid to reason.
‘Tell me, Michael, do you really want to go?’
Stumpy Michael hesitated. How explain to a loving and commonsense woman the lure of new country, good, bad or indifferent? How find words to say that for all his passionate devotion to his family the thought of leading this expedition to find the course of a mysterious river was the breath of life to him?
‘Yes, Kate. Yes, my dear. In a sense, I do want to go.’
The intended leisurely inspection of ‘likely little properties’ went by the board. A 14,000-acre estate near Darra, a few miles out of Brisbane, of which Kate and her husband had been doubtful on first sight, suddenly appeared to Stumpy Michael as having endless possibilities and on June 6 he purchased Archerfield from one Mary Elizabeth Murphy for £15,000.
Grandfather, assessing his brother’s new acquisition, inspected the stock and scratched about for mineral possibilities.
‘Some fine horses there all right, Michael. The land’s not up to much but ye might find ye’ve got a coal mine here.’
‘I’ll put down a drill when I get back,’ his brother said.
While Kate moved in with the family, her husband’s attention was fully occupied organising the Kimberley expedition. There had been no need to advertise for men. Emanuel had enlisted the services of one John Pentacost, surveyor and geologist who had been for some time tutor to his boys, and had asked that his eldest son, Sydney, be another member of the party. The remaining three, Tom Kilfoyle (Darby Durack’s brother-in-law), James Josey and Tom Horan, all tried and experienced men, had been contacted by wire in various parts of Queensland:
WILL YOU JOIN EXPEDITION KIMBERLEY DISTRICT W A STOP AWAY ABOUT FOUR MONTHS STOP WIRE IMMEDIATELY IF INTERESTED AND MEET US BRISBANE EARLIEST DURACK
In a week all three had materialised at Grandfather’s Bowen Hotel.
‘How soon do you want to start?’
‘Two or three weeks from now. Time to see your folks and cancel your commitments for a few months.’
‘We’re on!’
‘You haven’t asked about the pay.’
‘I thought we might be paying you to let us come,’ Horan said.
Kilfoyle, bluff and down to earth, dismissed this suggestion, though he too had probably not given much thought to the financial side of it before. ‘And them with all the money in the world! Not on yer life!’
‘It’ll be a hard trip,’ Grandfather said, ‘and we’re prepared to pay handsome for the best men. What do you say to three pound a week—all found?’
‘Three pound ten,’ Kilfoyle said.
‘It’s a deal!’
Twenty-three tried and well-bred horses were purchased for an average of £30 a head from breeders around Brisbane, while Emanuel busied himself with the selection of fifteen hundredweight of rations and equipment from Sydney stores. The items ran as follows:
800 lbs flour (16 bags.)
30 lbs tea
140 lbs sugar
10 lbs rice
250 lbs salt meat
10 lbs currants
15 lbs tobacco
50 lbs salt
20 lbs soap
1 box caps
6 pint pots
6 each knives, forks, spoons
6 tin plates
1 camp oven
1 gun
2 cwt horse shoes
1 axe, and sundry tools
2 billies
6 tins pepper
4 tins mustartd
6 tins curry powder
12 tins jam
5 lbs shot
1 can gunpowder
60 doz. matches
14 lbs horse nails
Saddler’s tools
12 blankets
10 pack saddles
6 riding saddles
The list, by reason of its rigorous simplicity, makes interesting comparison with the cumbersome equipment of other exploring parties that set forth with waggons, drays and herds of sheep for killing on the way. Stumpy Michael, like Nat Buchanan and John Costello, had a simple formula for such expeditions: ‘Travel light and ride good horses.’
On July 6, 1882, friends and family farewelled the travellers on the chartered steamship Volmer. Kate Durack’s apprehensions for her husband’s safety increased to near frenzy when two days after the departure fierce storms lashed the Queensland coast. Several wrecks were reported during the next few days but no word of the Volmer until a wire came from Rockhampton, 350 miles north of Brisbane:
VOLMER AGROUND ALL ASHORE SAFE AND WELL RETURNING COACH BRISBANE IMMEDIATELY DURACK
Gathered again at Archerfield the travellers told their tale of seemingly miraculous escape from the fury of the hurricane. Half the precious horses had been battered to death in the hold, most of the provisions washed overboard or ruined by salt water. The remaining horses had been swum ashore and left at John Costello’s Rockhampton property, Cawarral, since it had seemed impractical to return them to Brisbane in their shocked condition to begin the voyage anew.
This misfortune increased the cost of the expedition by well over £1,000 but the organisers considered themselves fortunate in being able to charter another steamship almost immediately. A second start, with a fresh supply of provisions and horses, assembled with astonishing speed, was made by the 900-ton steamship Vortigen on July 19. Stumpy Michael, starting his diary from that day, commented blithely on
our colourful crew, skippered by Captain Brown, pilot Captain Dark, first mate Jack Green!…Passage between Brisbane and Townsville extremely rough. Spend most of my time in the hold with the horses, at one stage fearing another disaster…Smooth waters Townsville to Torres Strait. We have now named all the horses and selected our respective favourites for the journey. Mine, a piebald of the circus kind which I have named Doughboy. Thursday Island…One thousand, two hundred and thirty-five sea miles from our dear ones…
Another 730 miles of tropic calm and colour brought them around the tip of Arnhem Land to the little Territory port on the red cliff above the mangroves where everything upwards from the jetty, indicated at high tide by tins stuck up on sticks, bore the mark of makeshift and lassitude. Ramshackle tin sheds, Chinese huts and Malay shanties hugged the edges of the steaming mud alive with hermit crabs and scavenging seabirds.
A white-clad Customs official in tropical topee and sandals, waving a palm-leaf fan, enquired their business and directed them up the rough roadway to the straggling town on the jungle’s rim above. As the port of a new land boom, Darwin would hardly have inspired confidence, with her few Chinese stores and government offices, private houses built on stilts and straggling tumbledown shanties, all partly obscured by long rank grass and fighting a losing battle against white ants. The population was preponderantly Chinese with a sprinkling of European, Malay and Aboriginal. Blacks and Asiatics dozed in the shade of trees or lounged in narrow doorways, while white men in a state of chronic ennui reclined in cane chairs on latticed verandahs, syphoning soda water into whisky, rum or ‘square face’ gin.
Sight of strangers in the port caused a stir of interest and the newcomers were pressed for confirmation of rumours that cattle were soon to start overland from Queensland into Kimberley. Armchair politicians under every verandah in the rambling streets propounded upon what should be done with the Territory, half a million square miles, then boasting hardly more than a thousand white inhabitants, four or five thousand Asiatics and a few thousand Aborigines. The Asiatics, encouraged to supply cheap labour for the seventies, had guickly graduated from work on the plantations or on the railway project between Darwin to Pine Creek and had either gone prospecting or set up as shopkeepers in the port.
The newcomers listened with some bewilderment to a variety of opinions. It seemed generally agreed that the land was rich and that rice, cotton, sugar, tobacco and tropical fruits could be grown in abundance. Some contended, however, that transport must come first, that a railway run up from Port Augusta along the route of the OT would transform Darwin from an obscure tropical port to ‘the Singapore of the southern hemisphere’. Some said the country’s first need was more white women, others more amenities, or a strong-minded Vermin Board to deal with dingoes, tick, buffalo fly and troublesome blacks. Some held that the natives should be gathered into compounds and trained for service, others that it was impossible to train or educate them for anything since as a race they were mentally backward and congenitally treacherous. Another faction held that success could only come from the organised development of mining, beginning with the immediate despatch of ‘the bloody Celestials’ at present engaged in systematically smuggling Territory gold to their home land. Others argued that this was primarily a pastoral country, that the cattle industry should be developed, with meat works in Darwin to ship away frozen and tinned beef to the world’s markets. ‘A great place for talking,’ Stumpy Michael wrote to his family, ‘but very little done.’
Enquiries for a ship to take them to Cambridge Gulf brought forward one of the few really energetic inhabitants of the sleepy port—Captain Murray of the 120-ton schooner Levuka, who bustled about arrangements with every show of zest for the adventure. It was on his suggestion that they engaged two Aborigines of the local Larakia tribe—reputedly reliable fellows and good trackers revelling in the white man names of Pannikin and Pintpot.
A combined farewell and twenty-first birthday party for young Syd Emanuel was organised at the Palmerston Club, and ended uproariously when an improvised band, marching to the tattoo of kettle drums, escorted the wayfarers to their ship to catch the midnight tide.
All through the Timor Sea adverse winds lashed blue walls of water against the Levuka’s, frail hulk. The horses, whinnying in terror, were thrown from side to side in the narrow hold and the native boys, huddled together, too sick and frightened to eat, seemed likely to die before they could touch land. When Stumpy Michael spoke to them encouragingly they rolled hopeless eyes.
‘Finish, Boss! Finish.’
On the seventh day out two of the horses were so severely injured that Stumpy Michael was forced to shoot them. While hauling the carcasses up, the pole on which he was balancing rolled in a sudden pitching of the ship and he was hurled ten feet into the hold, badly spraining his shoulder and injuring his back. After eight miserable days, when the ship swayed towards Cambridge Gulf, he was just able to limp about again with his arm in a sling.
As the schooner rounded a small island, rugged and cleft with gullies and ravines, its beaches criss-crossed with turtle tracks, the Gulf channel could be seen swinging away between broken sandstone ranges.
‘The last man in here, as far as I know, was Phillip King, in the Mermaid, about sixty years ago,’ Captain Murray said. ‘I wouldn’t care to be navigating these shoals and reefs and tidal rips without his charts.’
Stumpy Michael, comparing these with the map of later years, picked up what he judged to be the mouth of the Ord River, but Captain Murray was doubtful.
‘It might be any one of a number of streams coming in from either side and this is hardly an inviting country to be lost in.’
Evening closed in over the lonely gulf. A dark cloud of vampire shapes, wheeling and squeaking, rose from the mangrove thicket and white cockatoos went screeching off into ranges whose fortress shapes, rising 1,000 feet sheer above salt marsh, King had well named The Bastions.
By morning, on a swiftly receding tide, the ship lay careened in mud. Flat-topped ranges, touched by the opal colours of sunrise, glowed like the mountains of dreams, lending false colour to the tide-churned waters of the Gulf.
Getting the horses ashore before the turn of the tide was an anxious business. The animals had finished all the water and hay aboard the day before and stood dejectedly in the hold with hollow flanks and drooping heads. They seemed scarcely fit to walk ashore, let alone carry men and packs more than 600 miles over rough country. Michael was confident that they would pick up after a few days’ spell on fresh feed and water but Captain Murray, now thoroughly sceptical about the whole venture, reminded him that King had failed to find drinking water thereabouts and had remarked even dingoes and kangaroos lapping from salt pits.
Stumpy Michael and his men, however, were already over the side with helpers from the ship’s crew, ploughing through the reeking mud to cut mangroves for a rough landing-stage to the shore. When all was ready the horses were hoisted from the hold and coaxed across the branches. They floundered and sank in mud and, as the tide turned, jibbed, weak and trembling, on the edge of deepening channels. Water was swirling over the mangrove bridge before all horses and equipment were ashore.
At once the search for fresh water was begun. Stumpy Michael and Captain Murray climbed a steep point to look across a vast expanse of marsh, shimmering like a hoar frost under a layer of salt, patterned with the tracks of wild creatures, scattered with the branches of trees washed down by rivers from far inland. Isolated ranges with the buttes and talus slopes of African table mountains rose from the level plain, intensely blue and purple in the hard light of afternoon, some seeming to float above the horizon on shimmering drifts of mirage. Captain Murray said he could hardly bring himself to leave his friends with their near-spent horses in so fantastic and desolate place and urged that, failing to find fresh water, they would abandon their project. Stumpy Michael informed him that he had many a time found water in more unlikely and barren spots than this, and pointed to where the others on the plain below were cooeeing and waving their hats.
A recent storm had filled a number of holes and shallow billabongs, and brought on isolated pockets of good grass to which the horses were led and hobbled out to graze.
A camp was made and a tree marked ‘D1.’, the first of twenty-four marked trees denoting stages between Cambridge Gulf and the Negri River. Nightfall found them in a circle of blacks’ fires, glowing in pinpoints of spinifex from range and pinnacle like a chain of festive lanterns. Faintly, from the darkness, came the sharp tapping of hardwood sticks, the hollow far-carrying throb of a didgeridoo, the wailing notes of Aboriginal chanting.
A homely sound [Stumpy Michael recorded], bringing me back in memory to our people at Thylungra. The boys, Pintpot and Pannikin, very much afraid and huddled in their blankets at the fire, for always with the blacks it is the same old story of the terrible tribes next-door, but after meeting them in many parts of the continent I must say I have found them everywhere much the same.
Having entered the day’s events in his journal he wrote his wife a letter to be cherished and preserved for the grandchildren he would never see.
Cambridge Gulf,
17th August 1882.
My dearest Kate,
I hope these few lines will find you and all my poor little children in good health as this leaves all of us at present…This is the 4th letter I have written you since I left home. Oh, how I would love to hear now how you all are…
Well, since we left Port Darwin till we came here we were eight days. Bad weather all the time so we could not sail and we had two of our best horses died on the voyage. I had a fall into the hold myself while hoisting one of the poor creatures overboard and have come ashore here with my arm in a sling. We have only twenty-one horses now.
We got goods and horses off on shore today and pitched our camp. We will have to give the animals a week’s spell here before we start. They are very poor, in fact it is a marvel they did not all die on the little schooner. The day we got here we gave them the last drink of water we had on board and the last bit of hay, so you see they had a narrow escape. Now they have plenty of grass and water, thank God. Although the country on the coast along here is very rough there seems to be plenty of fresh water in every gully. We had a great job landing the horses and were very lucky we did not drown any of them.
My dearest Kate, I think we will be much longer over this trip than I expected on account of the horses being so poor so I don’t think you need expect to hear from me now for about four months at least. The day I get to a telegraph office I will send you a wire and as soon as you get it send Patsy a wire that same day and let him know how we got on. The day you hear from me, wherever I am, you may depend I will travel as fast as the mail till I get home, if God spares me. Don’t forget to write every fortnight to Perth for the next three months and please God I will get your letters all together when I get there. Give me all the news of the children and how they are geting on…and has the baby begun to walk yet? Don’t forget to kiss them every morning and night for me till I get back to them.
My kindest regards to all the friends and a thousand kisses to you and all my poor little children and believe me, my dearest Kate,
Your fond and loving husband til death,
MICHAEL DURACK.
Three days later the travellers watched the departing vessel out of sight and resigned themselves to camp for another ten days while the spent horses recovered from their sea journey. John Pentacost became absorbed in examining rocks and looking for the colours of gold while others amused themselves fishing and shooting at the big man-eating crocodiles that dozed in the mud or floated on the turbulent brown waters. Some of the party waded to the gulf islands at low tide, returning with hawk-beaked turtles and hats filled with turtle eggs. Stumpy Michael and Tom Kilfoyle, his second in command, walked for miles surveying their situation and became increasingly confident of having landed at the mouth of the Ord River. The stream ran west from the gulf but they had no doubt it would presently turn south and lead them to Forrest’s marked tree at its junction with the Negri.
They broke camp at dawn on August 24 and, saddling packs and riding horses, set off along the mangrove-bordered river. Four miles of rough country opened on to good grass prairies, ribbed with sandstone ridges and cleft with a bewildering network of nameless streams among which the original watercourse was lost. They ran up what seemed the largest of these many creeks until the jagged arms of cliffs dropped down to hold it to an impenetrable northward course.
Unlike the sprawling Queensland rivers that spread far and wide after the rains to disappear sometimes completely when the floods had run their course, the larger of these Kimberley streams had bitten deep, tortuous channels in the plains and worn towering gorges through the ranges. Expanses of dry bed alternated with deep green reaches where waters were held between high banks, creviced by centuries of wind and water, luxuriant with trees, creepers and trailing palms.
Disappointed, they crossed where the waters ran between heavy cedars, Leichhardt pines and drooping pandanus palms and where the horses, bending to drink, stiffened and drew back. The cause of their fear was not far to find—a party of natives on the bank above, standing solemn and withdrawn with their long barbed fishing spears. They appeared strong and well-made, like a people who lived well, their naked bodies heavily decorated with tribal scars, the men with hair pulled stiffly from broad foreheads and bound at the back in peculiar elongated knobs. A woman screamed and ran for hiding, dragging her child by the hand, but the men remained standing. Stumpy Michael stretched out a hand to them in a friendly gesture, whereupon they turned stolid backs and sat down, as though determined to show neither interest nor fear, hoping perhaps that when they turned again the apparitions would have passed on their way, out of sight and out of time, a thing for wonder and memory, a daydream to record in corroboree.
The white men rode on, through spreading eucalypts with trunks smooth and clean as though freshly white-washed, to where another river entered the channel from the north. They struck uneasy camp, for the water was salt here, the horses thirsty and nervous and the two native boys apprehensive of a night attack. They were not disturbed, but in the morning they found a maze of footprints encircling their camp.
Following the course of this new river they were cheered by the sight of open plains and abundant grasses—a wonderland of pasture and fine trees. Huge bottle-shaped boabs—friendly giants of the plains—dangled big velvet brown nuts from their dropsical branches silver-grey and leafless in the dry season. The slender stems of wild cotton bore a dazzle of saffron blooms and red-brown pods spilling a froth of white down. Bauhinia branches were heavy with the scarlet blossoms whose pistils swelled to gleaming seed pods that rattle on the wind. Cork-woods spurted fierce flames of flower from leafless branches. Between the trees the even spread of golden grass gave an impression of park land, artistically planned, a reserve of wild life where bustards strutted in stately families, pausing to regard the strangers with haughty surprise. Wallabies and kangaroos stopped in their tracks to turn soft bibbed fronts in curiosity. Brolgas rose in great flocks and with them many bright birds familiar to the Queenslanders, with some others that were new to them.
Stumpy Michael recalled how his wife had lamented the lack of colour and variety in the western Queensland scene and longed to tell her of this country—an artist’s paradise of scenery in the grand manner.
If one were to paint this country in its true colours [he wrote], I doubt it would be believed. It would be said at least that the artist exaggerated greatly, for never have I seen such richness and variety of hue as in these ranges and in the vivid flowers of this northern spring.