23
THE RULE OF THE ROAD
The years 1883 to 1884. Stock converging on Kimberley. MacDonalds leave, from Goulburn district. Nat Buchanan leaves from Flinders River. Durack cattle head for the gulf. Life in the cattle camps. Too many calves. Dry stage to the Hamilton. Drought camp on the Georgina. Long Michael returns to Brisbane for horses. Sickness in the camp. The drought breaks.
A bird’s-eye view of the continent in the middle of 1883—‘the overlanders’ year’—would have shown thin trails of stock converging on the big northern rivers from east to west. Sheep, to be driven inland along the Fitzroy and its tributaries, were being landed in thousands on the west coast at the newly established port of Derby where the first bales of Kimberley wool already awaited shipment to southern markets. Meanwhile droving parties with thousands of cattle were making from Queensland and New South Wales for scattered destinations in the Territory and Kimberley.
In May, while the Durack parties were still mustering and organising, the MacDonalds and their MacKensie cousins, originally hailing from the Isle of Skye and some of whom had been guests at my grandparents’ wedding, were already on the trail north from Tuena in the Goulburn district with cattle bound for the junction of the Fitzroy and Margaret Rivers, some 3,500 miles from their starting point. By the time the Durack cattle got under way the MacDonalds had already run into drought conditions in New South Wales and were suffering heavy stock losses.
John Costello, meanwhile, was negotiating the sale of his coastal properties near Rockhampton and planning to establish a chain of Territory stations on the Limmen River that ran a wild course into the Gulf of Carpentaria.
At much the same time Nat Buchanan and his relatives the Gordons and the Cahills had taken delivery of a mob of cattle on the Flinders River, about 350 miles north of Thylungra, to stock country on the upper Ord for the Melbourne firm of Osmond and Panton. During an exchange of reminiscences in later years old Tom Cahill, a member of this party, told how the redoubtable Nat—or ‘Bluey’ as he was generally called—had been sent to take over this mob from an incompetent head drover:
One of the first things he did [Cahill wrote] was to sack the man who was being paid seven pounds per week as Pilot to the cattle along a main road. The next thing Nat did was to go to each camp and empty the demijohns of rum that was on the drays out on to the black soil…
One can well picture the dismayed faces of the drovers watching their precious liquor disappear into the thirsty ground, but controlling the drink problem was one of the head drover’s greatest headaches. Whether there was grog in their camps or not the theme song of all the overlanding parties was the much parodied drinking chorus:
Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter,
Hurray, the rolling river,
We love Three Star with a little water,
Ah, ha, we’re bound awa’, across the Western border.
The route from Thylungra stretched north to the Gulf and swung west to no-man’s-land. On the map it looked simple enough and measured a fairly neat 2,500 miles. In fact it veered to every compass point from water to water, from grass to grass, and nobody knew how far they must travel in ‘drover’s miles’.
Half-way up the Thompson River Long Michael’s party had caught up with the other mobs and from here they were to travel more or less together, but keeping the four mobs apart as far as possible. Which lot ‘went lead’ for the day seems to have depended upon which got the earliest start in the morning.
Each party had its waggonette containing supplies, water drums and drovers’ swags. This was driven by the cook who liked to strike camp ahead of the drovers and have the billy boiling and the Johnnie cakes roasting in the ashes when the men rode in off watch. A good camp cook took a tremendous pride in his speed and efficiency. He was traditionally a touchy customer, but the sight of his busy figure, moving briskly among the neat rows of packbags and cooking utensils, was a welcome one to a band of hungry men after a long day in the saddle. They judiciously praised the lightness of his dampers and brownies, the succulence of his salt beef and stews.
There were conventions to be observed, small points that marked the experienced stockman from the ‘newchum’. Nattiness was one of them, for untidiness meant muddle and delay. It was against all the unwritten laws of the road to waste time looking for one’s personal effects. Hat, boots, pannikin and stockwhip must always be to hand, while matches, revolver and pocket knife were carried in neat leather pouches in their belts. It was ‘not done’ to linger over meals or get in the cook’s way between the packs and the fire, and no one but the cook was ever permitted to meddle with the impedimenta in the waggonette.
Tough customers as many of the old-time stockmen were, some so illiterate that they signed their names with a cross, there was a certain code of etiquette in the cattle camps. Unless he volunteered information, a man was never questioned about his past and the name he gave himself was good enough. Nothing he said in drink was held against him and he was not reminded of his indiscretions at a later date. A man could skite as much as he liked, he could leg-pull and lie, but he must on no account be ‘flash’, though what was considered ‘flash’ in one district often passed in another.
Letting the cattle spread out over good grass, the drovers ‘poked’ their mobs quietly north-west up the Darra and over the rugged dividing range to the head of Western River. At Longreach they had taken on as many stores as the packs would carry to avoid bothering station people with their needs. Some settlers resented the passing of big herds through their properties, for in the words of the old ballad:
When the Overlanders gather
In the wide and dusty plain,
When tomorrow’s never mentioned,
And they never speak of rain,
When the blazing sun is setting
Like a disc of shining brass,
They wouldn’t steal a copper,
But they all steal grass.
Some station owners, however, went out of their way to show hospitality to the overlanders. They never forgot how, on their way down Western River, stockmen from Vindex Station had ridden after them with a tribute of fresh vegetables and wished them luck as they moved on.
‘They could b…ally well see we’d be n…eedin’ it,’ Long Michael would observe whenever he came to this stage of his story.
Already watering places along the route were dwindling fast and if rain did not fall soon they could well be trapped in the dreaded western Queensland drought.
No mother fended for her family more diligently than these drovers for their cattle. They battled and thought for their mobs as they nursed them along, aware of the slightest tenderness of hoof and hollowness of flank, grieving for a perishing beast, calling halt for a cow to calve.
Long Michael and his brothers would have considered war well justified against men who cracked their stockwhips at the wrong moment or did anything to excite a mob in hand. They had certain pet theories and prejudices against other methods of working cattle that they would uphold to a point of fanaticism. The fourth brother, Jerry Brice, who lived to the age of ninety-four, gloried to his dying day in having slashed a man’s shirt down the back with his whip for having put cattle dogs on to a mob he had nursed down the Birdsville track to the Burra in ’81. Charged with assault and battery and fined ten pounds by the acting magistrate, stock dealer Jenkin Coles, his feelings were bitter indeed, especially since he had previously held Coles’ stock knowledge in high regard. Later in the day he met the dealer in the pub and was shaken warmly by the hand:
‘Put it here, young fellow,’ Coles said (or so the old man’s story went), ‘I’d have done the same to the so-and-so myself.’
New-born calves were slung into canvas hammocks underneath the waggonettes and when the cattle caught them up were taken into the mob to be claimed by their mothers, but as the weeks passed the new arrivals far exceeded the capacity of the slender hammocks. When as many as thirteen calves would be born in a single dinner camp there was no alternative than to destroy them. It was one of the drovers’ saddest reflections that they had been forced to dispose of no less than thirteen hundred new-born calves during the trip. It was a complete waste, for stockmen were oddly squeamish about eating veal or ‘staggering Bob’ as it was known in the cattle camps.
Keeping the bereft mothers on camp at night was an all-time job. They used every wile of their kind to escape the mob and make back along the route in desperate search of their young. Those that managed to break travelled quickly and sometimes returned three or four day stages before they could be overtaken and brought back. Often they went plodding on, far past the camp where their calves had been born, until the drought closed in on them and they perished on their tracks. This maternal instinct meant extra work for men and horses and the waste of precious time while waters along the route were sinking perilously low.
Dust driven on hot desert winds blew in the face of the mobs as they trailed over bare plains and dry creek beds.
When the drovers hit a township it was not easy to get them out.
‘Give us time to wash the dust down,’ they said, but they had collected a lot of dust and there were ‘old cobbers’ in every outback bar.
At Winton one of the waggon drivers found romance with a full-blown beauty behind the bar of the local pub and became so lovelorn at the Diamantina River that he asked for his cheque and returned to the township as fast as horse and packs would carry him. A bagman camped beside the track was glad enough to take on the job and the party continued downriver to the Diamantina gates.
The stock route lay over country flat to horizon’s end, meandering through a maze of claypan channels edged with tea-tree, salt-bush and wild cotton. Red bare sandhills, beaten by desert winds, broke the skyline as the stock veered west to Parker Springs, where round wells, warm and bubbling with soda and magnesia, overflowed into a shallow creek. Here, while the drovers enjoyed a plunge in the buoyant, effervescing waters, the cattle were allowed to browse and refresh themselves in preparation for a dreaded fifty-miles’ dry stage.
At the end of a three-days’ spell the stockmen filled their water bags, a small tank and some barrels, gave the cattle a last long drink and headed them into the setting sun. Forcing the pace, they pushed on to daylight, took five minutes for a pannikin of tea and a Johnnie cake and were off again until noon. They camped for the hours of intensest heat, to press urgently on at sundown into another waterless night.
Towards dawn the leading cattle were stretching out their heads, eyes and nostrils dilated until the whole thirsty mob had broken into an urgent trot, bellowing what the drovers knew as ‘the water call’. It was still a full day’s stage to the Hamilton River, but knowing how thirsty cattle were quick to smell water on the wind the drovers hoped they might be nearing a billabong. When advance riders discovered that the water scent was being wafted from a private tank, all the steadying tactics of the stockman’s craft were used to force the cattle in a detour past the tantalising spot to which they continued to turn and strain for miles.
One big three-year-old bull managed to break from the mob and gallop back. Duncan McCaully turned his mare after it in the moonlight, his long whip flashing out to cut its flank. The beast turned, head down, to charge, but the rider, already off his horse, seized the bewildered animal by the horns, brought it to the ground, and flung sand into its eyes. It was an old trick, cruel but effective, for an angry, half-blinded animal will always charge the nearest moving object—invariably, unless the stockman is extremely unlucky or inexperienced, the travelling herd which quickly envelops the outlaw and carries him along with it.
The mob strung on sullenly, bellowing its misery, through another sunrise, another dinner camp, too thirsty now to pull at the tufty, dry remnants of Mitchell grass along the way. A few hours’ uneasy spell and off again, the stronger beasts stringing ahead, the weaker lagging painfully.
Towards evening a dull green line of timber marked the winding course of the Hamilton but advance riders brought news that there was not enough water for the great, dry mob at the nearest hole. The drovers knew too well how the cattle would charge the water in their frenzy of thirst until it was churned to an undrinkable slough in which the weaker animals would hopelessly bog or be smothered in the crush. Grim tragedies of the droving track were known to them all, when perishing herds had stampeded to total destruction in boggy river beds.
The stronger cattle were now drafted from the various mobs and taken fifteen miles downstream to a big reach of water while the weaker animals were steadied on to the nearer hole. Only a little water, thick and foul-smelling, floated on the slimy mud, but the cattle drained it frantically and then nuzzled and sucked at the evil slime.
Late that night the sturdier mob, breaking at last from the weary drovers, plunged so precipitously into the big hole that when the mighty thirst was slaked dozens of smothered fish were found floating in the muddy waters. These provided a rare feast for the tired, hungry men, able at last to relax while the exhausted cattle fed quietly out over the river flat.
By the time they reached the big Parapitcherie waterhole on the Georgina everyone in western Queensland was talking drought and the drovers knew they must camp and wait for rain. Optimists in the party attached hopeful significance to ‘the ring around the moon’, the ‘pinky haze’ in the sky at sunset or the antics of insects and birds, but Long Michael at least had no illusions. As the horses had suffered badly over the dry stages and some had died from eating poison weed, he resolved to ride back to Brisbane for a fresh supply. Maybe a 960-mile ride to the capital with an extra mount and pack was no worse than holding cattle on a waterhole and waiting for the drought to break. At all events he seems to have taken it very much as a matter of course. Grandfather had news of his cousin’s coming while in Brisbane and at once busied himself to have suitable stock horses ready in hand. Through letter and when possible by telegram he had kept in close touch with the movements of the cattle and paid wages and running expenses into the accounts of his head drovers. He was at the same time looking after the affairs of his cousins, Big Johnnie and Long Michael, selling stock they had left on the Rasmore and Shannon runs and keeping accounts after his fashion.
On behalf cousins John Durack and Long Michael while on road with cattle by me P.D.
John Durack sold 21 bullocks to George Ellms and my brother
Jerry on the 15th of June 1885. Also 12 on the 12th June to above all at £5 per head.
I have sold altogether to F. Cavangh 9 head of bullocks for £53 cash.
Sold a mare and filly for Long Michael on the 21st June 1885 for £17 and received cash. (Have not paid Long Michael as yet.)
The three brothers, Grandfather, Stumpy Michael and Galway Jerry, assembled in Brisbane to meet their cousin and hear first-hand details of the droving trip, found Long Michael somewhat low-spirited.
‘We should have got away six months earlier,’ he said. ‘We’d have been at the gulf then instead of in the middle of this God-awful drought. If you ask me, we’ll be lucky to get half the cattle through now.’
In an effort to cheer him they took him to inspect their properties at Archerfield and Moorlands, and Grandfather showed him a block of land he had purchased for a home on the high bank of the Brisbane River, but it is doubtful whether these activities had the desired effect. Long Michael, well deserved as was his reputation for stockmanship and devotion to his job, had never regarded the bush life as his chosen calling. He had, as he confessed in later life, always hoped to work himself out of it before he was too old and establish himself in some less rigorous form of business. He was inclined to resent the turn of fate that had set him toiling on into the wilderness at much the same age that his cousin Galway Jerry had retired from the bush life to become a figure in the fashionable racing world. Long Michael’s branch of the family, although in Australia three years before the other and as hard-working as anyone in the colony, did not seem to have been favoured by fortune like their relatives. Darby Durack had never made money and had dropped dead slogging in the sun, while his sons had walked, penniless, out of the drought in New South Wales into another on the Diamantina and were still more or less broke. On the other hand everything their cousin Patsy touched had turned to gold since he dug up his first nugget on the Ovens in ’53.
‘I was born either too soon or too late,’ Long Michael said. ‘A bit earlier I’d have been in on the gold rushes and a bit later I would have come in on the college education we’re giving the younger boys.’
‘As it is,’ Grandfather consoled him, ‘you’ll be the first in on some of the richest country in Australia. You won’t regret taking on this trip.’
Back on camp the drovers now had time to kill. Men off watch sat about whittling stockwhip handles from lengths of ironbark that had the pliability of whalebone and was known for some reason as ‘dead finish’. They spent hours patiently working bits of greenhide into their favourite types of whip, making rounded ‘snake belly’ plaits that would cut like knives in a straight thrust.
Young Charlie Gaunt started a two-up school and Jack Sherringham played the concertina and sang the ‘101 bush melodies’ and a few of his own all to the same tune.
Then there was ‘mumble-the-peg’, so much in vogue among stockmen of the day. Like knuckle bones but played with an open penknife, it kept the players amused for hours on end. Wild applause greeted feats of digital dexterity, with shouts of mirth for the loser who must worry a buried penknife out of the dust with his teeth. So great a grip had the game taken outback that James Tyson when advertising for stockmen added the curt advice: ‘No mumble-the-peggers need apply.’
Still, the weeks dragged wearily. The cattle, forced to wander miles to grass, were falling away and the stockmen began to suffer from a mysterious skin affliction like scurvy. Other symptoms followed until, overcome by weakness and lethargy, they lay about in the shade of the scraggy coolibahs, some too weak to ride after the cattle and others too ill even to sit up. The boss drovers, sick themselves, doled out the nostrums of the bush -quinine, Epsom salts and Holloway’s mixture - but without avail. The nearest doctor was at Cloncurry, 200 miles away, but sicknesses such as fever, dysentery and Barcoo rot were regarded as part of a stockman’s lot. This seemed like all these common ailments in one, but only when two men died within a day of each other was its seriousness realised.
Two black stockmen whose assistance had been called in to hold the cattle provided a clue to the problem by pointing out that the far end of the Parapitcherie waterhole had always been held taboo as a tribal camping-place.
‘That belong long time,’ they said. ‘Must be some reason. Might be poison.’
Acting on tribal custom they dug sand soaks in the dry bed of the Burke and carried water each day in canteens and water bags to the sick men, who began to recover at once. Realising that the cattle and horses were also being affected by the water, they fenced off the death trap and sank large dry wells, hollowed troughs from tree trunks and filled them with whip and bucket for the perishing stock. Many beasts, however, were already dead or dying and although attempts were made to burn the carcasses the reek of carrion hung horribly about the waterhole.
Later it was discovered that the Parapitcherie hole was fed by alkaline springs which attained a near lethal concentration as the freshwater-level fell.
Light rain fell about the end of April ’84, just enough to make a little water and give fresh hope, but it caused the cattle to spread out, feeding over a wide range which made hard work for the weak horses.
About a week later a rider from the nearest station came galloping at dawn.
‘Get moving, you fellows. The river’s down!’
The drovers knew droughts and they knew floods—those sudden avalanches of water pouring from some distant part of the river into country where perhaps no rain had fallen for many months, filling the long dry channels of creeks and rivers, lifting timber and carcasses to go surging downstream, turning the parched landscape into an inland sea.
‘The river’s down!’
Expertly the cooks had their equipment into the waggonettes and the stockmen were in their saddles and away. They were always competing over the time they took in catching and saddling a horse, getting a fire alight and a billy boiling, rolling a swag and hitching it to a pack—little things, seemingly unimportant, but on which at certain times might hang the fate of an entire mob and of men and horses too.
The cattle but for the inevitable stragglers were taken at a run to higher ground where, minutes later, drovers watched the waters surging down, swirling into the topmost branches of the river trees under which they had camped for weary months…death-dealing, life-giving water, changing the face of the land.