The years 1884 to 1886. Young Michael Durack returns to Thylungra. Patsy and Stumpy Michael Durack form the Queensland Cooperative Pastoral Company. Land purchased for a Brisbane home. Michael returns to college with cousin jack Skeahan. Payment deferred. Goodbye to Thylungra. Sarah Tully takes a stand. The new house completed. Mr Healy leaves for Ireland.. Rumours of gold in Kimberley. Tom Kilfoyle, Long Michael and Big Johnnie Durack meet their cousin Patsy in Charleville. The Rajputana sails for Cambridge Gulf with young Michael and John Durack, their uncle Stumpy Michael and others.
Grandfather’s decision to take his eldest son from college early in ’83 had caused him much heart-searching, especially in the light of Dr Gallagher’s regret. Back at Thylungra after meeting his brother Stumpy Michael on his return from Kimberley he had written to his sons:
Thylungra.
Feb. 1883.
Dear Children,
I cannot tell ye how much there has been to do since my return more even than I thought of before and I have had to reconsider my decision to leave ye at school another year dear Michael as The Rev. Dr Gallagher has suggested. I am sorry I will have to ask ye to come home on the next coach north after ye receive this letter and that ye will not compleat yere examination that would fit ye for the University. I had not in mind for either of ye the law or the classics for a career of which Dr Gallagher has spoken to me but would have yere names associated with pioneering of new country as is in the blood dear children, and yere people always on the land as others are associated with professions such as doctoring and the Law which is not in yere blood.
I should acquaint ye that I have gone into partnership with Cousin Johnnie in 300,000 acres and stock in Kimberley and this is to be a separate property to the one which I have taken for ye both and also Pat and Sunny when they are older. There is a limit of about 1,000,000 acres to what one holder can take up in W.A. and also a limit to what ye may hold of river frontages but we can later take up pretty well any area we desire and divide into different properties in the name of a company as has been done in Queensland and within the law. This country I would have for yereselves and in yere own names for to run in yere own way as ye will be men soon and must be standing on yere own feet. We shall come to a business agreament for the purchase of the Kimberley property from me upon certain terms so that it will not be said ye have been pampered and everything come to ye for nothing, the aisy way.
This is as I would have it, dear children, but if it is the will of God and the considered judgement of yere teachers that ye go for the professions then I will be standing down but at this time with all the arrangements to be made for getting the cattle on the road and running the stations at the same time as my other business I must have Michael at the first chance.
Your loving father,
P.D.
The learned headmaster of St Pat’s had been prepared to admit that the boys had made good progress in those three years but refused to concede that they had, in their father’s words, their ‘education completed’.
‘The boys stand only on the threshold of learning,’ he had pointed out, ‘but they show a great aptitude for study and it is my opinion they are both more suited to the professions than to station life.’
Father himself, like many youths of the same age, had no singleness of purpose at this time. His years at college, after the first agonising months of homesickness, had been happy and rewarding. His studies interested without entirely absorbing him and as the son of a wealthy pioneer squatter he had enjoyed a certain schoolboy prestige. As time went on he and his younger brother had not lacked for holiday invitations to the homes of well-to-do schoolmates in Sydney and Melbourne and on prosperous country estates. The little mud-brick homestead at Thylungra, for all its homely charm, was a mere hovel to the fine mansions they visited. People were impressed by the area of the Durack holdings on Cooper’s Creek but the boys felt that they would no doubt be sadly disillusioned to see the flat, grey plains of that arid west. The rivers too sounded splendid enough in terms of length and of breadth in flood, but what of the drought years when the isolated waterholes dwindled to reeking puddles that trapped and held the dead and dying stock?
Brief glimpses of city life had shown them a world in which people attended theatres and fashionable race meetings, discussed books and music and made seemingly easy money in comfortable offices. By comparison the social life of the bush had begun to seem something of an uncultured rough and tumble and stock rearing in the far outback a crude means of livelihood. On the other hand my father’s inherited energy and zest for life and movement found outlet in the hard riding, open air station life and he was happy enough to return to the excitement of the big musters and all the plans for the overland drive. Naturally the romance of numbering in that expedition appealed to him strongly but his father’s need of help was more urgent than the party’s need of men. Although more reserved than most of his relatives, my father was, like them all, happiest when with his own. He was deeply devoted to his mother and to the two little sisters who now regarded him with the awe they would never really lose for him. Although he berated his brother Pat as ‘an ignorant young hooligan’ he was proud of the lad’s precocious stockmanship and the good looks he promised, and he believed as fervently as his parents that the baby Jeremiah—‘little Sunny’—was a budding genius. His brother John, probably his only really intimate associate, remained at St Pat’s and the two exchanged letters over this period. In September ’83 my father wrote from Thylungra:
Cher Frère,
Writing in great haste as you can imagine from my last. The parties have all got off now but all here still pretty busy. Father trying to be in two or three places at once as usual and nearly the whole management of this place and Galway has fallen to me pro tern. It is no easy job especially as the water position on both places pretty poor this season. Only hope we are not in for another bad drought and that the cattle get to the gulf without delay. We are shifting cattle onto the big hole up the creek already and some of them beginning to look poorly, but the sheep look all right and we turned off a good clip.
I have put up a yard on Galway since Uncle Jerry left—Pumpkin and Kangaroo offsiding. Did I hear you say ‘Doing most of the work, I bet?’ Well, I have taken the skin off both hands and they have now hardened up.
It looks as though it will be ‘goodbye’ for me as far as the studies are concerned. Have been reading Goldsmith and thinking of the old school, and shall I say, not without a sense of nostalgia. Sometimes I would like to think I was going hack. I have not mentioned it to Father as he does not seem to want to talk too much of the immediate future just now. I don’t think he knows what to do for the best. Dear mother says that whatever happens she will not be parted from her Muscovy ducks and the best of her pot plants which will be left to die in any other hands. I often play the piano to her and the girls and Sunny and they do not notice the mistakes nor that I make up most of the bass myself.
Old Mr Healy continues dotty as ever but pretty well and sometimes think we will probably have him with us for the rest of our lives even though he feels convinced the Irish question will never be solved until he gets back to set them on the right road. His conversation is much of the Phoenix Park murders of last year. Father keeps his fund going for the Irish Land League and will have nothing said against Parnell. He is much distressed by the news he gets from home though from what I can read of it the Irish are not helping the situation by their behaviour. Tell me all the news when you write and have you seen any more of Jim’s pretty sister? No need to envy me the girls’ Governess Miss Quirk. She is all prunes and prisms.
Your fond brother,
MICHAEL P. D.
No doubt the responsibilities with which be was entrusted at this early age developed in my father the habit of authority that formed much of the background of his personality. From that time onwards no one besides Pumpkin ever appears to have disputed his decisions. The faithful Aboriginal recognised only one master and although his attitude to the boys he claimed to have ‘grown up’ was protective, respectful and affectionate, they remained always ‘the young fellows’ who still had plenty to learn. It would be some years before my father came to realise the degree of his dependence upon this stalwart and capable retainer, and longer still before he could recount with amusement the brush they had soon after his return from college to Thylungra. Very much the young laird in well-fitting breeches, polished leggings and spurs, he had devised a series of signals on the iron triangle that served as a station dinner gong—three for Pumpkin, four for Willie, five for Kangaroo and a sustained clanging for general assembly. Pumpkin disliked the innovation and feigned deafness. He never argued. He simply failed to co-operate when his own ideas differed from those of his young master.
‘Fetch me that black stallion, like a good fellow,’ Father told him one day. ‘I’ll give him a try-out on the bullock muster today.’
Pumpkin disapproved of a small sharp type of spur Father effected at this stage and had no intention of letting him ride the stallion that was his pride and joy. He brought up another horse on the pretext that the one wanted could not be found and when sent back with instructions not to return without it finally reappeared leading the stallion which had developed an unaccountable limp. When this disability recurred each time he elected to ride the horse Father became suspicious and found on examination that the limp was caused by a few strands of hair passed under the shoe and wedged tightly in the cleft of the hoof. He turned on the black man indignantly.
‘What’s the meaning of this? Don’t you reckon I can handle this horse?’
‘You can handle him all right, young fulla,’ Pumpkin said. ‘I’m only thinking about the horse—that’s all.’
Later the youth complained to his father: ‘Seems to me you’ve let old Pumpkin have too much of his own way all these years. He’ll be telling us how to run the station soon.’
‘He’s been doing that ever since we came to Thylungra,’ Grandfather chuckled. ‘Maybe that’s the reason we got on here so well.’
When the cattle were about nine months along the road to Kimberley Grandfather believed he had hit upon the solution to the problem of how to have his cake and eat it too. While on a business trip to Brisbane the inspiration had come in the form of a half-jocular enquiry from a business acquaintance who had previously asked for first option on Thylungra if he ever decided to sell out.
‘Well, you old beef baron, I hear you’re going to build yourself a mansion in the city at last and you’ll be sending your sons over to the Ord River. Isn’t it time you decided to let somebody relieve you of a few of your burdens?’
‘I’ll admit the whole thing’s getting a bit much for me,’ Grandfather replied, ‘but as far as the Cooper’s concerned it’s a matter of sentiment. I cannot bring myself to sell my interest in this country that I brought to life as though it were no more than a matter of cash.’
‘Then why not a syndicate?’ his friend suggested. ‘There are plenty others, besides myself, interested in getting a foothold out there. If we were, perhaps, to combine forces…?’
In less than a month the deal was finalised and the Queensland Cooperative Pastoral Co Ltd formed. It was to be a powerful combine ‘to carry on in Queensland and elsewhere in Australia the businesses of stock and station holders, sheep, cattle and horse farmers, breeders and graziers’. The company was to ‘purchase the stations known as Thylungra, Galway Downs and Sultan in the district of Gregory South; of Tongy in the Maranoa district, of Buckingham Downs in the district of Gregory North…of a butchering business and certain freehold lands situated in or near Roma; and also of the Forrest Vale run situated in the district of Kimberley, W.A., together with the cattle, sheep and horses depasturing on the said station runs.’
The estimated number of cattle on Thylungra in January 1884 is stated as being 30,987—an astonishing increase on the pathetic 100 head that first came to Kyabra Creek in ’68!
The agreement was drawn up between ‘Patrick Durack of the first part, Michael Durack of the second part, Richard Wingfield Stuart, Henry Benjamin, Cyril Selby, David Benjamin, Reginald Arthur Whipham and Richard Newton of the third part’ by which those of ‘the said third part’ were to pay ‘those of the first and second parts’ the sum of £160,000 for coming in on the spoils of their pastoral empire.
This seemed to Grandfather the ideal compromise, for by maintaining his share in the syndicate he was keeping faith with the Cooper district while being relieved of the full burden of its responsibility. He could visit Thylungra with a proprietary interest any time he wished without being tied down to dates and obligations. Losses sustained over the seemingly inevitable drought periods would be shared while he should continue to receive handsome dividends from good seasons. His agreement with his cousin Big Johnnie had left him free to make any business arrangements deemed advisable for the land they held in partnership in Kimberley, so he had thrown in the untried Forrest Vale run on Spring Creek for good measure, his other Kimberley holdings having already been signed away in favour of his four sons.
Galway Jerry had preferred to be bought out by his brothers rather than join the syndicate and was promptly paid £20,000 of the down payment of £30,000 made by the incoming shareholders, who, despite the company’s declared half million capital had asked for a year’s grace in which to make final payment. The remaining £10,000 Grandfather paid at the same time to his brother, Stumpy Michael, who had been appointed as a director of the Queensland Co-operative Company.
Reluctant still to sever his close relationship with Cooper’s Creek, Grandfather lingered on, dallying over plans for his Brisbane house, ‘putting things in order’, waiting for messages about the progress of the cattle. It would seem that having travelled so far with such undeviating clarity of purpose he now hesitated, on the brink of a new phase, wondering ‘Where next?’
In July 1884 my father wrote again to his brother in Goulburn:
I do not think Father seems so well lately. I think the sooner he leaves Thylungra now the better but he appears irritable when I ask him whether he has quite made up his mind when he will go or what he wants me to do when they have all gone. Whether I am to stay here, go to Kimberley at once or return to college I do not know and am in a state of uncertainty as to the future. Somehow a lot of the life seems to have gone out of this place since the cattle got away and so many of the old hands left for Kimberley. There is not the same excitement about sports and race meetings since Uncle Michael and Uncle Jerry left and I miss old Duncan McCaully and all the others who have gone. I hear cousin Mick Costello has gone to the Territory with Uncle John and they have some splendid country on the Limmen River. Aunt Mary and the children will be back from Ireland soon and are going out there and Aunt and the girls will be the first white women ever in those parts.
Well John, I was nineteen last week so time is getting on and I would not like to think the years would drift by in this undecided way. I wish Father would make a clean break now and be done, for although there will be some regrets at leaving the old home where we all grew up I sometimes think the Cooper is going back now rather than forward. We need rain badly and the blacks say there is to be a real drought though please God they are wrong. Poor Pumpkin professes great sorrow at the thought of the family leaving and Father has promised him the black stallion, Ebony, and the bay mare, Forest Maid and another colt that he was supposed to be sending to Kimberley. I don’t know what Pumpkin would want with horses of his own as he rides anything he likes on the station and seems to have an idea he owns the lot. He may not enjoy such freedom in the future, but no doubt he will get used to it…
Pumpkin had asked most earnestly to be allowed to accompany the family to their new Brisbane home but Grandfather held to his belief that even so exceptional a native would fret and sicken away from his own country. The case, he explained, was not to be compared with John Costello taking blacks from Kyabra to his station on the coast, for the town property they were going to was little bigger than the Thylungra kitchen garden. It would be just a big house on a small piece of land with other houses all around it. There would be no more than a few buggy horses and no cattle or sheep whatever. Pumpkin, whose wife had died a few years before, returned sadly to his lonely humpy and Grandfather believed the matter finalised. In this, however, he had not truly estimated a devotion that was stronger than the ageless ties of race and country and a determination equal to his own.
For his beautiful block on the high bank of the Brisbane River at Albion Grandfather had paid £8,000, a price indicating the inflated land values of that time. Grandfather considered it a bargain, however, since inferior blocks had been selling for as much as £10,000 at auctions in Brisbane. Eventually, having great faith in a Jewish name, he engaged an architect by the name of Cohen and building began on the spacious colonial home with its wide verandahs and elaborately balustraded balconies. A grand mansion in its day, it appears from existing records to have cost little more than £2,600 furnished, which further indicates the lack of balance between land values and other contemporary costs.
At the end of ’84 Grandfather made a sudden, rather unexpected decision. His son Michael must return to college for another year.
‘But Father,’ the boy protested, ‘I’ll soon be twenty! Surely it’s too late to go back now?’
Grandfather, however, had made up his mind.
‘No, son. I was reluctant to take you away when I did and it has been troubling my conscience since. You might after all have wanted to go on to the University as Dr Gallagher suggested. Now you must go back, get your final exam and make up your own mind what you really want to do.’
No doubt, since his son’s return from college, Grandfather had wondered at times how this rather reserved and bookish boy who had little in common with the romping, ‘chiacking’ young fellows of the Cooper would settle to life in a possibly even tougher community. Grandfather might have felt more at ease had his son been given to youthful peccadilloes, if he had had to warn him off the drink or censure him for hard swearing, but this was never necessary. The boy was not a prude but his attitude to the cruder or lustier side of life about him was that of spectator rather than participator. As later becomes apparent from his letters and journals he had the capacity, even when actively involved, of regarding the drama of life rather as a member of the audience. Hardy and not easily tired, he was by no means afraid of work but his fine-boned hands somehow lacked a natural aptitude for handling tools and working timber and Grandfather teased him that his ‘fingers were all thumbs’ with a saddler’s needle.
So, to the delight of Dr Gallagher, Father returned to his Alma Mater at the beginning of ’85 and settled back into college life with remarkable ease. With him had gone Poor Mary Skeahan’s boy, the thirteen-year-old Jack, whose education had so far consisted of occasional shared lessons with his Thylungra cousins. Young Jack himself saw no purpose in education at that time and his only ambition was to get across to Kimberley as soon as possible. After a month or two of inward rebellion he decamped one night via the dormitory window and made his way back to his father who was then runnng the mail for Cobb and Co. between Charleville and Adavale. Dinny chastised his son for throwing away his golden opportunity, consoled himself in traditional style for having fathered a waster, then gave the reins into the boy’s considerably more capable hands and settled down to sleep the long miles away on top of Her Majesty’s Mail.
At Thylungra the season continued drier than the last and the promised date for final payment from his associates in the Queensland Co-operative slipped past. It was a further six months before Grandfather could bring himself to press for settlement and his reply from the Acting Managing Director ran as follows:
Brisbane,
Sept. 1885.
…I beg to acknowledge receipt of your account for disbursements since the 1st Jan. 1884.
Owing to the continued dry season it is still inconvenient to make final settlement and I trust you will again let it stand over for a short time when I shall have the pleasure of giving you a cheque for the amount of £130,000 to which you are entitled…
Grandfather returned the letter carefully to its envelope and placed it among the other documents in his little tin box.
In October the Thylungra children with old Mr Healy and the prim little Irish governess Miss Frances Quirk went off to stay with their Uncle Galway Jerry and his family at Moorlands while Grandmother and Grandfather finalised their long-drawn-out packing up.
In November, after receiving news of the arrival of the cattle on the Ord some eight weeks previously, there was no further excuse to hold Grandfather to Cooper’s Creek. Managers had been engaged long since for both Galway and Thylungra and the ‘heavy stuff, including the piano, the big trunks of household goods, the iron safes in which Grandfather locked his money and his best Scotch whisky, Grandmother’s cheese presses and a few pieces of treasured furniture made by Great-great-grandfather Michael, had already gone ahead. The place seemed deathly quiet since the children had left and most of the rowdy young stockmen were either in Kimberley, on the way there or making hell for leather to a new gold strike at Croydon. Earlier in the month Grandfather had watched the last of the old hands, Mick Byrne, Tom Connors and Jas Livingstone, ride off with forty head of Thylungra horses for his holdings on the Ord. Noticing the sadness of his eyes, Grandmother had exclaimed:
‘Why, Patsy, I believe you’d like to be off with them yourself!’
‘Maybe if I was sixteen years younger, Mary,’ Grandfather replied, ‘as I was when I first came into this country—with the best of my life in front of me.’
‘But you got where you wanted, my dear,’ Grandmother reminded him. ‘You’ve made money.’
‘Was it for the money then?’ Grandfather asked. ‘Now that it has come I cannot be sure.’
It puzzled his wife how a man who had done so much with such speed and efficiency seemed almost incapable, at this stage, of any action whatever. Often she would find him sitting quite still, not even pretending to read a newspaper or plait some strands of greenhide as he had liked to do when not otherwise employed.
Occasionally he would rouse himself as though in sudden decision and would stride purposefully down to the stock yard. Pumpkin would see him coming and be there before him.
‘You want the buggy horses, Boonari, sir? You go to Brisbane now?’
‘I have been thinking I may first have to see how they are getting along over on the Ord.’
‘You can’t go by meself, sir. I got my swag ready any time. Tomorrow might be?’
‘I don’t know, Pumpkin. I’m just wondering. Do you think they can get along all right on their own?’
‘I dunno. I s’pose they got to learn just like me and you.’
‘You reckon they wouldn’t thank us for meddling, eh?’
The accusation of interfering with other people’s lives, so often levelled at him by his mother-in-law and sometimes by Dinny Skeahan, in his cups, had never much troubled Grandfather before. He had shaken off their remarks with an impatient shrug.
‘And where would they be now if I had left them to make a mess of things? I tell ye I’ll be happy the day they are all on their own feet and making a success of their own affairs.’
‘But it is a matter of opinion whether yere own ideas are always the best,’ Mrs Costello would retort.
Grandfather would not let her have the last word on this point.
‘If it is no more than a matter of opinion, then another man’s ideas may be as sound as my own, but when it is something I have carefully worked out and to which they have given no more than a passing thought, then why should I not be telling them?’
At times he would shake his head over the Australian-born generation of his family, unable to express himself clearly on where the difference lay between their attitude and his own.
‘I will not criticise them in their stockwork or their bushmanship, for they were born to it and I was not, but in other things they do not seem to think beyond a day or a year. They will act upon impulse and make the law for themselves as they go along and hang what shall be the end result of it. They have been brought up in the faith but they do not return to it for advice. They look only to themselves as though they were Almighty God Himself, which they are not.’
To this ‘the young fellows’ in questions would reply with some scorn.
‘We have been brought up in a country where a man has to rely on his own judgement. We have no time to be riding a thousand miles to find a priest and besides, we don’t carry our religion on our sleeves like you Irishmen.’
‘You do not understand me,’ Grandfather would protest. ‘Ye must carry the faith in yere hearts and yere work will be blessed.’
And who could say that he had not been blessed when he rode into the lonely land with his hand in the hand of God? He had loved the country and its wild people and both had served him well. His family had grown up about him with strong bodies and good minds, his flocks and herds had increased and multiplied. He had brought people and life to the wilderness. There were homes now on the inland rivers and roads criss-crossed the vast, grass plains. He had been self-reliant, hard-working, purposeful, but every day he had acknowledged the help of God and his need of it. Some of the young people, like his own son Michael, could run rings around him in a theological argument, but their religion had become a formal thing and the saints who were so close and real to an Irish generation were far away from them—high and strange upon their heavenly thrones.
Would these young fellows, riding a new wilderness, be equally blessed? Had he done right to set them upon this adventure without wives and families to soften the harshness and loneliness of their pioneering work? Many may have considered John Costello and himself imprudent in bringing women and children to Cooper’s Creek and yet it would never have occurred to them to have left their families behind. Nor would they have considered postponing their marriages until life seemed plain sailing. It had seemed to them that little worth while could be achieved alone. How could the country have come to life without the families—the women he had sometimes wished to the bottom of the sea, the children who had not all been spared to them?
Without the inventive of family life, would these young men put up decent homes for themselves and live up to the standards in which they had been reared? How would they handle the blacks? Would they ride rough-shod, insensitive, or would they bear in mind, as he and Costello had done, that these too were the children of God? Had he been right after all in encouraging them to leave the Cooper country? Was he right in leaving it himself or should he, like his sister Sarah, have decided to remain and weather another drought?
Somehow talking to Pumpkin helped him to cast aside his doubts. He saw it as a sign of age to lose faith in youth, and remembered that after all they were fine, practical fellows, good-hearted enough and braver than the average. Big Johnnie had a nice girl in Molong—Irish-born, whom he would no doubt marry in a year or two and they would make a home on the Ord. Black Pat and Long Michael had a string of girls to choose from and meanwhile they had their Uncle Tom Kilfoyle also still unmarried, but a solid fellow, to keep an eye on them. Young Duncan McCaully should be all right too, for although simpler and more sentimental than the Durack brothers he had been one of the toughest fellows on Cooper’s Creek. Once there was a woman or two in the country others would come and soon there would be normal social life. It was a wonderful opportunity for them and they had one and all been keen to go. No one could ever say he had coerced them into it and in case that should be said of his own sons he was keeping them at college and equipping them for professional careers if such should be their choice.
Meanwhile Grandmother was quietly performing the final tasks, for however her husband might vacillate she knew with her woman’s realism that the die was cast. Their time at Thylungra had come to an end and for better or worse they must enter this new phase. She consoled herself that whereas she had not felt well-cast at first in the role of pioneer woman of the lonely west others now came to her for advice and called her ‘the Mother of Cooper’s Creek’. Perhaps in time she would come to feel at home in this new role as wife of a prosperous retired squatter in a city mansion.
When the buggy was packed at last and her pot plants and crate of precious ducks carefully settled in, Grandfather still sat on, his gaze wandering down the bank into the near-dry bed of Kyabra Creek where the white cockatoos and crows flapped and cried among the cajuputs and wild oranges.
‘We came into the drought, Mary, and we leave a drought behind.’
‘But you always said you would go in a four-in-hand and a rich man, so we must thank God for the good years between.’
‘The happy years, Mary.’
‘The happy years.’
Pumpkin was making a last adjustment to the buggy harness as old Cobby, now nearly blind and weeping unrestrainedly, held open the gate.
‘I’ll be back to see they’re treating you right,’ Grandfather said. The manager has it in writing that those horses belong to you now, Pumpkin, and he knows you’re a free man and as long as ye wear that medal I gave you St Patrick will look after you.’
‘I’ve got that travelling man too—that St Christopher,’ Pumpkin said.
Grandmother looked down at the scraggy old man beside the gate, the ‘guardian angel’ she had once taken for a crafty savage.
‘Good old Cobby,’ she said. ‘I will always remember…’ and let down her gossamer veil.
There now remained only the leave-taking with Sarah Tully and Poor Mary Skeahan who, since Dinny had finally given over the Rasmore run, was living with her sister at Wathagurra.
Grandfather, at sight of his sisters’ stricken faces, forced a heartiness he did not feel.
‘Whenever any of you want a trip to town there’s a home for you to come to and all expenses paid, and I’ll be back of course—I should say two or three times a year at the least.’
‘But it’s only I will see you, Patsy,’ Sarah said, ‘as I see my own lost little ones.’
Grandfather disliked what he called his sister’s ‘morbid prophecies’.
‘I don’t understand why you should be so fixed on staying on here,’ he chided her. ‘If it’s the graves you’re worried about why not send the poor little ones to lie with the others in the Goulburn cemetery—as Mary and I have done with our first little Jeremiah?’
‘And have them wandering lonely about the empty house and crying for us along the creek? No, never while there’s a Tully left.’
Not long after the family went away Sarah heard that stockmen were tying their horses to the railings of the Thylungra graveyard where her babies were buried. Grimly she set off in her buggy, dug up the crumbling bones with her own hands and reburied them at Wathagurra.
‘It is here your father and I will be lying,’ she told her children, ‘and each of you according to your place in the family.’
And so Sarah established her dynasty that would draw from the Cooper all those things for which her brothers sought so far afield.
Long after her death a fine modern homestead replaced the wattle and daub shack that was made in ’74, but it faces, like the first, into the prevailing wind of the west. That was as Sarah had wanted it—so that she could watch down the road to Thylungra for the brothers who never came back…
In Brisbane while settling into the new home came the happy news that both boys—Michael and John—had passed their matriculation and were returning home. Grandfather had cast off his depression in a fresh burst of enthusiasm. He called the new home Maryview, and early in ’86 threw it open for a housewarming party that lasted for several days. Friends and relations flocked in to exclaim at so much splendour, at the view from the balcony and the newly planted lawns and gardens descending almost to the river’s edge, at the modern stables where Grandfather’s famous buggy horses that had carried him over so many thousand outback miles now munched and champed luxuriously.
Old Mr Healy, slightly tipsy with champagne, wandered among the guests announcing his decision to return to his sister in Kilkenny. Up to this time, he said, as tutor to the children and business adviser to their father, he had been indispensable. Now with the elder boys grown up and a credit to his teaching, the younger ones, Pat and Jerry, starting at Christian Brothers’ College near Brisbane and Mr Durack’s affairs at this satisfactory conclusion, he felt he had earned his retirement. It was his duty now, he felt, to put all his weight behind the Home Rule Bill for Ireland. Grandfather saw him on to his ship with mingled feelings of relief and sorrow, and to ease the old man’s grief at the final parting said that he and his wife would try to visit him in Ireland ‘in a year or two’. Mr Healy nodded through his tears:
‘I will wait for you.’
At home the old man told everyone of the rich relations in Australia who were soon to visit him and waiting, he held on to life:
‘Oh yes, they will come for sure. My cousin, Mr Patsy Durack, is a man of his word, you know.’
Items about the possibility of gold in Kimberley had now begun to appear in the Queensland press. It was revealed that as far back as ’82 three prospectors, Phil Saunders, Adam John and John Quinn, had found colours among ranges south of Nicholson Plains. John had taken ill at the time of the discovery and, tied to his horse, had been led back to the Territory by his mates, but word of the find had caused a government party, led by geologist Edward Hardman, to be sent to the site.
In his report, which appeared in August ’85, Hardman wrote of ‘a large area of country which I believe will prove to be auriferous to a payable degree…good colours of gold…distributed over about 140 miles along the Elvire, Panton and Ord Rivers as well as on the Mary and Margaret Rivers where indications are very good…sufficient to justify the expenditure of a reasonable sum of money in fitting out a party to thoroughly test the country…’
It needed no more to touch off the easily roused optimism of a gold-minded community. The more responsible papers published warning articles, pointing out the costs and risks involved in prospecting in this remote and still unsettled area but already a party had chartered a ship from Brisbane to Cambridge Gulf. Grandfather, as easily excited by rumours of gold as the rest of them but with more caution than some, tried to discuss the possibilities calmly with his sons.
‘It may prove another blue duck, of course, but if there’s to be a rush it means an immediate local market for the cattle. It would give us time to look around for other avenues. If you decide to go, the country is yours for the taking. If not…’
By this, as might be imagined, wild horses could hardly have kept the boys from their Ord River heritage. Grandfather booked their passages on the Rajputana, Cambridge Gulf bound, with the prospecting party, in a month’s time.
While preparations for departure were in progress a telegram from Longreach made known that Long Michael, Big Johnnie and their uncle Tom Kilfoyle had returned overland from Kimberley and planned to take the coach from Charleville to visit their family in Molong. Grandfather was on the next coach west and arrived at Charleville at the same time as the three overlanders rode in. He knew more about the news of gold than they.
‘It looks as though there may be more than has been published,’ he said, ‘for the South Australian Government proposed setting up a port just inside the Territory border to capture the new gold trade but the West Australian Premier decided to get in first. He is supposed to be already on his way up the coast to open a port on Cambridge Gulf.’
The travellers were greatly excited at this news.
‘Then Black Pat should be in the money with his store and there will be some people in the country after all.’
Big Johnnie reported his disappointment in the Forrest Vale run but declared the Ord River country taken up in the boys’ names to be the best he had seen anywhere in Australia.
‘If they have decided to take it on,’ he said, ‘I will help them start the place when I get back and we can select another block later when you get across yourself. Meanwhile I have left all the cattle in charge of Duncan McCaully on the Ord.’
Decisions for momentous journeys were made with the usual speed. Long Michael and Tom Kilfoyle, having seen the family at Molong, were to hurry back to catch the Rajputana with the boys, Big Johnnie was to return overland, this time with his younger brother Jerry Brice who had been running Grandfather’s hotel at Adavale and they would try to purchase a few hundred head of cattle on their way through the Territory.
‘If ye get married in Molong,’ Grandfather said, ‘the girls could go around to Wyndham on the Rajputana, There’d not be much time but ye’d have only to wire and I’d get anything they’d be needing put on board.’
Long Michael answered vehemently for them all.
‘It’s no country for white women, Patsy.’
‘If it’s no country for the women, then what use is it to the men?’ Grandfather demanded.
‘When the markets open up we’ll make our fortunes there,’ Long Michael said. ‘Time enough then to think about marrying. Just now women and kids would be nothing but a handicap.’
This was a new outlook to Grandfather.
‘And where is it any different to Cooper’s Creek in the early days?’
‘The isolation, the fever, the blacks. The women’d want company, get sick—maybe worse.’
‘But the fever should go when the living improves. Ye get it anywhere living in the open and no vegetables. As for the isolation and the blacks…’
‘I want to get married,’ Big Johnnie confessed, ‘but I’ll give it another year or two. It would hardly be fair to ask a girl just yet.’
Grandfather shook his head.
‘But a country without women, I cannot picture it! It will be a sad, barren place until they come.’
After the departure of the cattle Stumpy Michael had gone into partnership with a wealthy friend, Mr Lumley Hill of Brisbane, and had given Long Michael a third share in the stock he had driven for them into Kimberley. A few days before the Rajputana was due to sail, Stumpy Michael came up to interview his cousin but the sight of the preparations, the horses ready for shipment, the talk of gold, of the country he had taken up and the tremendous work of settling in, sent him hurrying back to Archerfield to pack his own bags.
‘It is all more than Long Michael and a couple of men can handle on their own,’ he told his distraught wife, now the mother of seven children. There is so much to be decided and gone into that can only be done on the spot and it seems ridiculous that I should be taking it easy here. I should not be more than two or three months at the outside.’
So when the ship sailed at last Stumpy Michael’s name figured on the passenger list, with his two nephews, his cousin Long Michael, Tom Kilfoyle, Jim Byrne (whose brother Mick was on his way overland with Thylungra horses for the Ord) and Mr Stockdale’s prospecting party which included several women. It was not realised at the time that young Jack Skeahan, Poor Mary’s son, was stowed away below with the horses. Determined on a desperate action to break the maddening monotony of the featureless miles beside his drowsing father, he had one day picked up a bag of mail and flung it off the moving coach. When the loss was discovered he had taken his punishment, told his father where to find the missing bag and made off on foot for the nearest town. Hearing that his cousins were leaving for Kimberley he presented himself at Maryview asking to be allowed to go along but his request was refused on account of his youth. The ship was three days out before they discovered him.
‘All right,’ he was told. ‘You’ve chosen a man’s life and you’ll have to do a man’s work.’
‘That suits me,’ the boy said. ‘I never did anything else but a man’s work anyway—except when they sent me to that confounded school’
As the Rajputana steamed through tropic seas to Cambridge Gulf my father and his brother broached the riches of their library. On the fly leaf of the journal he was resolved to start at Cambridge Gulf my father scribbled:
April 25/86. At sea. John quotes sonorous passages on the Creation from ‘Paradise Lost’. Myself much taken up with Shelley’s translation of Homer’s ‘Hymn to Mercury’. Magnificent stuff:
The herd went wandering o’er the divine mead,
Whilst these most beautiful Sons of Jupiter
Won their swift way up to the snowy head
Of white Olympus, with the joyous lyre
Soothing their journey…