The years 1886 to 1887. Lively times in Kimberley. Big Johnnie Durack is speared by the blacks. A punitive expedition. ‘The wet’. Letter from home. Fever. Patsy Durack arrives and begins to build. White labour versus black. A new recruit. Patsy Durack visits the goldfields. First Wyndham race meeting.
Never, in all the years since, was there so much life and so much death on the rough bush tracks, so many callers at the station shacks. Even Father’s brief comments on daily happenings reflect the excitement, variety and general disorganisation of the times, for no ‘pattern of life’ had yet been established in Kimberley.
‘Tailing’ horses and cattle occupied a great deal of time and in the process they were becoming familiar with their country. They rounded up and branded the new-born calves and expressed keen satisfaction at the rate of increase on the rich Ord river pasture. They put up a few ‘rough yards’ on their run, pegged out horse and bullock paddocks for the future, but as yet made no attempt to fence and for the rest were in and out from the gulf and across to the goldfields.
As long as Father was in the saddle going from one place to another, whether or not there was any practical necessity for the journey, he felt his time was being well spent. He was ‘pioneering’, ‘empire building’. He had begun to cultivate an auburn beard and had, to his surprise, grown another inch in his twenty-first year, making him just six feet. Young John was shorter and still quite beardless and looked to his elder brother to make all the decisions. The two were devoted companions and at night sat together with their books, fighting off the insects that flocked to the light of their flickering kerosene lamp, while outside the still, warm bush pulsed with its unseen life and sometimes, throbbing from the hills like a muffled drum, came the sound of the black man’s didgeridoo.
To and fro from their tent and bough shelter on the Behn River rode stockmen and prospectors, police and government officials from the fields, these last confident bearded men in tropical topees and riding togs like the pukka sahibs of India that some in fact had been.
A delightful evening in company with C. D. Price, R. Wolfe. E. Baynes and Arthur Forbes. A lively flow of conversation and some wit…Forbes quite a brilliant artist causing much amusement with his sketches of gold-fields personalities—undoubtedly a rum lot…
Arthur Forbes, then warden of the goldfields, was the son of a British colonel who had retired to Western Australia with his large family. The water-colour sketches and cut-outs which he scattered throughout the North-West from Roebourne to Wyndham provide some of the most vivid impressions we have of these colourful times.
A party of Afghans came through with a camel team en route to the fields and travelling with them a woman:
…presumably quite young, though could not see much for her copious veil. Remarked that as she was the first woman ever passed through this part and the first ever on the Ord I should put her name on record, but she would not give it, saying airily to put her down as ‘The Mountain Maid’. Much regretted she would not wait for a meal or even a cup of tea.
‘The Mountain Maid’ threw up a shanty hotel on the fields and later followed the diggers’ trail to the Nullagine to fade from sight with a string of camels headed south for the Nullarbor—one of the countless, lonely pilgrims to each new shrine of the great God Gold. Hall’s Creek in these times was no place for women, except a few such intrepid characters as old ‘Mother Kelly’ with her scurrilous tongue and her heart of gold and ‘Mother Dead Finish’ with her noxious brew, lurking in her Dunham shanty to waylay returning prospectors. Legends grew up about the ill-gotten nuggets that rattled in her bulky corsage and she was found one day with a knife in her back and the clothing stripped to her waist.
Wyndham became gayer and wilder as the year went on. Gold was in brisk circulation and champagne flowed freely among the diggers, stockmen and business people of the town. Father, on his visits to collect mail and stores, wrote brief understatements of the lively scene.
Oct. 30/86. Strolling through town reading ancient history. Plenty of ‘hurrah’ fights going on. Too much champagne. Got life insured by Mr Hamilton. Deposited gold in Mr Baynes’ safe. Auctions two in a day…
31st. Town land sold today by Mr Stone, Govt. Resident, having realised £3600 odd, £2000 worth of Wyndham town blocks purchased by an English syndicate. Mr Ranford today presented with two nuggets of gold value about £120…
Ranford, returning from his survey of the gulf rivers, was piqued to find that so many shanty hotels, stores and shacks had been set up at what he had intended as a temporary landing place. He suggested that the inhabitants now began putting up more seemly and permanent structures on the official site, but the makeshift port was voted ‘good enough’ until the future of the fields was established. In fact few of the inhabitants cared a fig for the future of Kimberley. They had come to make as much money as possible in the shortest possible time and thereupon to leave the sweltering, mosquito-infested little town with its feet in the mangrove mud for good and all.
Not yet the days when a flock of charming young women with ‘honeyed tones and beguiling smiles’ would draw the station boys to town on the flimsiest excuse. Father was relieved to turn his back on the gulf in November ’86 and to make back upriver to the camp on the Behn. He found the place deserted with a note from the two Johns, brother and cousin, informing him they had gone after straying horses and that the others were mustering towards Lissadell. For the first time since his arrival in Kimberley, perhaps for the first time in his life, Father found himself alone except for the blackboy Tommy. Even in later years, accustomed to long, lonely days and nights in the bush, he hated to find himself the sole occupant of a lonely station.
Nov. 17. There is an uncanny and desolate atmosphere about the camp, [he wrote]. I set to work to mend some packs but do not know when I have felt the hours hang so heavily, with no sound but the melancholy note of a few crows and the wild cries of the cockatoos…
Nov. 18. Still anxiously expecting someone to relieve this monotony and do not relish the thought of camping alone again tonight. Last evening Tommy drew my attention to a chain of fires all along the range as far as the eye could see. He appears disturbed and says it is a signal of some sort, though I think more likely a bush fire having caught a long line of spinifex, giving a weird illusion of mountain villages lit up for some festivity. Do not know what can be keeping Duncan, the two Johnnys and Charlie away so long…
Nov. 19. Passed a very lonesome day anxiously expecting somebody home…Just dark and could hear the occasional knock of a bell coming from upriver, did not know who they were until, to my surprise, I saw it to be M. J. Durack (Long Michael), Jerry (Brice), brother Johney, Duncan and Charley. Asked me did I hear the dreadful news—cousin Big Johney has been speared by the blacks and they had just come from burying him yesterday—a horrible affair…
The two Johns had been riding after horses near the Rosewood boundary on the fateful day. The spear had flashed out of the long cane grass on the riverbank but the doomed man had galloped on 300 yards before he slumped and fell to the ground.
Behind them a group of blacks stood as though deliberating among themselves, then began moving forward slowly, spears set in their throwing boards. Uncle John drew the small Colt revolver from his belt but the dying man restrained him.
‘Don’t fire, Johnny. If you lose your horse you’re a goner too.’
‘You’ll be all right. I’ll take the spear out and get you up in front.’
‘No—I’m done for, son. Ride for your life.’
With the dead man limp in his arms the boy glanced again to where the blacks stood, straight and stiff, bodies slashed with white paint, heads bedecked with feathers and fur ornaments, spectres of inhuman vengeance. He laid the body on the ground and mounted the horse that stood quivering in terror, with its rein over his arm. It was dark when he reached the musterers’ camp on the Ord and gasped out his terrible tale.
Back in New South Wales, an Irish mother, polishing up the silver in her country hotel, put her hands to her head.
‘Something has happened to Johnnie. It is no use keeping it away from me. We will never see him again.’
Three weeks later the news, sent by ship to be telegraphed from Darwin, reached Molong, but it had swept through Kimberley like wild fire:
‘Big Johnnie Durack’s been speared by the blacks!’
From the gulf and the goldfields, mates—Barney Lamond, Jack Horrigan, Connors, Livingstone and the brothers Byrne—came riding to Argyle to show their respect in the only way they knew. Big Johnnie had been a hero to stockmen of Cooper’s Creek and the overland trail and the shock of his death hardened their hearts to steel against the blacks.
The avenging party, police, ‘special constables’ and black trackers, rode to the scene of the murder where the dead man’s brothers had buried him the following day. The body had been disinterred, pounded with heavy stones and the crushed remains pinned down with spears.
Angry men rode the ranges and the plains, following tracks that led to a deserted camp strewn with broken weapons, flint spear-heads and the bones of wild game and kangaroo. Mockingly, the blacks had left a clear trail to follow with spears stuck into tree trunks and kylie sticks thrown down where the trail might be lost to poor trackers over stony ground. Down into steep creek beds, over stony ranges, clay-pans, spear-grass plains, the tracks wound on until footprints mingled with the half-moon impressions of horses’ hoofs. The young trackers pointed, shamefaced:
‘This same way where we been before.’
They had been brought in a circle on an exhausting four-day ride, but still the tracks led on enticingly only to vanish at last under a thirty-foot perpendicular of limestone cliff.
The party broke up in disgust and whether further more successful reprisal measures were taken for this deed can never be known. The conspiracy of silence that sealed the lips of the pioneers added colour to the rumours that spread abroad so that whereas we know they took much rough justice into their own hands they were no doubt less devastating to the local tribes than was sometimes said. ‘Punitive expeditions’, like brumby musters, took a great deal of time and organisation and in that wild land where ranges and impenetrable gorges formed so ideal a refuge for fugitives they returned from such projects, as often as not, completely defeated. One lesson they learned from this chase, however, was that ‘treachery’ on the part of the blacks must be met with ‘strategy’ by the whites. The straight-out ‘nigger hunt’ would get them nowhere, for even with the help of trackers no white party was a match for the nimble-footed tribespeople who as surely as their dogs could smell the ‘cuddjabah’ and his horses on the wind. Nor could white men then be confident which side of the fence their trackers were on.
Towards Christmas the wet came in with blue flicker and forked dazzle of lightning, a rumble and cymbal clash of thunder that shook the plains and echoed back from the hills. Heavy rain fell on a labyrinth of creeks and gullies that sent the rivers roaring to the gulf. Kimberley changed in a week from gold and red of sun-bleached grass and scalded plain to a steaming, green land, splashed with the sudden colour of wet-weather flowers and white swamp lilies, quivering with heat haze, screaming, buzzing and droning with its multifarious wild life. Fragrant, creamy blossoms broke among the luxuriant foliage of the boabs and small, sweet flower clusters foamed on the cajuputs. Ranges, opalescent blue and rose in ‘the dry’, glowered indigo dark against tumbled skies and the grey tree trunks turned bold black as though splashed with tar.
A tangy, wild smell of rain-wet spinifex and eucalyptus swept down from the hills, bringing a sense of mingled excitement and resignation. The wet had set in and men’s movements were subject to the caprice of the rivers, the bog and the quicksand swamps.
Still a police constable with some thanks to good luck and his black trackers managed to bog through to Argyle with the mail including a letter from Grandfather:
My dear boys,
When ye receive this letter I should soon be on the way to ye and all the news can wait until I come, except I should tell ye that I will have Pumpkin with me, for that he turned up here of his own accord with the horses I gave him when we left Thylungra.
I was at first for surprising ye, but he says ye might be thinking to see a ghost and it is better that ye know to expect him. He would not have it otherwise but that he should come to you, dear boys, and does not know how ye will be getting on before he is there to help ye and to look after the horses. It has been a great concern to him about the Thylungra horses and since the sad news reached us of poor cousin Johney’s death, I do not think that he has slept sound for the worry…Ye’re mama is delighted that the good faithful fellow is to come to ye afterall and we have been having Masses said for ye along with our poor cousin, God rest his soul…
Speculation, as always after unspecific letters or telegrams in the bush, ran rife at the camp on the Behn. What did Grandfather mean by this vague statement that he should ‘soon’ be on the way? How soon and by what ship? Could he be so ignorant of the nature of a Kimberley wet season as to assume they could ride in and out of Wyndham for further news?
In March the Ord still rode high and mighty between its banks, cutting the settlers’ world into ‘gulf side’ and ‘t’other side’. Father was looking for lost horses around the Behn Junction when Bob Perry came to hurry him back to the station camp.
‘That crazy old man of yours turned up with his black offsider.’
And who, asked Grandfather, would be expecting any man to wait around in a hole like Wyndham when he had brought five good Thylungra horses on the ship with him? There was no mistaking the track since the diggers had strewn it with a litter of dead horses, tins and broken-down vehicles. They had got through to Lissadell without trouble and from there Long Michael and Jerry Brice got them across on a tarpaulin raft with the two strongest mounts swimming behind. It was like old times to be crossing a river in flood and fine fun had been had by all.
Grandfather had brought with him one of his innumerable parchment ‘Agreaments’, signifying that his Kimberley interests, including those he had shared with his deceased cousin Big Johnnie, were to be sold to his sons on terms payable over a period of ten years.
‘So that if things go smash in Queensland you children will be all right, except that ye will have to be keeping your parents in their old age.’
He spoke jokingly, for even though a run of bad seasons on the Cooper since the formation of the Queensland Co-operative had so far prevented the company from paying him any of his £130,000, he did not for a moment believe that ruin could actually befall so solid a combine in a boom State. In ’87 he was concerned about minor difficulties but not greatly worried for the future.
From the time he appeared on the scene things began to take shape around the Behn. To start with he tossed out the pegs the boys had driven in on their homestead site.
‘Just as well ye were a bit slow off the mark getting the place up,’ he said. ‘Ye’d have had it too close to the bank.’
He made quick ‘flood calculations’ and paced and pegged higher up. The place became a hive of purposeful activity as loads of grass and spinifex were carted in, horse-churned into the boggy, wet-weather soil and rammed between wooden stays. Timber was felled, carted and sawn to size, rafters, doors and window frames shaped and set in place.
‘What! Call that a yard?’ Grandfather exclaimed, examining his sons’ handiwork. ‘Ye ought to be ashamed of yereselves!’
‘It was only a temporary structure,’ Father explained.
The excuse was swept aside.
‘Nonsense! Ye might as well do the job properly to start with. I know places where they’ve been propping up these “temporary” yards for twenty years.’
He and Pumpkin worked together in the simmering heat from daylight to dark, as they had done in the early days on Thylungra. Mustering and branding continued meanwhile and the erratic journals began to read more like the day books of life at Thylungra.
By August the house, outbuildings and yards were finished and the camp on Behn River could justifiably claim the title of a ‘station’. They called it Argyle after the county in New South Wales where Grandmother was born and where the family had its first holding on Dixon’s Creek. The main building was like the first Thylungra, verandahs shading its red mud walls and crazy paving of grey river flags, its roof a cunning thatch of grass, pandanus and spinifex. Inside the floors were a hardened preparation of ant-hill mud. Bullock and kangaroo hides served as floor mats, as table tops stretched over old cart and buggy wheels, were nailed to timber frames for the seats of chairs and window shutters, cut into strips for a criss-cross open weave that formed the ‘spring mattresses’ of the rough bush beds. Greenhide water bags swung on greenhide ropes from the verandah posts, riding and pack saddles, harness and leather or greenhide whips hung from the beams.
Store and kitchen were one, with broad shelves for the provisions, a big, rough-hewn table for the cook and outside an open fireplace, mud oven at one side and ‘range’ on the other with its impedimenta of pots and billycans, a bucket of salt beef on the boil or cooling off with a deep scum of cooking fat forming on top. The meat house was a bough shade and timber trestle where the beef was salted and left to dry while ‘the fresh’ dangled on iron hooks, quickly forming a hard skin Nothing could prevent the flies finding the moist crevices, but no one was squeamish about blown meat in the bush. You cut out the infested areas in ‘the fresh’ and threw the blown pieces of ‘salt’ on the wood heap for the ants to clean.
But all the time fever haunted the station camps on the rivers like the malignant spirit of a country that would repel the trespasser. The daily small doses of quinine were increased until the ears of the settlers buzzed and their heads swam. ‘A touch of fever’ was general lethargy and aching limbs, ‘an attack’ anything from uncontrollable ague, migraine and high temperature, to various stages of delirium.
All over the country men rode after stock in an aching daze or lay on the creek banks with their hats pulled over their eyes, praying for the night to bring remission from the cruel light and the blazing heat of the sun.
In April Pumpkin, out after horses, found a traveller camped across the Behn too sick to walk a few miles to the station camp or bury the native boy who had died a week before and lay rotting under the dark massed wings of eagle-hawks and crows. Pumpkin had hurried back for the dray and brought the stranger to Argyle where he was cared for until well enough to move on to Hall’s Creek.
‘Was it always like this here?’ they asked the blacks, but gathered little sense from their reply. Everyone knew there were ‘debbil-debbils’ around the waterholes in the wet and when a man got sick the tribe would sneak off under cover of darkness, dodging about and trailing branches to obliterate their tracks and so confuse the evil ones as to which way they had gone, while the sick man was left to recover or die as the case might be. In this there was no doubt much sound, primitive sense for the white men’s stations rapidly became hot-beds of infection, and if the blacks were reassured that their evil spirits were nothing more or less than the sprightly Anopheles, they sickened and suffered as never before.
Work progressed, however, since there were plenty of hands in those months when a feeling of disillusionment with the goldfields had brought many ex-stockmen back to station work. It seemed in fact that with so much white labour available there would be little need to recruit further Aborigines. Grandfather’s idea of providing the blacks with regular beef to discourage cattle-spearing, establish mutual confidence and gradually absorb the younger people into station work was dismissed as impractical for Kimberley. The settlers declared they might soon find themselves impoverished by big native encampments demanding as their right not only beef but other provisions which, when withheld, would cause the blacks to become more of a menace than before. Most Queenslanders came west with a fixed idea of the inferiority of the Territory and Kimberley blacks to those of the decimated tribes of the other side, who were now seen to have had many admirable qualities. The Queensland Aborigines they declared could be quickly trained as loyal and efficient helpers whereas these, for all their cunning and treachery, were dunderheads in the stock camp. It was pointed out that their weapons were relatively clumsy, that they made no attempt to trap or net fish, and that in short they were best left as far as possible to their own devices since the more they learned of the white man’s ways the more crafty they became.
My father’s attitude to the native question was somewhere between that of Grandfather and those of his associates who thought that any sort of human consideration for the blacks was sentimental and ridiculous. I find it easier to imagine Grandfather, with his quick, Irish temper, taking a stockwhip to a native than I can my father who was not impulsive or quickly roused to anger, and I can imagine neither of them shooting a man in cold blood or using a gun at all except when necessary. Both disliked anything in the nature of blood sports and in later years when Member for the Kimberley district, my father, appalled by the wanton destruction of the bird life he loved, brought in a bill for its protection north of the 20th parallel. Nonetheless he would have been embarrassed, in these early years, to have been thought ‘unrealistic’ about the blacks, and had many a brush with ‘the pater’ on the stand they should take.
‘Maybe if the government would subsidise us for feeding them there would be something in your policy of encouraging them about the place,’ he told his father. Later he became so attached to this idea that he wrote suggesting it, by way of reply to a storm of criticism that had broken out against the northern settlers in the southern press:
I would like to ask our critics how else they would have us deal with the situation in which we find ourselves, other than by remaining out of the country altogether, a course rather late to decide upon, for when Australia was taken over in the name of the British Empire its purpose was surely that of populating and developing it? My father, a pioneer of western Queensland, held it as an ideal to absorb the aborigines into the white man’s economy and trained many natives successfully to this purpose. Others in the district pursued the same policy and the fact that so few aborigines now remain in those parts was in spite of their efforts. Had they been encouraged and subsidised to bring in and train many more natives the situation might be very different today for it was the behaviour of the outside or bush blacks who, in failing to co-operate with the new regime, in killing cattle, horses and sheep and committing a number of unprovoked murders that led to the settlers having to call in the protection of the police. I speak therefore from some experience and would regret to see the situation in Kimberley reach a point where the wholesale extermination of the aborigines would become inevitable.
Grandfather, however, sniffed at the idea of government subsidy for feeding blacks whose younger relatives were employed on the station.
‘I don’t know what’s got into the younger generation,’ he stormed, ‘forever wanting to be spoonfed by the government. In my day we were glad enough for the opportunity to strike out for ourselves and make good. We never expected anything for nothing—not even native labour. We provided meat and rations up to a point for the black families as a matter of course. It was our part of the bargain. We lived up to it and they lived up to theirs.’
‘They must have been a very different type of people,’ Father argued. ‘Where would you ever see a man like Pumpkin over here?’
‘Pumpkin was just an ordinary, average blackfellow who was properly trained and treated from the start and the boys you’ve got here now will grow up the same way if you go the right way about it.’
Pumpkin, while agreeing in general principle about the inferiority of the Kimberley blacks, regarded the boys Charlie and Tommy as exceptions to the general rule and was a ‘proper father’ to them as they told us in later years. Like Grandfather he discouraged the careless ‘pidgin’ form of English and taught his apprentices good manners and good stockmanship.
When he had been only a few weeks at Argyle he met a traveller coming through to the fields from Queensland with a black woman and a boy of about eight or nine years old. The child had a roguish face and a confident seat in the saddle and Pumpkin asked the traveller if he would care to exchange him for a tin of jam. The fellow considered the proposition:
‘I’ve trained him for a horse taller, and he’s pretty reliable,’ he said, ‘but I could do with some jam and that nice little mare you’re riding as well.’
Pumpkin consulted my father, the bargain was struck, and Boxer came into service at Argyle, a companion for the other two boys Charlie and Tommy who camped on the river bank a short distance from the house. Pumpkin himself camped on the homestead verandah, being convinced that the ‘myall’ blacks were planning a night raid and that Father and Uncle John, being sound sleepers, would undoubtedly be taken unawares.
The house completed, Grandfather set off for Hall’s Creek. The first excitement of the ’86 rush had passed and half the early diggers had already moved on to try their luck elsewhere but Grandfather was still impressed with the possibilities of the Kimberley fields. He thought it a great pity that the miners should be moving out after merely skimming the surface for the alluvial and he was determined to investigate further prospects with the aid of heavy crushing machinery. In this decision he was personally less interested in becoming a successful miner than in encouraging population to Kimberley and establishing a firm local market for the beef industry. Having pegged out a claim he rode back to Argyle and arranged with his son John, cousin Jerry Brice and two other ex-Queensland relatives, John Dillon and Jim Minogue, to leave the station for a while and work the claim until he came back with up-to-date equipment.
He then packed up for his return and rode down to the gulf with most of the white population which was making in for the first annual Wyndham race meeting. For a week all cares, ills and anxieties were forgotten. Grandfather was happy in the company of so many fellows who had started their careers around Cooper’s Creek and who carried with them the traditions and characteristics of the Queensland cattle camps. Listening to the lively talk of cattle, horses, stock routes, country and prospecting he felt a resurgence of the optimism that had faded somewhat in the fever-stricken months at Argyle when it had seemed that the young fellows might be right in believing that Kimberley, for all its potential, was less suitable for white habitation than western Queensland. With a race meeting in progress and a few women and children in the offing, a sense of normality returned and he again foresaw the day when home life would come to the lonely hinterland. Again he saw the roads pushing out to the little bush towns and station settlements on the rivers. He heard the rattle and rumble of the coaches, the noise of the big house parties, the sound of music and dancing and the merry laughter that he had missed in this great, quiet land. Soon the boys would marry and the time would come when he could bring his wife and daughters to visit them and the vast distances that now divided the family would seem less than they had covered so often between Goulburn and Cooper’s Creek.