The years 1891 to 1893. First Durack born in Kimberley. Mrs Patsy Durack visits Goulburn. M. P. Durack and Tom Hayes droving to the Territory. Stock disease. Further droving trips to Territory market. Murder of Sam Croaker at Auvergne. Controversy on the native question—Bishop Gibney versus Chas. Harper. Sergeant Lavery arrests natives on Argyle. Death of Mrs Patsy Durack from fever at Argyle. Rise of Connor and Doherty. M. P. and M. J. Durack drove cattle to Derby. Shipping to Fremantle.
Back at Argyle, where Grandfather and young Pat had been left in charge, news awaited of the birth of a fifth child to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Fan at Rosewood. ‘This making no less than eighteen Duracks in the district,’ Father writes, but he does not add a local wit’s description of contemporary East Kimberley as ‘the land of blacks, Sacks and bloody Duracks’, the ‘Sacks’ referred to being another prolific local clan.
A feeling of depression hung over the station, for Grandmother had taken ship around the north coast to visit her daughters in Goulburn. Grandfather thought the girls should return to Kimberley with their mother, for it now seemed that the house in Fremantle might not be possible for another year or two. So far there was barely enough money to carry on at Argyle and except for old Mrs Costello’s insistence upon paying for her daughter’s trip even that could not have been considered.
‘We’ll have them both nuns if we leave them in that convent much longer,’ Grandfather complained. ‘There’s Mary nineteen already and whatever chance of meeting an eligible man?’
‘I don’t think much of her chances of meeting one here,’ Father said, for he had already set an almost impossibly high standard of eligibility for his sisters’ suitors. ‘Besides, what on earth would they do with themselves?’
‘What do girls do anywhere?’ Grandfather asked. ‘Help their mother, make pretty clothes, go riding—’
‘In this climate? With skins like theirs?’
Father would not hear of it and already it was he who had the last word on family affairs.
At the beginning of October he was off again into the Territory with a second mob of 118 head. This time his companions, besides Pumpkin, were Tom Hayes and his boy Ned Kelly from Rosewood. This combination seems hardly to have been a successful one, for Father, the ‘book-reading’ young fellow who would not be told, and Hayes, the seasoned, opinionated overlander, were incompatible travelling companions. Since it had fallen to Father’s lot to undertake these rather tedious droving trips he saw no reason why they should not occasionally break a day’s travelling record or follow an unconventional procedure. Not so Tom Hayes, for whom there was only one way of handling cattle and that was as they had handled them ‘on the overland’. They came one day to a waterhole where Hayes considered the approach unsuitable for stock and insisted on riding downstream to find a better place, leaving Father, fuming with impatience, to hold the thirsty mob. After waiting half an hour Father, with Pumpkin’s help, started the cattle in to drink:
We have no difficulty whatever [he writes] in getting the cattle down where my friend tried to persuade me they could not be got in.
The boy Ned Kelly kept going to sleep on watch and letting the cattle stray and when Hayes took to him with a stockwhip retaliated by attacking his master with a tomahawk:
Indeed [Father remarks] had I not appeared at that moment to wrench the implement from the boy’s hands there may well have been serious consequences. Pumpkin in some disgust of the scene.
Blacks dogged their footsteps from the Territory border, set fire to the grass and disturbed the cattle continuously. Hayes was for firing shots to disperse them, Father for ‘making parley, since an understanding must be arrived at if this is to become a regular stock route’. A watering place where a bullock was speared and the mob deliberately stampeded they named ‘Humbug Camp’ as it is still known today.
Here and there, however, the blacks now appeared anxious to compromise:
October 25th. Whilst packing up four of our sable brethren come into our camp, one giving his name as ‘George’, very generously offering me his paramour. I politely decline, and when packed up, finding his companions with spears carried in their toes through the grass, I order them away. They follow a short distance but are soon lost to sight…
Disease struck the cattle at Delamere and thirty-five animals dropped dead by the wayside before they reached Brock’s Creek. ‘Alas for this mysterious affliction,’ Fathers writes, for red-water fever had not yet been traced to infection from cattle tick that was soon to prove a major challenge to the pioneers.
The year ’92 was unsettled for everyone. The Territory market remained limited and the price poor but there was no better alternative and Father, with various companions, including his brother John and cousin Jim Durack, the forthright versifier, made the weary journey five times in twelve months. These three got on very well together, however. They broke their own records on each successive trip and achieved a number of quite unnecessary feats that the overlanding drovers would have refused to attempt on principle. Father and Uncle John recited Homer and Milton to their hearts’ content and their cousin reeled off interminable verses of his own.
The blacks seem gradually to have discovered certain advantages to be gained from the droving parties and would close in on the camps as the white men moved out, scavenging for beef bones or plugs of tobacco left as gestures of goodwill.
Towards the end of the year Father and Uncle John arrived at Auvergne to find that Jock McPhee and the Chinese cook had just buried the latest manager, that pioneer drover of the Gulf route to Kimberley, ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croaker, who had been shot by his half-caste stockman Flanigan. They were probably the first to hear the story, so often told in after years, of a resentment that had smouldered to hate in the oppressive atmosphere of the Territory wet, ending with the shooting of Croaker over a game of cards.
The rest of the story had reached Pine Creek before the droving party. Flanigan had ridden the dead man’s horse to Ord River Station and told his story to Jack Kelly, the manager, convinced that he had only to have his case presented by a white man and it would be seen at once that his action was fully justifed.
Kelly humoured him all the way in to Hall’s Creek where he delivered him into the hands of the police. When the time came Flanigan had nothing to say in his own defence and six months later was hanged at Fanny Bay jail in Darwin.
At Argyle the old year ’92 was ushered out to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ lustily rendered by the family and a large police party under Sergeant Lavery, then organising a ‘surprise drive’ on the persistent cattle-spearers. With the settlers on the one side still demanding ‘some effective action’ against the depredations of the blacks and the ‘outside critics’ on the other loudly condemning atrocities, the dispute had continued in the southern press. Bishop Gibney, long since safely returned from establishing a mission at Beagle Bay, his estimate of the native character if anything higher than before, took up the cudgels once more on behalf of the blacks, this time finding an equally eloquent opponent in Charles Harper of De Grey Station outside Port Hedland. The good bishop, in a public meeting at the Town Hall in Perth, made what seems to have been a tactical mistake in declaring that ‘for every sheep killed by the blacks and for which they were most cruelly treated, God has punished the settlers by taking away a hundred or more sheep in the drought’. This statement, seized upon, analysed in the light of Biblical interpretation, commonsense logic and the Irish question, became a red herring across the main track of the argument. The bishop refused to retract a word of it and rose to the bait in defending the Nationalist cause in his home land:
Mr Harper’s allusion to the cause of Ireland by way of analogy to the native question is an unfortunate one…The few real atrocities committed by the Irish were those of the weak against the strong and founded on centuries of misrule. Many manifestos have been issued by Nationalist leaders against genuine atrocities but I have never seen the squatters of this colony, as a body, or their representatives do anything but take part against the Government to stamp out the wilful and deliberate murders and cruelties against the original owners of the soil by the alleged ‘few’.
When this correspondence reached Argyle, Grandfather, somewhat to the embarrassment of his family, waved and quoted it at all comers. A keen admirer of the forthright bishop and a loyal supporter of Parnell and the Nationalist movement, much of his old fire returned as he now denounced the increased powers of the police and the flogging of cattle-spearers. His brother Galway Jerry disagreed with him, insisting that nothing short of flogging was merited by blacks who would cut the tongues and tails from living animals.
‘And how are we to teach them that such things are cruel and that the branding, ear-marking and castrating that we do to the living beasts are not?’ Grandfather demanded. ‘Just read here now what the bishop has to say of it all.’
Galway Jerry glanced cursorily through the letters.
‘What! Not the Irish question again!’
‘The Irish question!’ Grandfather exclaimed indignantly. ‘And you but for the Grace of God born to starve in the poor famine-stricken country! Ye are like the rest of them, Jerry, born with a silver spoon in your mouth and little thought in your head for the under-dog.’
‘It’s precious little silver we can lay our hands on these days,’ Jerry laughed, ‘and there’d be none at all soon if we left the running of the country to you and the bishop.’
Grandfather had no higher opinion of the police in Kimberley than he had had for the same body in Queensland.
‘Ye’re all useless anyway without the blacks to help you with the dirty work,’ he remarked in reply to the sergeant’s complaint that they had found the patrolling of the countryside a thankless task.
The police claimed to have ridden out at great personal risk, followed every black’s track and every smoke in sight, only to find the camps deserted, except sometimes for a few old men, women or children. When they brought these in as better than nothing, they were laughed at. If they shot blacks down in the act of ‘resisting arrest’ they were reprimanded or disbelieved by authorities in the south. At long last, however, the department had increased the Kimberley force, offering as an extra incentive a bonus of so much a day on the road in for every prisoner secured.
Lavery had heard that the blacks, always vigilant in the dry season, relaxed during the wet, confident that the police valued their comfort too highly to venture into the bog and brave the flooded rivers and creeks. Hence his present resolve to make a wet-weather raid with a party of four white men and five black trackers. It is rather surprising that so cumbersome a party succeeded in bagging even the ‘five gins, four piccaninnies and two buck niggers’ recorded as being brought into Argyle a week later. Father made a cryptic comment on the incident:
After some debate in which the pater expressed himself with unusual vehemence the police decide to let go the gins and piccaninnies and take in only the two bucks with the purpose of introducing the lash to them.
It was a heavy wet, almost intolerably hot, and the fever was bad. McCaully, Pumpkin, Boxer and other blacks went down with it and became so weak that Grandmother, long since returned from her trip to Goulburn, sent her sons out to shoot duck, hoping to tempt them with the broth. Two of the black women let off by the police came in with children, one suffering from terrible burns, another with bad eyes, to be healed by the white woman’s ‘magic’. Grandmother was cooking and caring for her patients day and night until she too succumbed to the prevalent fever.
Father’s journals tell the familiar story of the malarial victim:
Mother still suffering fever and very weak.
Mother still poorly but a little better since yesterday.
Mother suffering violent attacks fever and ague today.
Mother feeling well in early part of day but towards evening had to take to her bed again, very weak and suffering much from want of sleep. Administered five drops of laudanum.
Mother slightly better this morning, and has taken her sewing to the verandah.
Somewhat reassured, he went to Rosewood to discuss a boundary muster, stayed the night with his uncle and aunt and was packing to return in the morning when Boxer came riding from Argyle, lagging in his reluctance to be the bearer of such news.
He evidently did not hurry himself [Father writes on the black-rimmed page of his journal] for he could have been here three hours earlier judging from the time he left…
The girl, Valley, sent to her mistress with a cup of tea, had returned to say that she was asleep. That was a good sign, they thought, since she had been resting so poorly, and Grandfather went on quietly with his work in the blacksmith shop. Pumpkin appeared in the doorway with stricken face and shaking from head to foot.
‘Boonari,’ he said, using the old western Queensland word of endearment and respect, ‘Boonari,’ and sank sobbing to the ground.
She lay relaxed in the chair, her sewing in her lap, her fingers clasped on the nun’s beads that had been her lifeline of spiritual strength.
Family members came from Rosewood and Lissadell.
Jan. 23/93. James Clarke comes from Lagoon to make a coffin. Brother Pat and self assist. The remains of our poor dear Mother buried at sundown. We place a cross at the head of grave inscribed:
J. M. J.
Pray For Her
Jan. 28. Pat, Pumpkin and Ulysses prepare to go to gulf to inform brother John. Father accompanies Uncle, Aunt and children to Rosewood. Miss Cameron likewise goes…What a strange change has come over the place! Gone the cheerful look and greeting smile that formerly associated itself with home. Decide to leave at once for Rosewood myself as find it too desolate even for a night.
The brief notes of the journal record the quiet grief and sympathy of the bush people as they gathered at Argyle on Grandfather’s return. Old hands from the goldfields, a few former associates from Cooper’s Creek, old ‘Pepper Tin’ Pethic, weeping so uncontrollably that Grandfather must bid him ‘pull himself together’, the blacks wailing on the river bank. Grandfather had as yet found neither words nor tears in the shock of his grief, doing whatever was suggested like a man in a dream, pulling the broken girths from a rafter in the saddle shed and quietly setting to work on them, weeding his patch of corn. Nat Buchanan and his wife, who had come to Kimberley not long after Grandmother, drove by buggy all the way from Flora Valley. Grandfather took his old friends’ hands, thanking them wordlessly, and turned to talking of the horses in Buchanan’s plant, of a fine colt one of his brood mares had got from the stallion Sultan that had near been taken by horse-thieves. But his effort at control had been too great and in leading his guests to the verandah he had reeled and fallen in a dead faint. Buchanan and Father lifted him to a bunk where he quickly recovered, made his apologies and went on with talk of everyday affairs.
Mustering continued through the wet, a procedure long since abandoned for sake of both man and beast.
A February 20 entry is evidence of its effect.
Boy Bob loses his mare shortly after taking bullocks out. I go out after her riding the grey ‘School Boy’. Find mare and return for home when my horse gives in and have to leave him and walk back. Return shortly after only to find horse quite dead. Cause attributed to ‘dry puffs’ brought on by former hard galloping. Rain and terrific heat all throughout day.
The necessity for grasping any possible market seems to have dictated this unseasonable work and in the wet of early ’93 the pace was increased by a new turn of events. When Baker, the first member for East Kimberley, died in January a by-election was held in which Francis Connor was returned unopposed. This undoubtedly marked a new era of progress for the district, for Connor and Alex Forrest, member for West Kimberley, together began to organise the cattle trade. They had plenty of incentive, for both had business interests in the Kimberley district and a keen desire to make their fortunes. Before March the firm of Connor and Doherty began to make itself felt in the community. With Connor back and forth from Fremantle and Doherty operating around Wyndham, communications were sent out offering to act as middlemen for the pastoralists. There were now shipping facilities of a sort at Derby and the SS Colak had been chartered to bring cattle from there to Fremantle. Father and Long Michael at once closed a deal to deliver a mob of 500 Argyle and Lissadell bullocks to Derby, 750 miles west, by the first week in May.
This party consisted of Long Michael, Father, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Ned Kelly and two Lissadell boys Barney and Billy.
No need to follow in detail the long, slow trip to the west, with the restless night-watching of cattle on wet camps, the fear of stampede, the difficulty of getting stock to drink where they sensed the musky Aboriginal smell, the disappointment of stock losses caused from eating poison bush. Frank Connor met them at Hall’s Creek, discussing the familiar Kimberley topics of numbers, dates, prices, weights and condition. Connor would be in Fremantle when the cattle arrived, Doherty down from Wyndham to see them at Derby.
From Hall’s Creek the East Kimberley station men were on new ground, but meeting old friends. Willie MacDonald welcomed them to his shack at Fossil Downs and they discussed the problems of the industry. MacDonald said he had been living ‘on credit’ since he arrived and looked like continuing to do so for another couple of years. A storekeeper in Derby had carried him all that time, but he would not regret it. Every penny would be paid back now the markets were opening up.
At the spot where the prospectors had crossed the Fitzroy on their way to Hall’s Creek there was now a Telegraph Station and homestead shanty cum hotel run up by Joe Blythe, who then little knew he had founded the townsite of Fitzroy Crossing. How cheered would have been this hardy battler whom they met on the road with his team to know that the Glenroy run he was soon to take up in ‘the underworld’ behind the Leopolds would become, through the faith and enterprise of his sons, the centre of the Kimberley air-beef project, with abattoirs from which carcasses would be flown from almost inaccessible back regions to the Wyndham freezing-works.
At Quanbun they met Edwin Rose, a member of another West Kimberley pioneering family, whose ‘place showed the result of that industry and perseverance that are the basis and root of prosperity’.
Other encounters of the journey were Will McClarty, who had received members of the Durack-Emanuel expedition towards the end of their journey in 1882, and farther on Solomon Emanuel’s son Isadore whom the drovers found at Emanuel’s original station some forty-five miles outside Derby. Emanuels were at that time the largest single lessees in the Kimberleys and had extended their holdings to include Gogo, Noonkanbah, Lower Liveringa and Rarriwell. So far, Isadore told Father, they had made nothing whatever out of the country, although they had sunk some £50,000 into it. For all people might talk of encouraging the small men to the district, it seemed clear to him that it was at this stage a big man’s country. Already a number of small-holders who had taken up land in West Kimberley had been overwhelmed by the difficulties of holding out against poor markets, depredations by the blacks and stock losses through disease, and had been bought out by men with capital such as Alex Forrest and themselves.
The drovers’ arrival at the port coincided with that of the Rob Roy from Wyndham bringing Dennis Doherty to see the cattle shipped and Grandfather on his way round to Goulburn, via Fremantle, to escort his daughters to Kimberley as a solace to his lonely heart. Even Father had to admit by this time that to leave them any longer in the Goulburn convent was ridiculous, for Mary was now almost twenty-one and Birdie nineteen. It seemed now, however, that with the southern market opening up, the long talked of ‘house in Fremantle’, where the girls could make a home for their sorrowing father and a city headquarters for their brothers, might soon become a reality.
Grandfather rode out to the cattle and helped bring in and yard the first eighty head at the port. The Colak swayed in and then began the slow clumsy process of drafting the cattle into cages at the head of the race and swinging them into the ship’s hold.
Work continuing all night up to three a.m. and on again after 6 a.m. Process slow enough apart from lack of energy or interest on part of men working on the boat. Away by mid-day.
The Rob Roy continued south. Doherty returned to Wyndham in the Australind. Long Michael rode back with most of the plant and boys, while Father awaited the return of the Colak on which he was to travel south with the remainder of the mob.
He had been looking forward to this first holiday since his arrival in Kimberley seven years before but he had not bargained on the effects of the sudden cold of a southern winter.
Francis Connor was at the ship to meet him and together they supervised the swimming ashore of the cattle from Owen’s Anchorage, the poor beasts, after the bumping and rolling of a stormy voyage, now forced shivering down the race and into a cold rough sea. Father, clutching a flapping overcoat, pitied the animals with which he had become familiar in the two months’ journey from Argyle to Derby.
Manner of landing very crude indeed to say the least of it. Cattle pretty knocked about. Ten lost on voyage.