34
GLIMPSES OF ‘THE NAUGHTY NINETIES’
The years 1895 to 1896. Social life in east Kimberley. The Pierce family. Police and settlers. Native prisoners. Women in the cattle camps. The half-caste question. Killing for the blacks. Patsy Durack interviews black miscreants. Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in ’95. The tick question arises.
From the beginning of ’94 there had been a definite feeling that Wyndham was to become a port of substance, but the idea of moving to the official site seems never again to have been mooted. The town was nobody’s special pride and responsibility. To the station people it was no more than a business depot and its residents were for the most part government officials serving three-year terms of which they made the best or the worst according to temperament. Many of the younger people assuredly made the best of it and social life in east Kimberley was never as lively and convivial as at this time.
When Magistrate Frederick Pierce, his lovely wife and daughters took over the residency on the slope of Mt Albany the young men of the district began finding more frequent and pressing business in town. A racing association organised several meetings a year, while picnic parties were extended to camping expeditions, when the young people, heavily chaperoned, rigged mosquito nets on the banks of lily lagoons and sang plantation songs around blazing camp fires. Apprehension of dawn attacks from natives added zest to the adventure and even Miss Norma Pierce’s experience of discovering a snake in the voluminous sleeve of her nightgown did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm for the great outdoors.
The station men vied with each other in escorting the pretty Misses Pierce, mounted on their race-horses, for long rides across the white salt marsh. The sisters, two at a time, were as often at Argyle as my aunts, Mary and Birdie, were in Wyndham, the arrivals causing a stir of excitement either at the station or the town. Aunt Mary often pointed out to us a little thicket by a spring, a few miles outside Wyndham, where after the long hot buggy rides from inland they had bathed and changed for their triumphant entries. In these days of carefree sun dresses and shorts, the elaborate outfits they wore seem incredible, photographs of picnics and tennis parties at Wyndham and Argyle in temperatures soaring over one hundred degrees showing the men complete with coats and ties and the girls in veiled gem hats, leg o’ mutton sleeves, heavily tucked and embroidered blouses, pinched waists, long, substantial skirts and buttoned boots.
Father, making sly digs in his journals at the ‘amorous delights’ of his brothers and cousins, himself became deeply absorbed in the project of establishing a racing stables at Connor and Doherty’s Ascot depot a few miles outside Wyndham. Romantic musings on ‘the captivating brunette’ whom it is his ‘happy lot’ to escort on riding and duck-shooting expeditions run through his diaries for quite three years, with delicate references to ‘stolen tresses’ and letters ‘written in a clearly defined, beautiful hand which would at once betray a mind capable of no intrigue and a spirit filled wth the loftiest human feelings of her divine sex’.
It is surprising, however, that none of the family married any of the Wyndham belles of that time and that Father did not meet his fate until another ‘captivating brunette’ crossed his path some fifteen years later.
At Argyle the two spare rooms and wide verandahs were often taxed to capacity with visitors and the Chinese cook constantly threatened to go on strike. Amusing young men rode to and fro. Will Mansbridge, youthful magistrate for Hall’s Creek, played merry pranks; Frederick Booty, an Oxford graduate and nephew of Osmond, owner of Ord River Station, enchanted the company with long recitals from Milton and Wordsworth; and the handsome young baronet Sir Alexander Cockburn Campbell, travelling the country in some official capacity, lent an aristocratic flavour to the gathering. Mr and Mrs Nat Buchanan called when travelling to town, as did Mr Stretch, brother of the Bishop of Newcastle, and his cultured wife from Denison Downs. The ‘fairy fingered Miss Cameron’, having surprised the community by becoming Mrs Duncan McCaully a year before, also visited frequently with her baby daughter.
On July 22, 1895, Father records at Argyle:
Receiving congratulations this morning from sister Birdie and Miss Pierce I remember that this is my 30th birthday. My reflections upon the occasion are intermixed with grief and joy. A wide and seemingly unbounded prospect yet lies before me but clouds as ever shadow the horizon…I am much exercised in my mind with our problem regarding the blacks and resolve upon this day to make every effort at reaching an understanding. It must be admitted that one is far from edified by the sight of so many of these unfortunates bound in chains. In fact some of our fair companions, in the gentleness of their hearts, have taken us to task for it.
Father’s troubled state of mind is hardly surprising in view of the fact that his father’s predictions on the native question were working out so much nearer the truth than those of the opposite faction. The flogging of the blacks had done nothing to subdue their spirit; rather it had incited them to more daring acts of bravado, and although sometimes roused to indignation by allegations that he considered ill-informed or ‘grossly overstated’, Father was extremely sensitive to the ill-opinion of a growing faction in the south. Generally respectful of authority he had, moreover, lately been at variance with the police over a matter touching on his integrity.
Early in April he had recorded:
…a heated discussion with Inspector Orme, who openly asserted that the squatters are afraid to venture far enough afield to properly round up their cattle. I defiantly threw back the taunt.
The mutual taunt of cowardice had started in west Kimberley some years before, police accusing the station people of letting their cattle stray so far afield that they were frightened to venture after them, settlers blaming the police for the inadequacy of their patrol and their failure to arrest the real culprits. However, where not long before the police had been laughed at for their failure to make sufficient arrests, they were now denounced for making too many. With an increased number of reliable black trackers, and a fairly elaborate system of espionage, their tactics had increased in subtlety so that they were able to round up big encampments in well planned dawn raids. Moreover, a daily living allowance of 2s 5d ‘per knob’ for all natives arrested as suspects and witnesses made it profitable to bring in as many as they could manage. Chained together neck to neck, wrist to wrist, the long lines of prisoners, men, women and children, wound their miserable way over the bush tracks to receive sentence in Wyndham, Derby or Hall’s Creek. Their crimes were murder, sheep or cattle spearing or breaking insulators to make spear heads, and acquittals were nil.
Brief, scattered entries reveal Father’s growing sense of discomfiture at the situation:
Am disgusted at the spectacle of a party of niggers on the road with police, the chains in many instances much too short from neck to neck, chafing and pulling as they move along and all appearing half starved. Constables—and—making no secret of sending the women bush to catch lizards and snakes so that they may pocket the greater part of the food allowance.
Just witnessed the separation of a black youngster, about four years old, from its mother, being taken off to Darwin as a ‘witness’ to some crime or another. The wailing of this poor little devil was pitiful, refusing every attempt at solace from other members of his tribe, pelting them with stones, throwing himself on the ground and rolling in desperation, casting imploring glances after his retreating mother with loud cries of ‘Walya ca! Walya ca!’ until his voice grew husky and faded into the bay of a dingo.
As time went on there was less talk of the inferiority of the Kimberley natives to those of Queensland and New South Wales. The anonymous ‘buck niggers’ and ‘gins’ were becoming entities with human attributes and likeable ways and steadily more indispensable as the big gold strikes in the south lured away white labour from Kimberley. At Auvergne about this time Father records a discussion with the manager, T. K. White, ‘on a somewhat different level to that usually adopted in this country’.
…pleasantly discoursing upon the maladministration of the Territory, the works of Rabelais, Racine, Moliere, Rousseau, Talleyrand and the merits of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Thence to philosophy, the littleness of the part we play in this vast universe and the future that may lie ahead for some of the aboriginal people of this community. Mr White points out to me three young children here of most pleasant and intelligent features upon whom he had experimented with surprising results in the teaching of the alphabet and minor arithmetical problems. He declares us mistaken in considering their intelligence of the lower orders of man…Altogether I find White a man of most interesting and humane outlook.
In more isolated areas the power of the soft-eyed native women was already apparent. Some of the bigger resident landholders had their wives and families to dispel the loneliness of the bush but many a small battler or solitary manager for some absentee owner was glad enough of the dusky companions whose only terms were the right to live and to serve. The following entry, made when visiting Wave Hill Station around this time, is significant of a changing order:
Sunday on one of the most isolated stations in Australia. The musterers, Sam Kelly, Horace Bennison, three blk. boys, five gins. What a transformation! The many-coloured dresses of the women have now given place to shirts, moleskin pants and stockwhips slung across their shoulders. They are not now easily to be distinguished from the sterner sex but for their fuller posterial curves. Took a camera shot of men, women and piccaninnies all jumbled together. Living conditions very crude indeed and am moved to remark that the owners of such properties would do well to give some thought to those who work for them on such outlandish places, separated as they are from all social comforts and associations and surrounded by half savages…
From this time, until a Native Administration Act put a stop to the employment of women in the cattle camps, was probably the heyday of the black women who never before or since enjoyed such status and sense of importance. Small-boned and timid-seeming, they soon proved themselves to have more endurance and intelligence than their men in the cattle game. They loved the life of the stock camps, the thrill of riding the plains where they had dug for yams and scratched for lizards and if they served other ends than mustering and holding cattle little evil was prevented by confining them to the boredom of the homestead wurlies on the creek banks.
Other aspects of this increasing compatibility began to reveal themselves from this time onwards. Father records having noticed a black stockwoman riding into Wyndham with cattle, a half-caste baby in a coolamon strapped to her back. It would seem to have been the first half-caste child he had seen at Kimberley and he reacted forthrightly:
It is greatly to be hoped [he wrote] that such is not to become a commonplace in our community for the strain resulting will assuredly be no asset its being common knowledge that the half-breed inherits the worst characteristics of both races, nor would I feel disposed ever to trust or to employ one of the kind. The problem will therefore inevitably arise as to what can be done with such unfortunate unemployables who through no fault of their own are brought into the world in evidence of the unlicensed and irresponsible conduct of the poorer products of both black and white societies.
In this Father was voicing opinions to which all ‘right thinking’ people of the day subscribed, but I never heard him deny the reliability or efficiency of his various half-caste workers of after years. In fact the Kimberley ‘yella-fellas’ were to prove genetically remarkably good specimens, better adapted to the environment than the white man and better to the new way of life and philosophy than their full black brothers. The men who fathered them were after all mostly hardy individualists with guts and staying power and their mothers selected from the more attractive and healthy specimens of black womanhood.
It is clear that from now on Father began acting on lines previously dismissed as ‘impractical’. His journals show that he lost no opportunity of investigating native tracks or camp fires and of trying, with the help of an interpreter, to come to some understanding. On Inspector Orme’s next visit to Argyle he records a further
…heated interview on what measures he intends taking in regard to the recent mischief and I especially request that he takes no prisoners into town—that after he arrests the malefactors he sends me word when it is my intention to take a bullock and shoot it for them.
Meanwhile Grandfather, having finished the Argyle house and joined Pumpkin and Ulysses at the Ivanhoe stud, was dealing with the situation along lines of his own. Here, where the stock consisted at this time of valuable imported strains, every beast speared represented a serious loss, and Pumpkin, who felt his responsibility keenly, was at his wits’ end when Grandfather arrived. Together they had followed tracks, watched and waited at strategic places and one morning surprised a party of about six men in the act of pushing a raft piled with fresh beef from the river bank.
Pater informs me that the blacks made a great noise and show of weapons [Father writes], but appeared nonetheless somewhat abashed to have been caught red-handed. He ordered them to take some of the steak from the raft while Ulysses got a fire going. They thereupon cooked and distributed it around, eating some themselves and communicating, as far as possible, that a beast would be killed at the station on request if they left the cattle alone on the run. Pater and Pumpkin thereupon entertain their company with stories of the different hunting methods employed in western Queensland to those used in Kimberley. It is to be seen in how far this parley will prove successful.
This little incident is a good example of Grandfather’s extraordinary tact and insight in the handling of the Aborigines, and it is the only instance in any of these early journals of an attempt to establish a basis of common human understanding. It may have had much to do with the fact that there were fewer instances of cattle-spearing at Ivanhoe than elsewhere after this time and that there was never any difficulty in recruiting abundant native labour for this station.
Towards the end of the year Father persuaded his younger sister Birdie to accompany him on a holiday. She went without much enthusiasm, being at that time ‘deep in the throes of romance’ with a charming and personable young warden for the Hall’s Creek goldfields. Perth they found lively and much grown up in two years, ‘with the subject of Coolgardie still foremost upon all lips’, though compared to Melbourne still a mere country town.
How strange [Father writes] to get into the bustle and throng of crowded humanity again and although Melbourne is said still to be very dull since the depression it seems much alive to us after the back blocks of Kimberley, and the shops beautifully decorated and lit. How many years will it yet be before our now prosperous Perth approaches anything within reasonable comparison? As I sit here on my hotel bed my thoughts are carried back to dear old Kimberley, to poor old Pater, his sadness forgotten, I trust in healthful sleep, sister Mary dreaming of happy times to come and brother Patriens, perhaps somewhere out on the run doing a nocturnal watch around the cattle…
While in Melbourne Father ran into an old school friend who, now much a man of the world, determined to introduce the innocent from outback to a taste of real life.
The scenes tonight [we read] superceded anything it has yet been my lot to witness. Firstly, the Dynamite works where wheels are seen going with 1500 revolutions to the minute apparently to the eye quite motionless where this electricity is generated and sparks flying without any heat whatever. Such works are so great that they make a man feel of little individual moment in this world.
The other sight takes us to the deplorable state of society and never did I conceive that such a miserable and piteous sight was to be presented. Here, lying on a wooden bed, her head resting on pillows was a beautiful young girl in the bloom of life, dressed to taste, bodice of delicate white folded material, red and white crepe skirt, surrounded with clouds of opium smoke between two hideous old Chinese and in a dreamy kind of lethargic state with her eyes languidly shutting and opening regardless of anyone about her. Her head was decked with a kind of crown which she repeatedly kept pressing down with her hand. On another chair sat a depraved looking girl with heavy eyes imploring alms for to procure opium, while soon there came in a youth about 17 or 18, smart looking and well dressed—another victim, I suppose to that terrible drug and begging our acceptance of a smoke ‘to soothe our nerves’. Truly we are blind to the conditions of this life and in leaving necessary contribution of 1/- did we not do wrong as lending sanction to the further continuance of this vice?
Christmas in Goulburn was a time for visiting friends and relatives and catching up with the years between. Aunt Birdie attended midnight Mass in the Mercy Convent chapel and confided to her best-loved nuns the shy secret of her romance. The nuns, disappointed no doubt that their beloved ‘little one’ had been after all diverted from ‘the narrow way’ of religious life, were concerned to hear that the young man in question was not of her faith.
‘But his attitude to religion is most serious and respectful,’ Birdie assured them, ‘and he hints that he will no doubt become converted in time.’
At the Goulburn Cathedral Father listened to a Christmas sermon preached by his old teacher Dr Gallagher, soon to be elected Coadjutor Bishop of the diocese.
I am delighted to find [Father writes] that his eloquence was no illusion of inexperienced youth and that he still has the same power to stir our vacillating hearts to fresh resolve, sentiments that might on other lips appear but commonplace transmuted by some individual magic to utterances of new and vital appeal. Yet, when asked what he has told us I can only say it is the time honoured exhortation to attend our spiritual duties, throw old feuds aside and greet our fellow men with cordial wishes and open hearts…
In Sydney, at Kimberley House, the family headquarters in York Street, there had been a joyous meeting with the youngest brother, Jerry, who having won a mathematical scholarship was then attending the Sydney Unversity.
Together we embark on a round of visitations, races and theatres with such programmes as ‘The Pirates of Penzance’, ‘The Magistrate’, carried out, but ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Pat or the Bells of Rathbeal’ the latter providing many a good, solid laugh.
At Her Majesty’s Theatre witnessed an Australian play ‘To the West’, a very good and true representation of life in a mining camp. The sensational acting of Dampier was indeed exceptional but his playing of the man dying of thirst was, I consider, rather overdrawn. The explosion in the mine was a scene very well the representation of the Fremantle Gaol incorrect, its being built of brick and the original in stone…
The city of Sydney this month indicates a tone of prosperity the regime of Free Trade auguring for many a new era of startling possibilities while others assert it to be a fallacious policy…For myself I regard a policy of partial protection infinitely more desirable…
Further somewhat quaint comments on contemporary Sydney life may have historical interest:
I notice here a strong propensity for music…with numerous itinerant musicians parading throughout the night and day and superior bands drawing big assemblies. Many, I must say however, are subsidised less for the tunefulness of their performances than for the obvious misfortune of their circumstances…Nor can I here refrain from remarking upon those ladies who are ‘bound apprentice to the wanton trade’. In none of the colonies have I found them so persistent for man’s welfare, greeting him with winning smiles in streets and restaurants, commiserating with the inconvenience of his late hours should they encounter him after ten or eleven at night. I am told that homeliness and familiarity is a virtue that they carry to excess. One is reminded of the letters of Goldsmith and his story of the Chinese merchant writing so eloquently to his friend the ambassador in China of the generosity of the English woman for whom he prepared verses of the most eulogistic quality only to find himself most woefully deceived…
Jerry and myself have pleasant walks through the city and discuss ardently the physique and manners of the Sydney people who on the whole strike one as rather small and thin in stature, contrary to the general conception of Australian manhood. There seems less of the larrikin element in the main streets of the town however and certainly less of that vile whistling than one finds in some of the rural towns. I cannot speak for the lower suburbs.
The love of rapid aerial motion appears to have taken strong possession of the city and the spirit of cycling has captured the populace, even the ladies. There is visible in the main street a girl who rides a bicycle advertising Don Marino cigars and it is still a matter of dispute whether the divided skirts or the bloomers are the proper dress for the symmetrical female form indulging in this mode of travel. Some say the fad will pass but it is my opinion that the bicycle has come to stay and has in many instances superceded the use of the horse which I suppose will suffer further unemployment on the introduction of the now spoken of motorcycle which has been tried in America with some success…
A Sunday stroll on the domain to hear the stump orators expatiating on Temperance, Religion, Socialism. The trait of sincerity would appear wanting in many of them.
Attended a cricket match the enthusiasm showing that this game is regarded as the great national sport in N.S.W. as football in Victoria. A great number of ladies present not so much from admiration or understanding of the game as of putting in evidence their new Sunday frocks and hats…
Father records at some length his righteous anger when a young Sydney solicitor brashly deprecated the morals of the bush.
The most convincing practical argument would be to have felled him on the spot but I had to bring the philosophy of my silent hours in the bush to bear and so averted the enactment of a scene.
I emphasised that what he said might in some measure be true of the weak minded led by the dictates of others into giving way to their animal propensities in places yet lacking the elevating influence of women or of entertainment of any sort.
I remark that we assuredly lack such edifying influences as high kicking ballet girls and daily scenes of debauchery and lawlessness. The appearance at this stage of a depraved and drunken woman added some weight to my remarks on this boasted city morality. Should therefore, any casual reader peruse these lines, let him not hold up for my admiration the high standards of the city as against those of the bush nor yet accuse us of callous indifference to fellow beings who deal to the best of our ability and conscience and within the limits of our present circumstances with the daily exigencies of our isolated lives…
In Brisbane the inevitable family contacts included Aunt Kate, still in the throes of legal battle, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Pat Tully with stories of the recent inroads of rabbits to match the growing worry of tick infestation in the north. But things were improving in western Queensland. The Tullys with 22,000 sheep, 3,000 cattle and 400 horses were rapidly wiping off their debt to the bank and looking to a future where increasing knowledge of the artesian system would allay much of the constant anxiety of drought.
Father’s old Kimberley acquaintance Ernest Baynes had branched out in an experiment that was to solve yet another of the cattle man’s problems.
Am driven by Ernest to their chilling rooms and later to their meatworks at Queensport which I find indeed inspiring and thought provoking in its implications for the future of our industry. In this process not one iota of the beast goes to waste…The process of tinning I find amazing…
By this time, although drawn by associations to Queensland and New South Wales, the Kimberley branch of the family definitely regarded the West as home, and Father voices sentiments of warm satisfaction at returning to Fremantle to the hearty welcome of Connor and Doherty. Every year of their association had strengthened the ties of trust and friendship between them and an affiliation of their business interests had already been discussed. To Father there had never seemed any reasonable argument against it. They followed the same calling, knew the same people, went to the same church, shared the same politics, belonged to the same clubs and laughed at the same jokes.
Connor and Doherty, now in possession of both Newry and Auvergne stations, had a large area of country with its western border—unfenced of course—abutting on Argyle so that altogether the properties would form a sizeable pastoral empire of some six to seven million acres or roughly 10,000 square miles. With this asset and the Wyndham business, the firm of Connor, Doherty and Durack would be in a position to hold its own against even so powerful a combination as Forrest and Emanuel.
The proposed amalgamation and the troublesome topic of cattle tick occupied most of their time while awaiting the return ship to Wyndham.
In January Long Michael’s partner Lumley Hill had discussed with Connor and Doherty the danger of tick, supposed to have come into the north from Batavia in the seventies, being allowed to penetrate freely into Kimberley from heavily infested areas in Queensland and the Territory. The idea was rapidly gaining ground that the parasite Ixodes bovis was directly responsible for red-water fever that had decimated many good herds over the past ten or twelve years. So far Kimberley had been relatively free of the pest, but if unchecked it would no doubt soon become a major challenge to the industry.
Connor, Lumley Hill and other east Kimberley pastoralists had thereupon waited on the Commissioner for Crown Lands asking for an implementation of the Stock Diseases Act to prevent the import of cattle from the Territory—except from border properties owned by Kimberley interests such as Wave Hill, Newry and Auvergne. It no doubt seemed a shrewd move at the time to have protected the east Kimberley market at the same time as preventing the further introduction of tick, but no sooner was the regulation agreed upon than some busybody stock inspector reported cases of tick and resultant red-water fever as far west as Hall’s Creek!
East Kimberley pastoralists at once began clouding the issue by referring to the difficulty of distinguishing true cattle tick from other harmless varieties and of how many infested areas had never known a case of red-water fever, whereas red-water fever had occurred where no one had yet seen a tick. An entomologist named Helms had now been sent up to make a thorough investigation of all stations and it was hoped by his associates in Fremantle that Father would be able to bring to his notice ‘the many anomalies that appeared so far to have escaped the notice of the inspectors’.
And so began the battle of Ixodes bovis that was to rage between east and west Kimberley pastoralists for many years to come, uncovering the worst aspects of self interest on either side—a story actually more interesting to the psychologist than to the entomologist who was in little doubt from the beginning as to the true nature and implications of the pest. The fight was to drag on long after the limit I have set for this chronicle of the pioneering days, until the issue was resolved in the gradual immunity built up by the cattle against infection, when the regulations, quarantine lines and dipping troughs would fall, one by one, into disuse, almost without the participants in the long struggle realising that it was drawing to an end. By this time, however, little semblance of friendship would remain between Connor, Doherty and Durack in the east and their old associates Forrest and Emanuel in the west. Nor did it help to dispel the undercurrent of class consciousness that existed between the ‘old families’ of the State and the ‘Irish element’ from ‘the other side’.
In the first round the Duracks came out rather well, being put on record by the government entomologist Richard Helms as the only settlers in the district from whom he received any co-operation. This may not have been unrelated to the fact that Father and the scientist enjoyed each other’s company, finding much in common in their literary tastes. Together they rode around collecting specimens in tin match boxes and discussing the ‘anomalies of the tick question’ with the anomalies of various philosophers far into the night.
Apropos of the many abortive arguments upon which we mortals embark, [Father writes] I quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went.
Helms shares my admiration of the philosophy expressed, poor Father, on the other hand, somewhat contemptuous of ‘the heathen nincompoop!’
Grandfather had no patience with the pastoralists in deliberately keeping the tick question ‘anomalous’ and he had frankly laid before the inspector a number of aspects that did not favour the immediate policy of the east Kimberley cattle men. He had expressed himself on this subject forthrightly from the outset:
‘Why don’t ye get down to tin-tacks about this tick business?’
‘What do you mean—tin-tacks?’ his sons countered. ‘What would you do about it, anyway?’
‘I’d find out whether the tick really was the cause of this red-water and set to work to get rid of it even if ye sell no cattle for a couple of years.’
‘But we’re sure it’s not the cause,’ the boys insisted. ‘It’s a big scare put up by the west Kimberley people to collar the market.’
Grandfather however had an inconvenient memory in some respects:
‘Ye were willing to blame the little creature when it suited yere own ends to keep the Territory cattle out. I tell ye ye’ll not solve yere problems by playing politics.’
‘But we’ve to sell our stock haven’t we? It’s a matter of business.’
‘It’s bad business,’ the old man told them. ‘There’s a cattle disease in this country and ye should be fighting it together, both sides of the fence, instead of trying to hoodwink the government for the sake of a temporary gain.’
But his protests carried little weight with his sons, or for that matter with any other Kimberley residents. An attitude had taken hold of the country that he could neither define nor understand. He could only shake his head in a bewildered way, wondering where the dream had failed, why this rich and beautiful land seemed loved by neither God nor man. The towns and the homes had not come as he had hoped. The only made road within hundreds of miles was one he had hacked out with his own hands. The boys showed no signs of marrying and it was clear that Argyle would be a home only as long as the girls remained. When they went away it would become a desolate shell of a place, full of dust and cobwebs and white ants like the womanless shack over the river at Lissadell. Was the lack of progress in the land a matter of the climate, the fever, the isolation, and the cattle tick or was there something lacking towards it in the hearts of the pioneers?