Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  But many of the settlers who employed convict stockmen and shepherds and who owned land within the Limits were very quickly attracted to occupy the great natural pasturage beyond them, and so many of the Ribbonmen of Parmelia and many other convicts as well found themselves hundreds of miles out in the hinterland, many days ride away from any magistrate, minding sheep on pasturage which, according to British law, belonged to the Crown and to which they had no right. It was inevitable that men should have settled themselves or their flocks on pasture-lands discovered by explorers beyond the Limits of Location, but they were technically squatters and that was the name given to them. Squatting on land beyond the Limits of Location had begun with absconders, cattle-duffers and sheep-thieves. When the Macarthurs, Wentworths and Bradleys began to invest in the huge unalienated pastures beyond as well as to live the lives of princes within the relative urbanity of the Limits, the power of the squatter became so great that his interests negated the irritation of the British government and began to dominate all other political interests.

  The Ribbonman John Hessian was assigned to a landowner/doctor at Broulee near Bathurst, and Larkin was assigned to Goulburn, within the Limits of Location, to a young Currency landowner named William Bradley, the rich and enterprising son of a New South Wales Corps sergeant. Bradley owned land and a brewery and mill at Goulburn, and was also running sheep beyond the Limits to the south-west of Goulburn, in the area known as Monaro. William Bradley took up land in the Monaro in 1834 and though according to the official documents Hugh Larkin was assigned to Goulburn, in fact he would at some stage be sent to work on Bradley’s squatted-upon land far to the south-west.

  Bradley’s own holdings would be greatly increased when other pastoralists had to give up their land in a coming depression in the 1840s. He would also become a member of the Legislative Council of New South Wales when it became part-elected, and worked within it to have the system of squatting legitimised by the home government and by the colonial authority (both of which abominated it but ultimately gave in). His sheep and cattle runs in the Monaro would come to total 270 000 acres (1092 km2). He saw his squatting career as part of the same spirit of progress which moved him to become a promoter and investor in the first Australian railway, Sydney to Parramatta, and to finance the survey for a railway line to Goulburn. Such was the potential wealth derived from the raising of sheep and the export of wool on squatted land, and such was the social respectability of the practice that the daughters of this son of a Rum Corps NCO married into reputable British military and vice-regal families.

  As one of fifty men Bradley employed to work under an overseer on his Monaro properties, Larkin exchanged convict clothing for the standard bush uniform supplied by masters—leg-strapped trousers, blue Crimean shirts, and a cabbage-tree hat of plaited leaves. A few kangaroos provided material for a warm coat. Larkin no doubt began as a shepherd, but if he were a good horseman, he would wear Hessian-style boots and spurs for rounding up livestock on horseback. Mustering stray cattle, riding up escarpments through the great verticals of eucalyptus trees, and armed against attacks from natives, the Ribbonman might have been mistaken for the master.

  One of Bradley’s protégés in the Monaro area would be a young man the same age as Hugh Larkin, William Adams Brodribb. Brodribb’s father had been the young English solicitor mentioned earlier who had administered an oath and acted as counsel to the Berkeley Castle poachers. Brodribb senior had finished out his sentence as a ticket-of-leave attorney in Hobart, and now had become both a farmer and a shareholder in the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land.

  The younger Brodribb, arriving in Van Diemen’s Land as a child in 1818, grew up in respectable Anglo-Scots colonial society, in which the family did its best to forget Brodribb senior’s foray into secret oaths. Brodribb the younger arrived purposefully in New South Wales in 1835, when Larkin had been working for Bradley for a year. ‘In those days,’ Brodribb would remember, ‘it was no unusual thing for a squatter to claim 200 or 300 square miles [518 or 777 km2]; land was no object; there was plenty for new squatters’. One stockman tending flocks in a hut in Monaro promised to show Brodribb ‘a good cattle station, unoccupied, not far from his master’s station, provided I should thereafter feel disposed to settle in that squatting district’. Brodribb’s run lay in a deep corner of the Monaro, in a plain made bare perhaps by the firestick hunting methods of the natives who came there in summer. Wooded hills and snow-streaked alps rose above the pastures. Some years later Brodribb stated that in his first year in the Monaro, with a convict shepherd, very probably Larkin, and ‘the assistance of a few Aborigines, I washed and sheared my 1200 ewes’. Here the wool press was primitive. Brodribb confessed, ‘. . . my hut-keeper pressed the wool with a spade, in a rough primitive box made by ourselves on the station’.

  He would take cattle and sheep across the Australian Alps to Melbourne and stake out a run near present-day Benalla in Victoria, during which time, by informal arrangement with Bradley, Hugh Larkin worked for him and may have made the huge droving journey under his management. As well as managing his own run Brodribb also managed other squatters’ runs, and when the wool price slumped in the early 1840s, he became the manager of Bradley’s Monaro operations from 1843 onwards, headquartered—as was Hugh—at Coolrindong Station near present-day Cooma. Ultimately he would move west along the Murrumbidgee and take up land at Deniliquin.

  The business of running sheep and cattle on immense and remote pastures obviously fascinated him—he tried to develop a sheep unloading port in Gippsland, Port Albert, and he dealt cheerfully both with remoteness, coarse living under a bark roof, and, until 1844, when he married, celibacy. He too, like Bradley, had no doubts either about the decency or morality of occupying and living on land that at the start of his New South Wales career was considered by two significant parties—the natives and the government—to be an illicit occupation.

  After the settlers’ runs were given some legitimacy, flamboyantly dressed officials named Commissioners of Crown Lands rode out in green uniforms, hessian boots and braided caps, trailing a few mounted police behind them through the mists or heat hazes, to decide where Bradley’s and Brodribb’s properties and grazing rights began and ended, and similarly where someone else’s began and ended. Boundary lines were drawn with the same informality— natural springs, an Aboriginal tumulus of stone, tree-blazes, ant heaps, and isolated she-oaks all served as markers. Settlers were to pay £10 for every twenty square miles (51.8 km2) of country they occupied, and on top of that a halfpenny for each sheep.

  Hugh Larkin, distracted by labour, distance and adequate diet from any clear impulse of rebellion, probably had his journeys too. When the wool had been loaded on its wagon in late spring, that is, October-November, a settler like Brodribb would start out with a reliable man to bring the load overland to Goulburn. From there they would ease it up the Razorback mountain range and down through endless hills to the place called the Black Huts on the Liverpool Road, where Sydney wool buyers posted themselves waiting to buy. In good years, buyers would advance far up the road towards Goulburn on fast ponies. The buyer would cut a slash in an ordinary bale, take out a handful of wool, hoping he had picked a representative sample, and make a bid. These were primitive but significant dealings, for on them colonial prosperity depended. What slave cotton was to the American South, convict wool would be to Australia. The mills of Britain had an illimitable hunger for both.

  There were a number of hostelries in the area where the roads from both Sydney and Parramatta met—the Farmer’s Home, the Square and Compass, the Woolpack and Old Jack Ireland’s—at which the squatters and dealers argued and struck a price, while the Larkins of the system went amongst the wagons looking for someone shipped more recently than them, to hear news of their most distressful country. The wool from the Monaro, bought at the Black Huts, would be taken on to Sydney by the dealer, be shipped to London and turn up at Garraway’s Coffee House in Change Alley, Cornhill, where by the light
of guttering candles early Australian fibre drew bids based on an unprecedented enthusiasm.

  Could Larkin, or men of his ilk, ultimately hope—under ticket-of-leave or conditional pardon—to become graziers and land-holders themselves? Could the Ribbonman be transmuted into an Australian landlord? To establish a station, capital was needed, £5000 for a well-balanced flock, wagon and convict shepherds. But some determined former convicts, starting with small flocks, managed to become the living exemplars for the character Magwitch, the English convict who left his fortune to Pip, in Charles Dickens’s novel of 1861, Great Expectations.

  The Irish convicts cherished the case of Ned Ryan, a Ribbonman who twenty years before had been found guilty of Assaulting Habitation at Ballagh, Tipperary. He had got his conditional pardon in 1830, settled land near the present town of Boorowa, beyond the Lachlan River north-west of Goulburn, and in time built a house named Galong Castle and was re-united with his wife and three children, one of whom would serve in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales! The Etonian, classicist squatter might find that his neighbouring pastoralist was a former sheep thief from Ireland or Scotland, or even a former denier of the British system like Ned Ryan. Though rare, the convict who returned home rich, like Orpheus ascending from Hades, would become one of the stock figures of popular literature.

  In the winter and early summer of 1837, inadequate snow fell on the Australian Alps above the Monaro to fill the rivers. This was Hugh’s first experience of that recurrent but assured Australian phenomenon, drought, the most severe until then experienced by Europeans. There would be five to six such years of blazing suns and poor rainfall. The Murrumbidgee River dried up. Hugh and other convict stockmen had horse races in the dry bed. At night, he would rise in stifling air to see huge walls of flame moving down the wooded slopes, set off by lightning or an Aboriginal hunting fire. Hugh Larkin’s Australian education was proceeding apace, and heat and fire annealed him further to this inescapable landscape.

  MEETING THE SEASONAL PEOPLE

  For the convict shepherd and the night-watchman, as for the stockman riding out from the central station, the day came when the natives appeared out of the screen of forest, old men and warriors ahead, women and children behind, to hold discourse and perhaps to trade. The convict knew these people speared sheep, and if a shepherd objected too strongly, as he was duty-bound to (loss of livestock would show up on his record), they might kill him with spears or a blow to the back of the head with one of the hardwood clubs or stone axes they used to finish off kangaroos.

  Convict shepherds and drovers watched them closely, and noticed their womenfolk and their possessions. The young native men of the Monaro in fact carried a variety of purpose-designed hunting spears and two designs of the stunning and felling boomerang. The women carried their dilli bags and finely wrought nets of kurrajong fibre for catching the large, edible bogong moths of the area.

  The Ngarigo had occupied for millennia this side of the Australian Alps between the Murrumbidgee and the Snowy rivers. They had ritual and marriage relationships with people named the Walgalu and the Ngunawal to the north, towards present-day Canberra, and with the Bidawal to the south. They encountered in summer the Djila Matang from the western side of the alps, and traded for shells with the coastal Djiringanj to the east. Virtually until the year Hugh arrived in the Monaro, these had been the borders of their feasible world.

  They wintered in the milder but still brisk northern Monaro, but came south to the higher Monaro in spring, to feast on the nutty, protein-rich bogong moth, Agrotis infusa, ‘animated fat-bags’ which settle inches deep on trees and in rock crevices to breed. It was in the time of the bogong that Brodribb’s and Bradley’s men met them. It is possible that Hugh, and certain that other convicts, living on a womanless cusp of earth, made arrangements for the use of an Aboriginal woman. One commentator spoke of ‘black women cohabiting with the knowledge and consent of their sable husbands, in all parts of the interior, with white hut-keepers’. But occasional spearings showed that such relationships were not always acceptable to the elders.

  The liaison between the Irish convict shepherd and the ‘dusky maid’ was a fantasy commemorated in a song named ‘The Convict and His Loubra’:

  Thy father is a chieftain!

  Why that’s the very thing!

  Within my native country

  I too have been a king . . .

  You heard, love, of the judges?

  They drove me from my throne . . .

  The bush is now my empire,

  The knife my sceptre keen;

  Come with me to the desert wild,

  And be my dusky queen . . .

  Aboriginal monogamy was based on blood laws, and was as strict as European morality, and in terms of legal sanction stricter. But the white convict shepherd lay outside the bloodlines and so outside the moral universe of the natives. He was often a contact neither forbidden nor approved; he was a chimera to the Ngarigo as Phillip’s men had been to the Eora. Yet, said an observer, ‘I am told it is no uncommon thing for these rascals to sleep all night with a lubra . . . and if she poxes him or in any way offends him perhaps shoot her before 12 next day . . .’

  In protecting his master’s livestock, the shepherd would eventually instigate or witness the collision between European and native, the explosion of the relationship into spear-throwing on one side, the firing of carbines on the other. There were policies designed by anxious governors to protect the natives.

  After Governor Bourke went home in 1837, the new man Sir George Gipps, an administratively gifted soldier, would appoint Protectors of Aborigines, usually Anglican clergymen, to patrol a remote district and save the native people therein from molestation. These men often came to Australia in answer to an advertisement in the Church Times, and believed they would live with their wives and children in a colonial manse amongst other white-robed natives. Instead they were given a dray and dispatched into the interior. Hugh saw one such man moving bewildered through Bradley’s and Brodribb’s holdings. Like his secular brethren, the Protector found the nomadic quality of Aboriginal life an affront, and tried to keep Aboriginal people near his hut by supplying them with flour, sugar, tea, tobacco.

  In 1842 the system of protectors would be abandoned, but the squatters complained that Governor Gipps himself acted as a Supreme Protector who generally blamed problems of violence on settlers and their shepherds, and his efforts in that regard, particularly his prosecution of those stockmen who shot and burned twenty-eight natives at Myall Creek, hundreds of kilometres northwest of Sydney, will be dealt with later in this narrative. Squatters blamed Gipps and not themselves for the seven or eight years of frontier terror and warfare between 1837 and 1845—all without their admitting that the terror cut both ways. The natives would kill whites, one of them complained, ‘for no reason at all save their isolation!’ Hugh, other Ribbonmen and convicts, saw themselves as possible victims in a sporadic war for which they had not volunteered.

  As for Larkin, he survived and having applied unsuccessfully to have his wife and children sent to join him in Australia, after his conditional pardon in 1848 he would marry a young Irish convicted shoplifter from the Parramatta Female Factory, Mary Shields, assigned to Coolringdon as a servant, with whom he would have five children.

  * Some of the material from this section derives from the author’s earlier The Great Shame.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE HEADY BUSINESS OF EXPLORING

  Official European exploration in some cases is said to have followed acts of secret penetration and settlement of the interior. But wherever it reported halfway favourable grazing grounds, it was inevitable speculators would avail themselves of these wild pastures.

  When the report of the 1813 crossing of the Blue Mountains by Gregory Blaxland, William Wentworth and William Lawson came to Governor Macquarie, he sent his assistant surveyor, George Evans, to follow their tracks and extend them.

  Evans did not merely look down
upon what Wentworth called ‘the boundless champagne’, he descended by steep defiles into it, and found grass intermingled with white daisies, ‘as in England’. This was a matter of previously unimaginable delight for a man like Evans, to be Adam-in-chief in a new Eden, to enter the untouched Canaan. ‘A kangaroo can be procured at any time, also emus. There is game in abundance.’ Evans encountered a river running very strongly as he pushed west beyond the present site of Bathurst. He called it the Macquarie, and a lesser stream the Lachlan.

  These gestures of fealty to the Scots chieftain back in Sydney did not ensure Evans supremacy. He was passed over, as not quite an educated gentleman, and made second-in-command for the next excursion westwards led by the urbane naval lieutenant John Oxley, who wanted to marry young Elizabeth Macarthur and was considered by her irascible father a far better prospect than Wentworth had been. He established his depot on the Lachlan River to the south of the Macquarie. The large conundrum of Australian exploration had been established. Where did these westward flowing rivers end up? Could it be that they emptied into an inland sea?

  The Lachlan became a vast marsh Oxley could not penetrate, even though he believed it to be the edge of the envisaged sea. So he headed north and tried the Macquarie and again was defeated by marshes. Struggling back to the coast, Oxley found rich country which he named the Liverpool Plains, and found a way through the massive cliffs of the Dividing Range to the coast itself. Evans was always at Oxley’s side, and in this excursion one sees something that would become a feature of Australian expeditions: the leaders leaving behind horses and men, the latter wondering why they volunteered, malnourished and in a stupor of exhaustion, while a few brave souls tried to find a way out, reach a depot, a waterhole, a remote station or a settlement.