Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  But for the moment, Hugh Larkin’s Australian wife and children bloomed. Soon they would share the pews of Sts Peter and Paul with Irish farm labourers and maids, desperate bounty emigrants from the Shannon estuary, part of the huge exodus of souls from Famine-ravaged Ireland.

  Though the greatest mass of starving refugees would go to England, America and Canada, some thousands of Irish men, women and children reached Australia as a result of the Famine, including 4000 workhouse orphan girls. Two of the Irish emigrants who came from the peak of the Famine to Australia were Peter Lalor and his brother, while three other brothers went to America, where the discovery of gold had added an extra layer of attraction to the emigrant proposition. The Lalors came from a highly political family, and Peter’s would soon be a resonating name in the goldfields of Australia.

  MARY AND THE THUNGUDDI

  One Irish girl who succeeded in joining her (soon-to-be) husband in the Antipodean wilderness was Mary McMaugh, who arrived in Sydney with her mother aboard the Montmorency in mid 1849. In this case her betrothed was not a convict but a free emigrant, an Irishman two or three years older than Mary, named Jack Vaughan, and it had probably been decided some time before in Ireland that Jack would come out first, establish a homestead and then send for her—this would be one of the patterns of emigration from the British Isles and Ireland.

  Both Mary and her husband seem to have been the children of better-off Catholic farmers who survived the Famine, and Mary and her mother also successfully negotiated the risks of an emigrant ship—another matter of endurance. Yet Mary was shocked to see her fellow countrymen in the chain gangs of Sydney, a sight the locals were inured to.

  From Sydney, Mary left alone by ship for Port Macquarie, the outlying penal station northwards along the New South Wales coast. Here again she observed chained men quarrying, occasionally lifting their morose eyes to take in the traveller. In the small port her fiancé was waiting for her—a fine, strong man, as she described him, though ‘the hard bush life had roughened him’. She seemed, however, more stimulated than afraid when he described the life he led in the upper Macleay, and his narrow escapes from natives. Their marriage took place in the fort at Port Macquarie, and on horseback with a half-caste guide named Billy, they left for the town of Kempsey on the Macleay River, with its two pubs and a salesyard out the back of one of them. Stockmen and ‘overlanders’ here were booted and spurred, with bright Crimean shirts and colourful handkerchiefs around their necks. Jack said such men, flush from cattle sales, would ride their horses into the bar and call for drinks for all hands.

  From Kempsey Billy the guide accompanied them towards ‘my mountain home’, upriver, at Myall Station, Myall being a common term in New South Wales for ‘wild native’. They passed through groves of bush full of game, and the gorgeous, unaccustomed birds seemed to excite rather than alienate Mary. Her husband told her the names of trees, bushes and animals of this new world. She heard the cat-bird cry like a human baby.

  At a farm where they stopped near Toorookoo Crossing (now Toorooka) she listened to a forthright farmer and his wife tell the story of their recent deliverance from Thunguddi attack. The Thunguddi had occupied the headwaters and the valleys of the Macleay, Hastings and Manning rivers for millennia, they were sturdy people, and from conversations with such neighbours as these she began to discern the difference between corroboree, ceremonial dance, and the initiation ceremony capeharra.

  Now Mary and her husband rode on towards ‘pinnacle after pinnacle, towards blue-green mountains’. When they reached the ridge above Myall Station, station hands, dressed in Crimean shirts, moleskins, boots and cabbage-tree hats, presented themselves. Dogs came out to greet them. As for the house: ‘I was surprised to find it very neat and tidy, and when I learnt that this poor, ignorant black woman was the housekeeper, my astonishment knew no bounds.’

  The Thunguddi people were not, of course, all so benign. A party attacked the overland mailman at Big Flat, hacked him to pieces and beheaded him. To the Vaughans, this was an attack on civil existence itself, on the networks which connected them to the outer world. Soon after, the milking cows began coming home with spears in them. For fear of attack on Myall Station, Mary’s husband formed an outstation further down the river, closer to the mounted police barracks at Belmore River, and they lived there, now with two infants to whom she had given birth with the help of the Thunguddi housekeeper. When Jack was away, Mary dreaded the natives appearing and spent the night hours sleeplessly waiting for an attack. ‘Some of the blacks had been employed by white people, but had drifted back to their tribes again. These were the worst class—most daring, treacherous and cunning.’

  The fact was that these former servants had received an education in how genuinely the white settlers believed themselves to be here to stay, and they also knew what treasures a homestead might hold. Vaughan decided on the policy of making the Thunguddi scared of him, and this certainly seemed to his wife the right procedure. Vaughan ‘became such a terror to them that they feared him exceedingly and I think (under Providence) preserved me and my children’.

  For he was often away with his men, and Mary’s only protection was an old Aboriginal man at the front door with a spear, and another at the back. She believed they, too, would spear her if she turned her back, but one night when a party of Thunguddi made what could be called a demonstration outside the house, she found one of the old men hiding under a bed. Soon after, in a form of defiance, she returned to the head station with her two boys.

  Here she found a horse, impaled by a spear, standing dead against the stockyard fence. Though the stockmen slept with pistols, the Thunguddi raided the gardens, and carried off maize in their bags of kurrajong fibre. After Vaughan’s stockmen had met up with some Aboriginals roasting stolen bullocks, a small squad of native police and two white police were posted to the station to protect against further raids. But some kilometres away, cedar cutters had an unprotected camp, where—supposedly safe in numbers—they felled the then-plentiful and tall wild cedar and floated it downriver on the next ‘fresh’. They had employed a native named Smoker who showed the cutters the best clumps of cedar, and caught fish for them, and took honey from the hives of stingless native bees. It appeared Smoker secretly advised his clan on how to attack the loggers’ camp. If that is true then his kinsmen would pay a high price ultimately, but in the short term their raid left the dead cutters heaped up in front of their huts. One wounded cutter, Sparks, survived.

  At the end of a pursuit by the border police and stockmen far upriver, so many Thunguddi were killed that the place of the slaughter—like the creek on the Liverpool Plains and other such places in Australia—was named Waterloo, thereafter and to this day.

  To Jack Vaughan and his wife Mary, drought was an enemy too. Wild apple and oak trees had to be cut down to stop the cattle starving, and Vaughan took stock for sale hundreds of kilometres across rivers and mountain ranges to the market in Maitland, near Newcastle. While he was gone the kitchen and storehouse took fire from burning embers scattered by a cruel wind blowing through a bushfire. Though Mary’s boys struggled bravely, the fire obliterated the house as well.

  Then, when the drought ended, the river came down like a torrent, and cattle were drowned, their carcasses stuck fifteen or more metres up trees. Young Mrs Vaughan accepted it with a deep-set equanimity. It was the nature of Australian seasons, and Australia was not a country for soft souls.

  Myall Station was remote country, but remoter still were the ravines beneath the New England escarpment where the last major population of the Thunguddi was now situated. These groups were led by a man named Blue Shirt, but one day, riding far up the river, Vaughan captured Blue Shirt single-handedly and brought him back to the border police. It was reported that Blue Shirt was ‘kicked to death’ by a police horse, and no further enquiry was made of his fate.

  Not all depredation was the work of the natives. A pleasant young Scot named Ellis had arranged with Vaughan to li
ve at Myall Station to learn bushcraft. Mary enjoyed his company greatly. He was summoned home by a family loss, said his farewells to the station hands, and on the way to Kempsey, drowned above Dan’s Falls. There were signs that a theft had taken place from his satchel, which was sent on to his mother in Scotland, still containing his letters and journal. Some disreputable figures who had ridden down from New England were suspected of the murder, but in that immensity, as with Blue Shirt, nothing could be proved.

  The Thunguddi were still not utterly reconciled to the loss of their long, paradisal valleys. A new stockman who rode out to visit Dan’s Falls was found there beheaded, wounded eight times with spears and his horse wounded as well. He was buried, as bushmen were, in a sheet, and wrapped in a sheath of bark.

  How welcome to Mary Vaughan was the racing season when once a year the family went into the growing port town of Kempsey for the races there. It was a vivid scene—good gigs, fine dresses, conviviality. Racing clubs were one of the ways Australians built sociability across massive distances. But ultimately Mary and Jack returned to the testing loneliness of the upper Macleay Valley, and there one day, when gold had been discovered in New South Wales and Victoria, and when Sydney and Melbourne had been transformed to more than mere outposts, Jack Vaughan’s horse rolled on him and crushed him in that hilly country he had wrested from the Thunguddi. The man who had captured Blue Shirt was put on a bier at the homestead, and his and Mary’s boys helped bury him beneath the august blue hills of the Kookaburra Range. Mary would continue to occupy Myall, her sons married and stayed in the area, and her descendants are still found in the upper Macleay Valley.

  CHAPTER 25

  CANADA BAY

  An uprising which would send Canadian and American rebels to Australia began in Lower Canada—the present-day Quebec—in 1837. It grew from the refusal by the government—run by a British governor and an appointed legislative council—to address the political hopes and land aspirations of an increasingly poor and, above all, democratically thwarted group named the Patriotes, a French-speaking party, led by merchants and intellectuals.

  But it was not only French-speakers who were involved in the unrest of 1837-8. A reform movement was also operating in Upper Canada—today’s Ontario. Radical reformers there wanted to build an economy based on that of the United States, with the same degree of democratic control over revenues and expenses, and a check on the granting of land grants to people of influence. The leader of the radicals, William Lyon Mackenzie, instigated an armed insurrection after the lieutenant-governor intruded in the elections of 1836 to make sure that he had a conservative legislature.

  This rebellion was brutally crushed by British troops, but American activists, border supporters of the rebels, moved into Canada in 1838 to continue the fight. They ran into a well-organised military resistance co-ordinated by the new lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur, who had previously ruled Van Diemen’s Land.

  The trials of the French-speaking, Anglo and American rebels read shamefully and involved tainted ‘evidence’ manufactured under the broad aegis of martial law. The various charges thus proved on which the rebels were transported included high treason, misprision of treason [attempted treason] and lawless aggression. A number of them were condemned to death. Some travelled to the hulks in Britain before being transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

  Most of them, however were loaded aboard the Buffalo, which reached Hobart in February 1840. The Yankees were landed there, while the Canadians were sent on to Sydney.

  The approach of the Patriote rebels in the Buffalo alarmed the residents of Sydney. The Protestant mainstream was horrified sufficiently by the proliferation of Irish papists sunk in superstition, and now their equally rebellious French counterparts were to join in the New South Wales equation. The Herald reminded Sydneysiders: ‘The only instance of any united attempt to overturn the government here was after the arrival of the Croppies in 1804, and it was many years before the seeds of disorder and riot were crushed.’

  There was a public insistence that the Patriotes be sent to Norfolk Island, and the first Catholic bishop of Sydney, John Bede Polding, who came aboard Buffalo to hear their confessions, indeed exhorted them to accept that hard fate. Yet nine days passed, and the indications grew that the Patriotes would remain in Sydney. Governor Gipps decided that they would stay together as a group in the Longbottom prison camp along the Parramatta River. The ‘beautiful little village’ of Concord steeled itself for the arrival of the rebels at the camp on the western shore of Hen and Chicken Bay.

  A platoon of soldiers met the Patriotes on the beach and escorted them to the main barracks about a kilometre away. The superintendent there received them ungraciously. They slept on the floor of their huts with only one blanket to protect them and were forbidden to speak. Their clothes were branded with ‘LB’—Longbottom Barracks. Yet the Canadians abashed the guards by being good workers. They were put to work loading stones from barges onto bullock carts, taking them a little way inland and pounding them down to make road gravel. The superintendent considered appointing one of their number, Maurice Lepailleur, as work overseer, because he noticed Lepailleur was generally respected by the prisoners—a departure from normal practice. Removed, he was given the job of gatekeeper. A rather forthright Patriote named Louis Bourdon finally got the job instead—not such a popular choice. Meanwhile, Lepailleur noticed that even their luxuries, their ounce of brown sugar a week, was best described as ‘left over filth, full of little bits of wood and rice’. The rations normal to the convict condition appalled them. The cooks among them did their best to create pâtés, tourtières, soups and other French-Canadian dishes, but they could not perform miracles with rotten meat. By August 1840, some of the men showed the effects of malnutrition. A 190-centimetre innkeeper from St Martine named Shèvrefils was desperate for food and a number of his friends gave him their bread rations.

  Apart from unloading stone, some of the French Canadians burned charcoal, and others made bricks. Lepailleur was appalled to be made gate sentry, but it gave him time to keep a journal, and even to keep one for an illiterate prisoner named Basile Roy. He watched traffic go by on Parramatta River, and was surprised to find that the Sydney area was not as fertile as the Château Guay Basin in Lower Canada. Down the road in Sydney, Father Brady, secretary to Bishop Polding, waged a writing campaign on the Patriotes’ behalf, to get them better treatment and if possible some form of pardon.

  After three months the authorities felt secure in withdrawing the military guard assigned to the Canadians, and the Sydney papers began to comment favourably on their industry. Lepailleur in his gatekeeper’s hut nonetheless still chafed, as many of them did, at being ‘the slave of everyone, not only one person, but all those in authority’. Back in Château Guay, he had been bailiff, postal courier, farmer, father of two sons and a man of substance. Here, apart from the general ignominy of his lot, Bourdon the overseer began to act like a martinet towards him and everyone else. ‘Strangers have not despised us as much as our convict officers have,’ complained Basile Roy. They were chagrined to be marched to church in ranks like common criminals and brought back in the same manner.

  Louis Dumouchelle, transported with his brother Joseph, took ill, and extraordinary pressure was required to get him moved to the hospital in Sydney’s Macquarie Street. There he found that being nursed by convicts was a hard cure. The sick were often brutalised, and Lepailleur saw a man die after the convict nurses had shaken and beaten him in an effort to make him stand. The man died while tied to the end of his bed as punishment for letting his sheet slip to the floor.

  Louis Dumouchelle eventually died in Sydney Hospital hallucinating that he was reunited with his wife. His brother saw the limits placed on convict dignity when his body was placed naked in his coffin. Fearful that they might follow Louis into the Australian earth, the other Patriotes became devout, joining the lay brotherhood of Our Lady Help of Christians. The air over the Longbottom
station was nonetheless rent not by the singing of hymns to the Virgin Mary but by Patriote drinking songs.

  Contrary to official policy the Patriotes received newspapers, both local and the occasional overseas edition—a boy delivered them to Lepailleur the gatekeeper on Parramatta Road every morning. Newspaper opinion had come totally round to them. JD Lang’s The Colonist, for example, which had once feared them as a papist threat, now called them ‘unfortunate men’. ‘No mention or complaints are heard from them, and they pay implicit obedience to any orders they receive. Every evening they congregate near their . . . house for the purposes of prayer. After they are locked up each division may be heard for a short time, imploring the Supreme Being and then all is hushed till the morning, when they return to their severe probation.’ The exception was the Herald which felt that if they were treated kindly it would be unfair ‘to the well-behaved Protestant prisoners’.

  The men were able to get drink too, from the Bath Arms across Parramatta Road from their camp, owned by an accommodating German named Emmanuel Neich, who also supplied more reading material, including books in French. The Patriotes were confused, however, to find that there were no names in the English dictionary for Australian fauna or flora. There was no ‘cockatoo’ or ‘goanna’; no names for the fish many caught to supplement their lean diet.

  In 1841, in an exception to the general restrictions on convict assignment, Governor Gipps let it be known that the Canadians could be assigned. The deputy-surveyor, Samuel Perry, and Captain McLean were the first to apply. McLean was the principal superintendent of convicts, and had installed a system of good wages and conditions for assigned men—wages were to be paid into the Savings Bank of New South Wales in the men’s names.

  There was a depression beginning in New South Wales, and that fact delayed assignment for many, but as the numbers dwindled inside the Longbottom stockade, so did the morale of those left. There were fretful rumours that their wives and children would be shipped out. Lepailleur’s longing for his wife was such that when a woman on Parramatta Road stopped in front of the gate and looked into the settlement, it was all he could do to refrain from running out and greeting her as his spouse.