To Ride a Fine Horse

by Mary Durack

  But they brought me down to one

  At the diggins-oh! . . .

  I built a hut with mud

  At the diggins-oh.

  That got washed away by flood

  At the diggins-oh.

  I used to dig, and cry

  It wouldn’t do to die,

  Undertaker’s charge too high

  At the diggins-oh! . . .’

  Somewhere inside himself Patsy still believed that at least a little pot of gold must be waiting for him, and he was happy as they jolted along over the mountains and across the wide Australian plains. To many newcomers the country seemed harsh and forbidding, but Patsy had loved it from the start. It seemed to call to his youth and energy and he revelled in its strangeness and spaciousness.

  His first sight of the big plains from the mountain summit was one he would never forget, for here was a vast, open land, unbroken by fences or walls, where a man on a good horse might go galloping for miles and miles. Most of this country, his uncle explained, was already ‘taken up’, but government or crown land was all the time being broken into selections for small settlers.

  ‘I have saved all I can to put into a block and four legs,’ he said, which was a saying of the times meaning a piece of land and stock to graze on it. ‘A block’, he explained, in answer to Patsy’s question, might be anything from twenty to fifty acres, at about £1 an acre, but to make a decent start a man needed three or four times as much, and that meant a lot of money. At the time fifty or a hundred acres seemed to Patsy a tremendous property and he felt that when he could own so much land he would be well satisfied. He could then ride his estate like a fine squire indeed, but how long must he wait?

  Mr Chisholm of Kippilaw had been well pleased to have two more such as Darby Durack who were not afraid of work and knew how a job should be done. Patsy’s father, Michael Durack, was an expert carpenter and thatcher as well as being a practical man who could handle stock and grow crops and vegetables. Fortunately he had already taught his son a great deal, for he was not to be spared to help his family settle in the new land. They had been little more than two months at Kippilaw when he was run over by a horse and dray and died in his son’s arms.

  Kind people, touched by the grief of the family, so newly arrived and almost penniless, came to their assistance. One family offered a home to the widow, her younger children and the baby son, little Jerry, born in Goulburn just after his father’s death. The older girls were given employment on near-by farms, while Patsy, as you may not be surprised to hear, set off at once in search of his pot of gold.

  3

  Patsy’s Pot of Gold

  PATSY at eighteen was a lean stripling with black curly hair, merry blue eyes and friendly ways. He was a good runner, could dance an Irish fling and nimbly tap dance as he played on his fiddle, flute or tin whistle. After his father’s death he had needed his gift for making friends as never before and he used it well. Two men who helped him were Mr Chisholm of Kippilaw and Mr Solomon Emanuel, who had a bank, a store, a hotel and other businesses in Goulburn. To both of these he had gone for advice and had told them of his great wish to seek his fortune at the goldfield. They had not discouraged him, for they could see he was a sensible youth and desperately anxious to earn enough to make a home for his family. They had given him good advice, however, to which he listened carefully.

  He should go, they said, to the diggings at Ovens, in Victoria, some two hundred and twenty miles south of Goulburn. Here prospects were still fairly good and he might strike it lucky, but he should have another string to his bow. Mr Chisholm supplied him with the loan of a horse and cart and Mr Emanuel stocked it with merchandise to sell to the diggers. When Patsy protested that he had no money for all this, the kindly Jew explained that he might sell the goods on commission and pay only for what he could dispose of.

  Patsy was deeply touched by such confidence in a poor Irish boy, and almost a stranger at that, but Mr Emanuel was a shrewd judge of character and knew he would not regret his generosity. What he did not know was that this was to be only the beginning of a lifelong friendship and that he and Patsy Durack would do greater things in partnership than sell pots and pans, picks and shovels to miners on the Ovens River.

  One last piece of advice the good man gave Patsy before he drove away.

  ‘Come back when you’ve made one thousand pounds—no more and no less,’ he said. ‘You can raise credit enough on that to set you up in land and stock, but if you stay on in the hopes of making more you may very well find yourself back where you started, like so many others I have known.’

  Driving south in his covered cart over the winding, dusty bush roads, the words ran through Patsy’s head like a persistent tune.

  ‘One thousand pounds, no more and no less,

  No more and no less,

  To set you up in land and stock,

  In land and stock!’

  Sometimes he would laugh aloud at the very thought of it. He, Patsy Durack, in his second-hand clothes and battered straw hat (locally known as a ‘cabbage tree’), to be worth a thousand pounds! It seemed absurd, and yet it must come true, he thought, and a thousand pounds was a sizeable pot of gold.

  Four or five miles from his destination he became aware of a strange noise, a distant but slowly increasing roar like the approach of a mighty wave. He remarked about it to a miner he had picked up on the way and learned that it was the noise of the goldfield itself. He was told that it was a great number of noises rolled into one—the sound of more anvils and picks and shovels than he had ever seen, the banging and jangling of a few thousand buckets and tin dishes, the groaning and creaking of the waggons, the bellowing of the bullock teams and the cracking of whips. Besides all this there was the clatter of hoofs and barrows and a good deal of shouting and fighting as well.

  ‘The time comes when you can pick them out, one from the other,’ his companion said, ‘even the rattle of the Long Toms.’

  ‘The Long Toms?’ Patsy asked.

  ‘You’re a new chum all right,’ the other laughed. ‘They are the cradles used to sift the gold from the pebbles and the sand.’

  ‘So they’re still getting gold?’ Patsy asked eagerly.

  ‘Yes, they’re getting it,’ he was told, ‘but nothing like last year when they were playing skittles with bottles of champagne and spreading butter between five pound notes and feeding them to the dogs!’

  Patsy was shocked for he did not yet know the Australian habit of leg pulling and thought this was a very foolish way to behave, no matter how much gold one might find. He had often tried to picture a goldfield, but it was not at all as he had ever imagined. Never could he have dreamed of such a motley crowd as he found among the calico tents, windlasses, ventilators, shafts and great mounds of upturned earth. Men from almost every country in the world had flocked to the call of gold. Mud and dust clung to their beards, their red shirts and blue dungaree trousers. Almost all wore shady cabbage-tree hats, many with a circle of corks dangling from the brim to keep the flies away. The women, in their poke bonnets and long dresses, were almost as grimy as the men and Patsy noticed that many of them had rough voices and manners such as he had never known.

  He had brought some bolts of material among his goods and this they purchased eagerly, while the men clamoured for the mining equipment, the tin dishes, billy cans and camp ovens. His trade was brisk and he could hardly believe his eyes when payment came in gold dust or raw nuggets carefully weighed out on a pair of scales. One big Irish miner paid him in a piece of gold shaped like a horseshoe.

  ‘May it bring you more luck than I have had, young fellow,’ he said, and Patsy, who as a simple Irish boy was superstitious about omens and signs of this sort, kept the nugget and had it set as a brooch for his mother.

  The miner’s life was crude and rough, but Patsy enjoyed it to the full. When he had sold all his goods, he pegged out a claim of his own and worked it hard. He made many friends on the fields and had enough experiences to
provide him with good stories for the rest of his life.

  . . . he pegged out a claim of his own . . .

  Among those he met was a police superintendent named Robert O’Hara Burke, a well educated young man from County Galway. He and Patsy would often talk together of their homeland, and discuss horses, for which they shared the same passion. Many were inclined to laugh at Burke’s romantic talk and wild ideas about opening up the unknown spaces of the continent, but Patsy never tired of listening to him. Burke had made a study of Australian exploration and had maps showing just how far the various explorers had gone, and how much of the continent was still a mystery. He told Patsy of the brave men who had gone and of others who had tried in vain to cross the continent. Up to this time no one had succeeded in doing this, except around the desolate southern coast, and many, including Burke, believed that great rivers would yet be found to flow into an inland sea.

  Patsy was not surprised, therefore, to hear some seven years later that Robert O’Hara Burke was competing for a prize offered to the first man to cross the continent from coast to coast. He little thought, however, while poring over maps on the Ovens diggings, that his own land hunger would one day lead him to the country where Burke and his party met their tragic end.

  After eighteen months on the fields Patsy totted up his earnings and found that they amounted to just £1000. He was tempted to go on in the hopes of doubling or trebling this amount, but remembering Mr Emanuel’s advice, he said good-bye to his mining friends and returned to his family in Goulburn. He was now a strong young man of twenty and had grown a dark beard that made him look older than his years. His mother, sisters and younger brothers felt immensely proud of him, especially when people around Goulburn began to point him out as a young man who would make his mark.

  Having found his pot of gold he now rode not one but several fine horses. So far both his wish and the tinker’s fortune had come true, but in the meantime he had grown up and his ambitions had grown too.

  4

  ‘A Block and Four Legs’

  PATSY had been little more than a week in Goulburn when he set out again—this time in search of land, and knowing that even with the money to buy it this might not prove an easy task. There were still no fences to mark the boundaries of the different properties or to divide private from government land, while established settlers, who naturally wanted to go on using the unclaimed country as long as possible, would give no information to a newcomer in search of a selection of his own. Patsy had learned, however, that if he rode around with his eyes and ears open, telling no one his business, and striking up odd acquaintances, for which he had a gift, he would sooner or later hear something to his advantage.

  At the end of 1855, some months after his return from the fields, he managed to purchase 273 acres on Dixon’s Creek, about twelve miles from Goulburn, and another 240 acres about twenty miles south of that town. Other blocks around Dixon’s Creek he reserved for his Uncle Darby and family and for other Irish friends and relatives who were having trouble in finding a place to settle down. They all moved in almost at once and set about pioneering their ‘selections’.

  Patsy’s £1000 would not have gone far without further help from Mr Emanuel, but although the word ‘mortgage’ had frightened him at first he soon learned that few men had been able to make a start in the colony without help of this kind. He decided that the Dixon’s Creek property would be the family headquarters and here he would start a mixed farm with some good dairy cows, pigs, poultry and stud horses.

  The other blocks would be the beginnings of a cattle run, for although up to this time most of the settlers had gone in for sheep, the population had so increased over the gold-rush years that there was now a good demand for beef. Cattle raising required less labour than sheep, and Patsy had found besides that there were ways and means of getting at least a small herd together for very little money. Cattle could be bought ‘for a song’ from the pound in Goulburn where straying stock were kept until either claimed or purchased, and there was another even cheaper method for men who did not mind hard work with a spice of danger. On many of the bigger properties numbers of cattle and horses had run wild and become such a nuisance that the owners willingly issued ‘musterer’s licences’ free of charge to men who were prepared to hunt them up and take them away. Much of this wild stock was useless, but there were some good young animals among the ‘scrubbers’, as the wild cattle were called, and horses of fine Arab strain among the ‘brumbies’ in the ranges.

  You can imagine how Patsy jumped at this chance of obtaining free stock, with some good hard riding thrown in. As no man could be expected to muster wild cattle and horses on his own, he joined up with groups of stockmen, who agreed to make a fair division of the spoils.

  These were exciting days for Patsy. He had as yet no experience of stock work in Australia and was eager to learn all he could from his companions, some of whom were the best horsemen and stockriders in the country. They were men of all types and from all stations in life, among them ex-convicts, sons of English aristocrats, ex-army officers—mostly from Indian regiments—and always a few Highland Scots and madcap Irishmen. Some were in the game from necessity and others simply for the thrill of those breakneck rides after the wild cattle of scrub and range with their sweeping horns and shaggy hides. All shared a love of horses and liked nothing better than to talk of the famous riding exploits of their time. Their horses were trained to ‘turn on a plate’, as they said, to wheel and dodge about after the wily beasts that made off at a gallop on catching the scent of man or horse.

  Here, around the Lachlan, Snowy and Murrumbidgee Rivers, was the great training ground of the Australian stockmen who, year by year, were pushing out the edges of settlement into the great unknown.

  Here, too, legends were being made that would be immortalized by the famous bush balladists of later years—Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Will Ogilvie. ‘Banjo’ Paterson had not yet written ‘The Man From Snowy River’, but that famous muster of wild bush horses ‘where mountain ash and kurrajong grew wild’ was the sort of story told around every stockman’s camp fire in Patsy’s youth. Many local incidents were already being strung into rough rhymes, to be recited or sung, often soon forgotten, sometimes remembered and gathered together in Paterson’s volume of ‘Old Bush Songs’, which tell us so much of how these early stockmen behaved and dressed.

  “Just mark him as he jogs along, his stockwhip on his knee,

  His white mole pants and polished boots and jaunty cabbage-tree.

  His horsey-pattern Crimean shirt of colours bright and gay,

  And the stockmen of Australia, what dressy boys are they.

  The stockmen of Australia, what rowdy boys are they,

  They will curse and swear a hurricane if you come in their way.

  They dash along the forest on black, bay, brown or grey,

  And the stockmen of Australia, hard-riding boys are they. . . .’

  Another long ballad, sung to a then familiar tune, told of how the stockmen gloried in their wild and dangerous rides:

  ‘ “Oh for a tame and quiet herd,”

  I hear some crawler cry,

  But give to me the mountain mob

  With the flash of their tameless eye. . . .

  There’s mischief in yon wide-horned steer,

  There’s danger in yon cow;

  Then mount, my merry horsemen all,

  The wild mob’s bolting now—

  The wild mob’s bolting now, my boys,

  But ’twas never in their hides

  To show the way to the well-trained nags

  That are rattling by their sides.

  Oh ’tis jolly to follow the roving herd

  Through the long, long summer day,

  And camp at night by some lonely creek

  When dies the golden ray.

  Where the jackass laughs in the old gum-tree,

  And our quart-pot tea we sip;

 
The saddle was our childhood’s home

  Our heritage the whip.’

  The stockmen of Australia . . .

  Perhaps Patsy himself had a hand in some of these unsigned verses, for it was said that he could string a ballad together as he rode along and sing it to the delight of his companions like the bards of old. Unfortunately his youngest son, who kept dozens of his verses, burned them because he thought that a younger more sophisticated generation would make fun of them; but the few of his rhymes that have survived show that he had at least as much talent as the best of these early folk singers.

  People said that Patsy Durack always seemed to be in several places at the same time. This was because of his boundless energy and the speed at which he would travel from place to place, fitting in all sorts of different jobs. One week he would be mustering with a party around the Lachlan. The next he would be settling stock on his land at Lake Bathurst, from where, having left a couple of stockmen in charge, he would ride back to the family at Dixon’s Creek and help with the erection of buildings and yards that had been going on in his absence.

  These first bush homesteads were simple, but comfortable enough. They were made of slabs of timber and bark with thatched roofs and shutters that swung on hinges made from strips of untanned leather, or ‘greenhide,’ They had only two rooms, one for general living, where the men slept in their swags on the floor at night, and a bedroom for the women and children. The kitchen was simply an open lean-to outside. The floors were of hard beaten mud, strewn with hides, the furniture made of rough-hewn timber and greenhide. Bed coverings were the pelts of furred animals, roughly pieced together.

  Some of the things Patsy had learned about building from his father now came in useful, but the little timber homesteads of the Australian bush were very different from the whitewashed stone farmhouses of his native land. It amused him, as he worked, to sing a popular jingle about the use made of stringybark and greenhide in the bush: