To Ride a Fine Horse

by Mary Durack

  At last . . . the weary travellers found the Ord . . .

  Alexander Forrest met them on their arrival at Fremantle.

  ‘Well,’ he asked anxiously, ‘what did you think of Kimberley?’

  ‘We had a hard time,’ Stumpy Michael said, ‘but we found the country everything we could desire.’

  When Alexander Forrest began to talk of how cattle could be shipped to Cambridge Gulf, Stumpy Michael and Tom Kilfoyle were amused.

  ‘We’re station men, not dairy farmers,’ Michael laughed. ‘How many ships would we need to bring eight thousand head of stock?’

  ‘But how will you get them all that way?’ Forrest asked.

  ‘We will drove them, of course, as we have always done.’

  ‘But it’s more than two thousand five hundred miles—farther than from London to Moscow! However will you do it?’

  ‘We’ll work that out as soon as we get back,’ Michael told him.

  12

  The Big Trek Begins

  PATSY and Mr Emanuel were both in Sydney to meet the party on its return and plans began at once for taking cattle, sheep and horses to stock the new country.

  Mr Emanuel decided to take up land along the Fitzroy River and arranged for a ship to take his two sons and a flock of sheep to the site of the present port of Derby. Patsy, his two brothers and Tom Kilfoyle had taken up large tracts of country on either side of the Ord and Behn Rivers and planned to overland cattle and horses from Thylungra.

  To some it seemed an almost impossible undertaking, for although many long droving treks had been made in Australia, nothing of this length had been contemplated before. The distance was far greater even than it appeared on the map, for droving expeditions must follow winding river courses in search of water and crossing places and often go miles out of their way in search of good grass. They knew that they would have to travel at least three thousand miles, striking north from Thylungra to the Gulf and then heading out west across the territory and into the western state.

  The great bushman, Nat Buchanan, whom Patsy and John Costello had met before trying their luck in Queensland, had pioneered several successful droving treks into the Territory for big southern companies. Others attempting much the same thing had failed tragically. Men had lost their lives and entire mobs of cattle perished in very much less ambitious treks than the one now planned. Even some of his own admiring relations thought that this time Patsy was going rather too far in offering tracts of land and shares in stock to any experienced young relatives who would undertake to drove the cattle to Kimberley.

  ‘Such a long way to go and so many risks to take to pioneer a property,’ they said.

  ‘It’s not a property I’m offering you,’ Patsy exclaimed. ‘It’s a principality!’

  Few could resist his enthusiasm for long, however, and soon he had volunteers to take charge of several big mobs totalling nearly eight thousand head of cattle and two hundred horses. Among these were Darby Durack’s three elder boys, John, Patrick and Michael, now grown to manhood and known generally, to avoid confusion, as ‘Big Johnnie’, ‘Black Pat’ and Long Michael’. Their father had died some years before and their lives up to this time had been spent entirely among cattle and horses, pioneering little stations and undertaking long droving trips. ‘Big Johnnie’, in charge of a mob of two thousand cattle, was to be his cousin Patsy’s partner in the new venture, while ‘Long Michael’ and ‘Black Pat’ were to drove for Stumpy Michael in return for a share in his Ord River property.

  Tom Kilfoyle and another relative named Tom Hayes had gone into partnership with Patsy’s youngest brother Jerry in both land and cattle and several other relatives were to make up their party.

  Before leaving they had discussed every detail of the route and tried to think of everything that might arise. A condition of taking up land in Kimberley had been that they should occupy it within twelve months or forfeit their rights, as many others had been clamouring for Ord River blocks at the same time. This they did not take too seriously, however, for they knew that there were few, if any, besides themselves who would be able to get there with stock at all. Such an undertaking called not only for a great deal of money but also for a very special sort of experience such as Tom Kilfoyle and his Durack relatives had gained over the years. Patsy advised that they would do better to take their time camping on reliable water for months on end if the drought continued. After all, their object was not to break records but to get as many cattle as possible through to the Ord, and they knew that to gamble on the season’s breaking could well prove fatal.

  They knew too that since the natives had acquired a taste for beef and horseflesh no party had escaped attack. On Buchanan’s last trip the cattle had been repeatedly chased, while the drovers had returned to their camp one day to find the cook with his head chopped off.

  Another danger was the crocodiles and sharks that teemed in the gulf rivers, and last but not least the anopheles or fever-carrying mosquito, which had accounted for more lives in the far north than anything else. The drovers were careful, therefore, to include plenty of quinine and other malaria remedies among their stores.

  By June 1883 all four mobs were on the way, Patsy and his brothers accompanying them for several stages. Stumpy Michael and Jerry, anxious to get their growing families away from the inland, then sold out their Cooper’s Creek interests to their elder brother and moved to small stud holdings nearer the coast.

  . . . all four mobs were on the way . . .

  Patsy himself had purchased a lovely block of land on the high bank of the Brisbane River where he planned soon to build a fine mansion. He had also agreed to form a company of shareholders in his various properties and businesses so that, although he would still have an interest in Thylungra, he would be free to make his headquarters in the city. This syndicate advanced about a quarter of the sum agreed upon and promised to pay the rest within a year, but the dreaded run of bad seasons was already settling in outback and Patsy was never to see another penny of that money.

  He planned to remain at Thylungra until the cattle were well on the way and settled into the routine of travelling, and, as he had expected, his help was often called for on the early stages. A stampede within the first few weeks caused the loss of two hundred head and decided some of the hired drovers to look for safer jobs. Patsy and his native stockmen took replacements to join the overlanders and then returned to carry on at Thylungra. Several of the station natives had offered to go with the cattle but Aboriginal labour was needed as never before in the far west, since most of the white stockmen had been drawn away either to gold or opal strikes or to go adventuring in new lands still further west. Besides this, the drovers feared that however reliable at home, the native boys would soon become homesick and dissatisfied on unfamiliar ground.

  Their thoughts, however, scarcely less than Patsy’s, were constantly with the travellers. Every day they discussed the progress of the four mobs, picturing them moving along, a little apart during the day, camping close together at night, each party with its waggonette stacked with supplies, water drums and swags and driven by the cook. In fancy they followed them mile by mile, knowing almost to the day where they would be, when the head drovers would be riding in to some bush township for supplies and to send messages to anxious relatives. They shared the worry of the new-born calves that the drovers were forced to shoot when they became too numerous to be slung in hammocks under the waggonettes. It grieved them too to hear how the fretting mothers would often escape the mob at night and travel back as many as three or four day stages to where their calves had been born, some to be caught and returned, others to go plodding on until they perished beside the track.

  In October, with drought menacing the land, the drovers’ skill was constantly taxed by long dry stages on which the thirsty cattle at the faintest scent of water, sometimes even in a wayside tank, would break into stampede. By the end of the month, with little hope of finding grass and water on the track ahead, the
drovers decided to camp at a good waterhole on the Georgina River about four hundred miles north of Thylungra. It was a dreary six months’ camp, during which two drovers died of the effects of bad water and tempers grew short with the monotony of the long, hot days. At the river level sank they had constantly to be pulling cattle out of the bog, sinking wells and drawing water into long troughs with whip and bucket.

  A little rain fell at last at the end of the following April, but heavy showers in the upper reaches of the big river system brought walls of water tumbling down the dry creekbeds and spreading for miles over the parched land. Quickly the spreading cattle were mustered and driven to higher ground and the drovers, once more in good spirits, separated their mobs and moved on through the little towns of Boulia and Clon-curry to the Nicholson River. From Burketown, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, they wired back the worrying news that a stock disease known as pleuro had broken out among the cattle. For days Patsy waited at the little town of Adavale for further news, knowing that this could well mean the complete failure of the expedition. His anxiety was relieved when he had word at last that a wise old drover named John Urquart had saved the day with a ‘newfangled outfit’ for inoculating cattle against the disease. This had been laughed at as fantastic nonsense when first suggested and the amazement of the drovers can be imagined when they saw that no inoculated cattle caught the sickness.

  Patsy realized that the message received from Burketown would be the last they could expect until the party reached the Roper River, and that Settlement Creek near the border was the drovers’ point of no return. Here, the men were warned, was their last chance of pulling out, but those who had come so far with the cattle were prepared to stand together through thick and thin. With all eyes set to the west, they rode on through the wild tangle and rushing streams of the Territory wet.

  13

  Into the Promised Land

  DURING the long newsless months that followed Patsy tried to sink his anxiety in constant movement. He rode restlessly about the countryside, went several times to Brisbane to supervise the building of his new house, and twice to the New South Wales town of Molong to reassure his Uncle Darby’s widow about her brother Tom and her three big sons.

  In March ’85 they received a wire to say that all was well and some weeks later a letter from Darwin with further brief details of the trip. The party was then camped on the Leichhardt River and had obtained provisions and despatched mail to Darwin from a depot that had been set up for droving parties near the mouth of the Roper River. They had lost nearly half the cattle, for numbers had perished in the Queensland drought and of pleuro before it was controlled, while further animals had been speared, chased off by blacks, or taken by crocodiles in the Gulf rivers. That was about all, they said, except for the fever, on which they wasted few words since everyone in the Australian bush had experienced fever of some kind. This form, they suspected, was malaria, carried by the teeming mosquitoes from one man to another, and, since none escaped it, hardly worth mentioning. None-the-less the almost invisible dagger of the little winged anopheles accounted for more lonely graves along the stock routes of the north than native spears or any other single cause. It is terrible to think of how men with aching heads and limbs and parched throats rode doggedly on beside the cattle, mile after mile through the hot and comfortless wilderness. To these hardy and dedicated drovers the fear of sickness and even death was far less than that of being a burden to their mates or in any way delaying the progress of the cattle to their promised land.

  Later the family was to hear the stark details of a wet weather camp on the wild banks of the Roper. The drovers had managed to swim their cattle across the flooded stream but the waggons were trapped on the other side until the water level fell. By this time the natives had pillaged the supplies and further provisions had to be obtained from the depot. All this meant delay, and a rule of the road that no drink was to be brought into the stock camps somehow broke down. Traders who brought supplies by ship from Darwin began smuggling rum to some of the fever-stricken stockmen, who no doubt thought it might help to ease their sufferings and give them fresh heart for the journey. Of course it made matters worse and the leaders of the party, returning with the supply waggons, found some of their party too sick to move. John Urquart, the fine old bushman who had saved the day by inoculating the cattle on the Nicholson River, was by this time delirious and it was feared he might die if they could not get him on board a schooner to seek medical aid in Darwin. Before the boat arrived to take him away, however, Urquart, tortured by fever and depression, had ended his own life. He had been much loved and respected by his companions, one of whom, feeling, as the party was about to move on, that he too had reached the limit of his endurance, put an end to his misery in the same way.

  With heavy hearts the party pushed on west through the steaming mire and rank green grass of the Territory wet season.

  In May of the same year a more cheerful message by Overland Telegraph from Elsey Station told that the party was travelling well and hoped to reach the Ord within five months. The next news was from Black Pat to say he and Tom Hayes had left the drovers at the Victoria River and were chartering a schooner to take them with supplies from Darwin to Cambridge Gulf, where they would await the arrival of the party. This had been the original plan but after the loss of the two drovers on the Leichhardt it was feared no members of the party could be spared. By good luck they had met up with a drover and two natives who had been with Buchanan into Kimberley and who agreed to accompany the cattle on the last difficult lap. The natives proved to be none other than Pintpot and Pannikin, who had gone across Kimberley with Stumpy Michael’s party and were delighted to meet up again with their old friend Tom Kilfoyle.

  . . . the perilous canyon gorges . . .

  It was many anxious weeks before Patsy and his family heard of the last, nightmare stages of that now famous trek. The drovers knew that of all the wild and dangerous places they had come through there had been no such fearful hazard as the Wickham Gorge, through which ran the only stock route to the west then known. This was a narrow pass between sheer canyon cliffs where the winding palm-fringed river had cut its way in ages past. So far only Buchanan’s party, about a year before, had attempted this perilous task and the three new hands, who had been with this expedition, told how even these experienced drovers had been unable to get through without some loss of stock. They warned that a good night’s rest and steady nerves were needed, for if the cattle were to panic in this pinch it could mean not only the complete destruction of the mob they had nursed along for over two years, but the loss of human lives as well. The natives were numerous and reportedly hostile in this region and if it occurred to them to launch an attack from the cliffs above everything could well be lost. It was decided to bring the cattle through in small lots, as slowly and quietly as possible, and to use every trick of the drover’s trade to avoid a fatal rush.

  Although cattle that had survived so many miles of hard travelling and were so used to being handled stood a far better chance of getting through than a newly mustered mob, they soon became footsore and frightened as they slipped and stumbled over stones and other obstacles in the narrow pass. Even small numbers at a time made an almost deafening noise as the clatter of hard hoofs, and the rumble of nervous bellowing, mingled with the steadying voices and cracking stock whips of the drovers, was magnified many times by the echoing rock walls of the ravine. Several beasts, on the outer edge of the precipice, slipped and went hurtling to their death but the rest plunged on, urgently straining towards the far, sunlit opening of the gorge.

  . . . through the perilous canyon cliffs . . .

  And then, as if this were not enough suspense, the drovers’ apprehensive upward glances revealed that their progress was being observed by a large gathering of tribal warriors who stood, with their long-handled spears, outlined against the sky. For all their varied experience of Aborigines the white men could never predict how a strange tribe would behave
and had no way of telling whether the excited gestures of the blacks should be taken as friendly curiosity or angry threats. They knew, however, that the fate of their long expedition now depended on the mood or whim of the wild people.

  Perhaps it was the very drama and excitement of the scene that decided them after all to let the show go on. No spear was thrown and the dark figures following along the edge of the cliff disappeared as the drovers and their herd neared the end of the gorge.

  Through the ravine at last, with fewer losses than they had believed possible, the men sighed with relief and their hearts rose as the cattle strung quietly on and over the border into the western colony. Shortage of food was now their main problem for the stores they had brought from the Roper River depot had almost gone.

  Lack of important items of diet had caused sores to break out on their faces and limbs and every small scratch festered painfully. With the help of the two native boys they scrounged the bush for natural food—wild honey, yams and lily roots—and as they rode along their chewed, like the stock, at pigweed and other succulent plants. Fever, that had improved somewhat during the cooler months of the year, began to harass them again as the season progressed and, had they not known that the journey was almost to an end, some would not have had the heart or strength to continue.

  Following the Negri River to its junction with a larger stream, they knew they had reached the Ord at last, and Tom Kilfoyle here pointed out the tree they had marked on finding this spot in September ’82. He recalled the relief and joy of this party and their resolve somehow to get stock across the continent to drink from the deep Kimberley streams and fatten on the richly pastured plains. Now, almost exactly three years later, after two years and nine months’ travelling and at a cost of something over £70,000 they had arrived—although with only about half the stock they had started with.