Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  As Father always read himself to sleep, he believed he owed his life on more than one occasion to having left alight the kerosene lamp. When packing to leave Argyle for the last time, a few weeks before his death, he put it in his bag.

  To me [he noted in his journal] that little lamp not only stood for my safety but was the means of taking me on many a voyage of discovery and adventure. By its light I read all the great masters of literature so that my lonely rides in the bush were peopled with classical heroes and heroines…It saved not only my life but my mind.

  Christmas at Argyle was this year an occasion of forced merriment, for Grandfather could no longer keep back his tears at thought of other days gladdened by the company of his life’s love, or overcome his distress at the ‘Rosewood incident’ and its condemnatiion in the Catholic press. He was worried too by the ill-health of his brother Stumpy Michael, reduced by fever and with a persistent cough that gave him little rest. The girls insisted their uncle remain at Argyle where they could care for him but the thought of causing trouble distressed him more than his illness. As his coughing fits became increasingly violent he decided that a few weeks in hospital in Fremantle might put him in better shape.

  ‘My poor Kate has had so many shocks of late years,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go back to her a living skeleton.’

  Father set out with him by buggy for the river crossing to Lissadell but all the forces of nature combined to keep the sick man prisoner. Lightning shattered trees across the track, rent the shirt on Father’s back when he dismounted to clear the way. The rain pelted in torrents and the river came thundering down. When they bogged back to the station it was clear that Stumpy Michael was a dying man, but when the weather cleared for a time he insisted on starting to Wyndham by the other track. This time both Father and Grandfather accompanied him, catching up on the way with a mob of fat Lissadell bullocks that was to comprise the first shipment of stock from Wyndham to Fremantle. The sick man was cheered at sight of the sleek beasts from the property he had pioneered and borrowing Long Michael’s horse rode round them with appraising eye.

  ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘that whatever may become of me Kate and the children will be well provided for with Lissadell.’

  Grandfather ventured to question him about his mortgages and other entanglements, but he dismissed all anxiety with an optimism that may have been a symptom of his illness.

  ‘With the markets opening up like this, everything will be paid off within a couple of years and we shall all be on clover.’

  Wyndham at the beginning of ’94 gave every indication that this might be the case, for since Connor and Doherty had succeeded in chartering Eddystone for shipment of cattle from the gulf, the long talked of ‘facilities’ in the form of a new jetty and stockyards had quickly been completed. On his arrival Father was called upon to drive in the last spike of the town cattleyards, and the new era of East Kimberley expansion was ceremoniously ushered in with speeches and toasts. Later the cattle were driven down the race into the ship’s hold while Stumpy Michael, waving goodbye from the deck, looked down the gulf and down the years to the day he had landed with his little party on that lonely shore in ’82.

  33

  EXPANDING BOUNDARIES

  The years 1894 to 1895. Exploration of country and incidents of the time. Native ‘art galleries’ on the Keep River. Patsy Durack takes a road contract. Pumpkin and Ulysses at the Ivanhoe ‘stud’. Death of Stumpy Michael Durack and his brother’s visit to New South Wales and Queensland. Dr Gallagher of ‘St Pat’s’. Queensland relatives. The case of Mrs M. Durack versus Lumley Hill.

  Though money was still fairly short for the pioneers, their prospects were now as bright as the lucky nugget that had trebled the State’s population within a few months. The immediate reaction of the men with a good foothold in the country, however, was not to sit back and consider how to double the carrying capacity of the land they already held but to ride forth and double its area. This after all was in the good old tradition of the open range, a policy that the government found hard to improve upon for encouraging the opening up of new and untried country. Conditions were made as attractive as authority considered justified, though naturally the pastoralists, like all other men in this land of free for all, fought an unremitting and fairly fruitful battle for better terms. Whatever the land rentals, they were described as ‘crippling’. Talk of resumption within whatever stipulated time was ‘this sword of Damocles stultifying to development’ and any limitation of acreage was ‘a dog-in-the-manger government attitude’. There was something, however, in the pastoralists’ contention that their holdings sounded fantastically large mainly by reason of the vast tracts of useless rough range, claypan and cajuput swamp that lay between the good grazing areas, and that any Kimberley block under a million acres was hardly worth considering.

  An uninformed reader, casually perusing a pioneering journal of the time, might wonder at the long accounts of seemingly aimless riding around—not mustering, for no stock had penetrated as far as the horsemen probed, not prospecting or searching for lost explorers—just ‘looking at country’.

  Released from the anxious toil of long droving trips to uncertain markets, the stations running on organised lines, Father with his brother John or a native boy spent much of the winter months of ’94 and ’95 in this way. The result of their activities was reflected in the gradually expanding boundaries of Argyle and Ivanhoe, which from being two isolated holdings on the east side of the Ord gradually drew together and merged along a vast fertile tract of river frontage.

  Although most of the bigger watercourses and ranges had been identified, the more detailed exploration and naming of landmarks fell, as elsewhere, to the first settlers. Aboriginal words they found hard to remember and harder to spell, so simple names like Confusion Swamp, Wild Dog Gully, Skeleton Creek, Dead Horse Crossing, Blackfellow Gorge and Crocodile Hole began to fill blank spaces on the map as they rode around. Father’s diary of such expeditions reads like the summary of some Davy Crockett serial in an Australian setting. He and his companions were constantly being surprised, followed, surrounded or attacked by blacks. One morning at Emu crossing he and Ulysses awoke to discover that a shower of spears had penetrated their tent while they slept. Another time, startled by a warning shout from Boxer while riding through a gorge, Father glanced up to find a group of warriors with spears poised about ten feet above his head. Boxer shouted a remark at which they hurriedly lowered their weapons and disappeared, but the boy would give no satisfactory explanation of what he had said.

  Natural wonders and phenomena, dear to all bushmen’s hearts, were the subject of endless anecdotes that delighted our childhood. I have little doubt that in some stories, such as that of the fabulous serpent whose tail disappeared on one side of Cockatoo Lagoon as its head rose on the other, he drew the long bow. For others, however, like that of the daddy of all man-eating crocodiles in the Baines and the snake that left a track twelve inches wide through the grass, he would call witnesses. From the blacks he collected strange tales that challenged investigation—a white man living among the tribespeople of the Leopold Ranges, ‘a canary coloured goddess’ roaming with the Arnhem Land blacks.

  Then too there are terrible incidents, as when the tracker, sent to spy on a native encampment, was caught and hacked to pieces by his infuriated countrymen. Nipper, a boy who often accompanied Father at this time, one night rolled into the fire so that his shirt caught alight and burned the skin almost entirely from his chest and back. Father tells the story of the boy’s incredible endurance, as tied to his horse and sometimes fainting in agony he rode forty miles back to Argyle. For a while his life hung in the balance, but he recovered with the care of my aunts, and was soon on the track again, terribly scarred but otherwise none the worse. The Territory boy Aled Meid whom Father brought from Pine Creek was less fortunate. He became paralysed after a fall from a horse, was brought to Wyndham for medical care, but died soon afterwards.


  Also running through the journals of these years is a record of Father’s varied enthusiasms and often rather ludicrous experiments. He was from this time on a keen but inexpert photographer, taking hundreds of shots of local scenery or groups of people balanced at precarious angles, all developed and printed with a maximum of assistance and mess. One of these, long since faded almost to extinction, recalls a typical experiment of the nineties when he reared a clutch of emus for the purpose of training them to draw a buggy. A similar attempt with kangaroos likewise failed, but Father never lost his boyish enthusiasm for utilising the natural fauna. His most successful inspiration was having a suite of furniture upholstered from crocodile hides, not exactly comfortable, but certainly unique.

  Sometimes major incidents are recorded with tantalising brevity while at others the writer expands to long descriptive passages like those written when exploring the Keep River in the winter of ’94:

  …The stream now bearing to the north. Mark a boab, MPD, 21/8/94 at point of a small volcanic hill. Country too low for cattle, but picturesque and plenty of fresh water. Many crocodiles observed, especially at junction of salt and fresh streams. Turned south 22 miles. Natives saluted us with warlike words. We anticipated an attack when they faced us, stamping to the time of their martial song sounding like the words ‘Yap Yah! Yap Yah!’ ejaculated with great force. Proceeded until interrupted by a precipitous gorge on the one side and a large expanse of glistening water on the other, and behold here are the natives again on our trail. They quickly receded however, into concealment. Cautiously we tried the passage on the left-hand bank and 5 p.m. found us on ‘the salvation side of the gorge’ as brother John remarked. We camp and have no sooner breakfasted than the smoke of a native fire springs up close by. We saddle up and proceed towards it but find only fresh footprints. About seven or eight miles on we have to pass through another gorge more formidable than the last the distance through being much greater and the cliffs towering above our heads for hundreds of feet. On passing through we found many native art galleries but in so outlandish and inaccessible a place that few are likely to witness these depictions of animal life—the formidable alligator, venomous reptile, sleepy turtle, majestic kangaroo and feathered emu, all portrayed with that instinct born of intimate relationship. On getting through we breathed a sigh of relief seeing so many fresh footprints all through the passage and knowing how easily a man might be intercepted in such a place…

  Between journeys such as this and his station work Father moved briskly between Argyle and Wyndham, just as Grandfather in his prime had ridden between Thylungra and Charleville. Grandfather was proud of his sons and pleased to see young Michael’s personality developing on lines rather different from his own, but he did not always agree with the views and outlook of this younger generation. Since Grandmother’s death he had felt increasingly depressed at Argyle and at night would often slip away from the music and banter of the young people to stand by his wife’s grave or call upon Pumpkin in his camp and talk of other days. He hardly liked to admit how lost he felt when Pumpkin, with Ulysses as his offsider, was put in charge of the new stud holding at Ivanhoe, but after this little differences between himself and his sons became more frequent. There were times when he could no longer contain his impatience, and his Irish temper, long held in check, would flare unexpectedly as over the issue of the road between Wyndham and Ivanhoe. Up to this time travellers on the route had either to cut a new track or follow the waggon ruts of the teamsters and hope for the best. The pass through Button’s Gap near Ivanhoe had not yet been cut and buggies were sometimes hours negotiating a matter of half a mile. The local Road Board had answered the complaints of the settlers with talk of money and labour shortage.

  ‘But surely the government can do something for us?’ the settlers grumbled. ‘And what about all these useless, big nigger prisoners? Why can’t the police bring them out and put them to some useful work?’

  It was pointed out that whereas it was easy enough to control a chain gang working about the town with a lock-up to return them to at night, it would take a complete force to hold them, chains or no chains, out in the bush. The dispute had continued for over a year when Grandfather lost patience with them all.

  ‘Great heavens!’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what’s come over the young fellows these times. Out in western Queensland if we wanted a road we went out and made it ourselves—never mind waiting for money from the government or black labour.’

  Father had retorted indignantly:

  ‘Do you think we’ve nothing better to do than make roads?’

  ‘There’s a lot of things ye do that are waste of time in my opinion,’ Grandfather said, ‘but making a road is time well spent by any man. Ye could take it on a roster week and week about.’

  Finding his suggestion put to scorn, Grandfather left off working on the new house at Argyle, rode into Wyndham and submitted a contract to complete the road. His tender was so modest that a flabbergasted secretary accepted it without further question.

  For the next four or five months, with the help of a white man named Littleton and a native boy, he cut down trees, removed stakes and stones, graded precipitous creek and river crossings and made a cutting through the more rugged stages of Button’s Gap. If he had any headquarters during this time it was at the little camp on the Ivanhoe billabong where, in the rugged grandeur of the Kimberley landscape, he pined with a son of the Boontamurra for the unbroken horizons and shallow river channels of Cooper’s Creek.

  Often during this time Father mentions spending an evening at ‘the Stud’.

  Pater [he writes] passing some time in reminiscence of Thylungra days, calling upon Pumpkin to refresh his memory of various incidents. Pumpkin’s memory is, I must say, excellent, but I do not know that so much looking back is in a measure good for either, since they appear often much moved to sadness by even the happier recollections.

  One detects a hint of impatience that Grandfather, once a man of considerable wealth and influence, should not only content himself with a labourer’s task but should turn for companionship to one who, for all his sterling qualities, was after all but a simple Aboriginal.

  It is a sad reflection on the irony of life that since his wife’s death it seemed to Grandfather that only Pumpkin still really believed in him. To the rest, he felt, it was as though in having lost his money the great efforts of his life had after all been wasted, that he had become a forlorn and tragic figure of failure. In letters to his youngest son Jerry—the little ‘Sunny’ who had so gladdened his life at Thylungra in what he now referred to as ‘the happy days’—he fumbled for words in which to express the rift of values widening between himself and his elder sons:

  Yere brothers, Michael and Johnnie are getting on their feet at last and should do well. They have certain of their own views and opinions which are not my own but are not wanting my advise, so that I keep it to myself. Pat is more to my way of thinking but he is young yet and not so much of a man of the world and does not care much for books. Now ye have all had a good education and have learned a grate deal and may think yere father but an ignorant old fool but in experience I have learned a few things that could be of use to ye all and I would want ye all to make good and do well in life but to remember that everything is not in the making of a fortune or in the losing of it…A man may still have led a profitable life and have little proof of it in his pocket…

  After another of his visits to Ivanhoe, Father wrote:

  Pater now informs me that Pumpkin is undoubtedly homesick and should be sent on a visit to his countrymen. It may be some measure of poor Father’s own homesickness and loneliness that he sees reflected in his old associate, since Pumpkin has at no time mentioned to me his desire for a holiday and he must know full well that no request he might make of any reasonable nature would be refused.

  A brief note some months later, however, remarks the return of Pumpkin ‘much refreshed after a visit to his countrymen’.

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bsp; In all justice to Father it must be said that he probably never refused a request made him by an Aboriginal. The station blacks might have persuaded him to indulge even fantastic whims had they but realised his eager responsiveness to any evidence of ambition or initiative. For the most part their requests were simple and few, though on the rare occasions when a native employee expressed a wish to see the big city, Father, to our intense delight, would bring him south to our home in Perth and show him the sights.

  Boxer was probably the only one of the old station boys who ever exploited Father’s sincere wish to compensate the blacks for the service of their youth, but even his requests were modest enough—a plant of horses to go prospecting and his tucker bags filled whenever he returned to Argyle. Somehow Boxer was to work out a track of his own between the white world and the black, never belonging to either and answerable to himself alone. The blacks, even his boyhood companion Ulysses, distrusted him and many whites said he was a rogue but Father regarded him, apart from Pumpkin, as the most remarkable native he had ever known, and when the old Queenslander died in 1908, it was Boxer on whom was bestowed the title of ‘King of Argyle’. This was a purely white man investiture, consisting of a brass plaque on a chain to be worn around the neck. Boxer received the honour with gracious thanks and handed it back.

  ‘You keep it for me, Umpy. More better I travel light.’

  (Father, from his initials ‘M. P.’ was usually ‘old Umpy’ to the blacks.)

  If a station boy wished to visit a relative in another part of the country he would be issued wth a ‘passport’, requesting stations en route to supply the bearer with rations on account and arrange his return transport when required. One of these remarkable documents dated 1905 was years later returned to Father with a note from the manager of Sturt Creek: