To Ride a Fine Horse (9 page)

Many years later the poet Banjo Paterson wrote an amusing ballad called ‘The Bush Christening' which the same Pat thought must have been inspired by the story of his once unusual baptism. At all events the fears of the boy as described in the ballad were exactly his own:

 

‘He was none of your dolts—he had seen them brand colts,

And it seemed to his small understanding,

If a man of the frock made him one of the flock,

It must mean something very like branding.

 

So away with a rush he set off for the bush,

While the tears in his eyelids they glistened—

“ 'Tis outrageous,” says he, “to brand youngsters like me;

I'll be dashed if I'll stop to be christened!” '

 

Then came the great day when the first Cobb and Co. coach came through and before long a network of roads and transport began to break down the loneliness of the far west.

Naturally, in the midst of all this progress and prosperity there were some tragic happenings too, such as when a five-year-old daughter of Patsy's sister, Sarah Tully, wandered from her home, about twenty-five miles from Thylungra, and became lost. It was three days before the child was found, in one of the many dry gullies or ‘breakaways' worn by the flooding creeks, her little dead hand still clutching a bunch of bush flowers.

Soon after this, Patsy's boys John and Pat became lost with their old tutor. The boys had always loved going for walks and were irritated when Mr Healy, who had no sense of direction whatever, began going along ‘to look after them'. One day when the old man started heading back in quite the wrong direction they decided for fun to see how far he would go before realizing his mistake. After two miles they felt the joke had gone far enough but Mr Healy stubbornly refused to admit his mistake until even the boys had lost their bearings. By nightfall they were hopelessly lost.

As Patsy and the younger natives were away from the station, Mrs Patsy had sent at once for her brother John at Kyabra and by dawn the following morning
Costello, Scrammy Jimmy and several other natives were on the trail. The tracks of the wanderers became impossible to follow over hard, stony ground and after two days and two nights the searchers had begun to despair, when Scrammy Jimmy, with an ear to the ground, declared he heard Mr Healy's voice. They found the old man at last, lying alone and calling out in delirium: ‘Keep to the north-east, children! Keep to the north-east!'

The tracks of some natives then led the anxious searchers to a camp near a native well where they found the boys hungrily eating kangaroo and wild berries. They told how the blacks had found them some hours before, and how Mr Healy, then quite out of his mind, had fought them fiercely. They had been forced to leave him and the natives had brought the boys to their camp for food and water before taking them home.

The search party returned at last with the old tutor, still shouting and struggling, tied to a horse's back. He had stripped off his clothing in delirium, and as the skin was almost entirely burned from his body it was feared he would die before reaching the station. He survived, however, and under patient nursing came slowly back to life. Although almost blind, and incapable of further work, he lived on at Thylungra, happy in the illusion that he earned his wages as station book-keeper and business adviser.

This incident increased Patsy's sense of gratitude and affection for the natives and also his grave concern for the state of affairs that closer settlement had brought about. The old tribes, finding their lands and waters dwindling on all sides had taken to the wholesale killing of stock and not all the new settlers showed the tact and patience of the earlier pioneers. Natives were shot, white men killed in reprisals, and settlers, in fear of their lives, demanded police protection. A band of Aborigines, trained to ride after and subdue their countrymen, had already been operating in other parts of Queensland and were now brought out to this wild west. At first it was said that their task was only to arrest and reason with the bush natives, but soon it became clear that the black police rode to kill and that they shot without pity at guilty and innocent alike.

. . . the black police rode to kill . . .
 

Patsy, indignant at this cruel injustice, protested in vain, and when he had news that the police were on the trail again would ride the countryside with the native boys to warn the outlying tribes. Some took advantage of his offer of protection at Thylungra but most would now trust no white man whatever and remained to die in the bush.

The good seasons continued and the pioneers were becoming rich, but Patsy's heart no longer sang as it had when the tide of fortune began to turn for them.

‘What are they doing?' he asked. ‘Do they not understand that these too are the children of God?'

P
ATSY
hardly liked to admit his restlessness or the worry he now felt about the education of his elder boys. He had scarcely noticed how quickly the years were passing until he realized that the babies who had come with them to Thylungra were now gangling bush youths of twelve and fourteen. As much as anything in the world he had wanted his children to have the good education he had missed himself, but it was nearly impossible to get tutors in the far outback and
the thought of splitting up the family was almost more than he could bear.

Having decided to keep his worries to himself for a little while longer, he was surprised one day when John Costello confessed that he too had been feeling restless and worried about his family. His eldest girl, born on Mobel Creek, was now ten years old and neither she nor any of his other children had ever seen the ocean.

‘You should take them all for a holiday to the coast,' Patsy suggested, and then the blow fell. Costello had been leading up to the news that he had suddenly accepted the offer of £60,000 for Kyabra and was leaving with his family the following week. He was now rich enough to purchase any property he wished and had set his heart on a lovely place with an ocean frontage near Rockhampton.

As he watched them moving off with John's old parents and several of the faithful Kyabra natives, Patsy knew the time had come to prepare for changes in their own lives, and that to begin with the elder boys must go to school.

When he announced his decision the station was plunged into gloom. The blacks wailed and Mrs Patsy, Grandma Durack and the younger children wept copiously. Patsy, to hide his own feelings, kept saying how their schoolmates would envy his boys the thousand mile ride to college in Goulburn that now lay before them.

It was November 1879 when they set off, Patsy and his wife in the buggy, the two boys and the native Willie riding alongside. People prophesied that the ‘wet' would catch them on the road, the rivers would
come down and they would not get through, but Patsy vowed they would be in Goulburn on the opening day if they had to swim.

Sure enough the rains set in before they reached the border. The Culgoa River that cut across their track south had come down in a mighty flood, sweeping, with the dry grass and driftwood of the Queensland plains, into the river channels of New South Wales. Strong men with good horses were seldom baulked by flooded streams but to get a woman, two boys and a buggy across was another matter. Patsy knew of a station on the other side from which he could obtain help so he and Willie bare-back rode into the swirling current, and as their horses began to swim, slipped off and clung to their tails, reaching the opposite bank about two miles downstream. The station people lent them some casks and helped them cut timber with which to make a broad raft or ‘pontoon bridge'. This was attached to an overhead rope, slung between trees on either side of the river. Luggage, saddles, buggy and family were then mounted and hauled across—more or less high and dry.

It was a hard trip, the horses straining through mud and slush, maddened by sandflies that attacked the travellers just as fiercely. As they moved steadily south, however, conditions improved and they were invited to sleep at station homesteads. On one of these the boys, who up to this time had seen no fruit except the wild bush berries, were able to pick and feast upon peaches, apricots, grapes and oranges. They felt they were in Paradise.

Patsy and his wife told their boys how they had taken this track north for the first time in '68, not
knowing what the future held for them. So much had happened in those eleven years and although Mrs Patsy seemed just the same to her husband, others who had known her then were shocked to see how the harsh sun and wind had aged her fair skin.

So the family returned to Goulburn, where there were happy reunions with many relatives and friends. Mr Emanuel, delighted to know how the family had prospered, recalled their first meeting and how Patsy had loaded up his waggon to find his pot of gold at the Ovens diggings.

‘I wanted the gold to buy a fine horse,' Patsy laughed. ‘Now I have a thousand fine horses and am still not satisfied.'

Having established the boys at St Patrick's College, he returned with his wife to Thylungra, but somehow the place did not seem the same as before, for now their hearts were half the time a thousand miles away with the boys at school, and often too with John Costello on the Queensland coast. Still, the race meeting of 1880 was the biggest ever held in the far west and Patsy was cheered to see a crowd of some three hundred men, women and children, most of whom he had been in some way responsible for bringing into the country.

They had had a wonderful run of good seasons and become rich on the sale of land and stock. Thylungra and other Cooper stations were now carrying not only cattle and horses but also sheep, which gave promise of thriving splendidly. Still Patsy was not entirely satisfied. The country had been kind to them in many ways, but no one knew better than himself that it could also be cruel and hard. The threat of drought
and flood was always present, while terrible heat, harsh desert winds and frightful duststorms made life almost unendurable at times. Patsy began to feel that perhaps he should use some of his money to find a kinder, more reliable country for the younger generation to settle on and that he should build a comfortable city home for his wife and two little girls.

John Costello, who had not long been satisfied with his established station on the coast, had already taken up another station near the border of the Northern Territory and had gone riding west in search of still more and better land. Patsy did not feel attracted to the Territory, however, for although in some ways richer and less arid than Western Queensland he knew that it too was a difficult and unpredictable land.

One day in 1881, when on a visit to his sons in Goulburn, Patsy came on a report written by the West Australian explorer Alexander Forrest, who a few months before had taken a party right across from the north-west coast to the Overland Telegraph line in the Territory. Although only a hurried trip, Forrest had been delighted with what he saw, and reported the district he named Kimberley as a rich pasture country where it seemed that little need be feared from either drought or flood.

Patsy went at once to Mr Emanuel who, since his own sons were interested in the land, agreed that they should make further enquiries. The first step was a visit to Mr Alexander Forrest in Perth, capital of Western Australia, and for this purpose Patsy and his brother Stumpy Michael took ship from Sydney. Forrest told them how he had found and named a number of splendid rivers, and that but for sickness breaking out in his party he would have liked to follow a big stream he named the Ord and which appeared to run north, probably emptying into Cambridge Gulf. He had dotted in its most likely course on the almost empty map and predicted that the country it watered could well be the answer to a land seeker's dream.

Back in Goulburn Patsy and Mr Emanuel decided to finance an expedition to explore south from Cambridge Gulf, follow the course of the Ord to Forrest's peg and then strike out for the west coast, where they could pick up a chartered ship. Before long Patsy, his brother and Mr Emanuel had made all arrangements, purchased equipment and selected a party. Stumpy Michael, who by this time had the name for being one of the best bushmen in Queensland, had been appointed leader of the expedition, with Tom Kilfoyle, Darby Durack's brother-in-law, as his second in command. Mr Emanuel's twenty-one-year-old son Sidney, the latter's ex-tutor John Pentacost, a surveyor and geologist and two others completed the party.