A Single Tree Page 10
A Flying Trip to Queensland, Land and Water, Professional Trip in the District
of Liverpool Plains, New South Wales by District Surveyor Arthur Dewhurst,
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 9535
George Dunderdale
1893
1
There were now ladies as well as gentlemen in Gippsland, and one day the commissioner sailed away in his boat with the select party. After enjoying the scenery and the summer breezes for a few hours, he cast his eyes along the shore in search of some romantic spot on which to land. Dead wood and dry sticks were extremely scarce, as the blacks used all they could find at their numerous camps. He was at length so fortunate as to observe a brown pile of decayed branches, and he said, “I think we had better land over there; that deadwood will make a good fire”; and the boat was steered towards it. But when it neared the land the air was filled with the stench so horrible that Mr. Tyers at once put the boat about, and went away in another direction. Next day he visited the spot with his police, and he found that the dead wood covered a large pile of corpses of the natives shot by his own black troopers, and he directed them to make it a holocaust.
The white men brought with them three blessings for the natives – rum, bullets, and blankets. The blankets were a free gift by the Government, and proved to the eyes of all men that our rule was kind and charitable. The country was rightfully ours; that was decided by the Supreme Court; we were not obliged to pay anything for it, but out of pure benignity we gave the lubras old gowns, and the black men old coats and trousers; the Government added an annual blanket, and thus we had good reason to feel virtuous.
We also appointed a protector of the aborigines, Mr. G. A. Robinson, at a salary of £500 per annum. He took up his residence on the then sweet banks of the Yarra, and made excursions in various directions, compiling a dictionary. He started on a tour in the month of April, 1844, making Alberton and his first halting-place, and intending to reach Twofold Bay by way of Omeo. But he found the country very difficult to travel; he had to swim his horse over many rivers, and finally he returned to Melbourne by way of Yass, having added no less than 8,000 words to his vocabulary of the native languages. But the public journals spoke of his labours and his dictionary with contempt and derision. They said, “Pshaw! a few mounted police, well armed, would effect more good among the aborigines in one month than the whole preaching mob of protectors in ten years.”
When a race of men is exterminated somebody ought to bear the blame, and the easiest way is to lay the fault at the door of the dead: they never reply . . .
2
It was court day at Palmerston, and there was an unusual amount of business that morning. A constable brought in a prisoner, and charged him with being a vagrant – having no lawful visible means of support. They entered the charge in the course list, “Police v. John Smithers, vagrancy,” and then looked at the vagrant. He was growing aged, was dressed in old clothes, faded, dirty, and ill-fitting; he had not been measured for them. His face was very dark, and his hair and beard were long and rough, showing that he had not been in gaol lately. His eyes wandered about the court in a helpless and vacant manner. Two boys about eight or nine years old entered the court, and, with colonial presumption, sat in the jury box. There were no other spectators, so I left them there to represent the public. They stared at the prisoner, whispered to each other, and smiled. The prisoner could not see anything to laugh at, and frowned at them. Then the magistrate came in, rubbing one of his hands over the other, glanced at the prisoner as he passed, and withered him with a look of virtuous severity. He was our Black Wednesday magistrate, and was death on criminals. When he had taken his seat on the bench, I opened the court, and called the first and only case. It was not often we had a man to sit on, and we sat heavily on this one. I put on my sternest look, and said “John Smithers” – here the prisoner instantly put one hand to his forehead and stood at “attention” – “you are charged by the police with vagrancy, having no lawful visible means of support. What have you to say to that charge?”
“I am a blacksmith looking for work,” said the prisoner; “I ain’t done nothing, your worship, and I don’t want nothing.”
“But you should do something,” replied the magistrate; “we don’t want idle vagabonds like you wandering about the country. You will be sent to gaol for three months.”
I stood up and reminded the justice respectfully that there was as yet no evidence against the prisoner, so, as a matter of form, he condescended to hear the constable, who went into the witness-box and proved his case to the hilt. He had found the man at nightfall sitting under the shelter of some tea-tree sticks before a fire; asked him what he was doing there; said he was camping out; had come from Melbourne looking for work; was a blacksmith; took him in charge as a vagrant, and locked him up; all his property was the clothes he wore, an old blanket, a tin billy, a clasp knife, a few crusts of bread, an old pipe, and half a fig of tobacco; could find no money about him.
That last fact settled the matter. A man travelling about the bush without money is a deep-dyed criminal. I had done it myself, and so was able to measure the extent of such wickedness. I never felt really virtuous unless I had some money in my pocket.
“You are sentenced to imprisonment for three months in Melbourne gaol,” said the magistrate: “and mind you don’t come here again.”
“I ain’t done nothing, your worship,” replied the prisoner; “and I don’t want nothing.”
“Take him away, constable.”
3
On the diggings, 1853
Father Backhaus was, often seen walking with long strides among the holes and hillocks on Bendigo Flat, or up and down the gullies, on a visit to some dying digger, for Death would not wait until we had all made our pile. His messengers were going around all the time: dysentery, scurvy, or fever; and the priest hurried after them. Sometimes he was too late; Death had entered the tent before him.
He celebrated Mass every Sunday in a tent made of drugget, and covered with a calico fly. His presbytery, sacristy, confessional, and school were all of similar materials, and of small dimensions. There was not room in the church for more than thirty or forty persons; there were no pews, benches, or chairs. Part of the congregation consisted of soldiers from the camp, who had come up from Melbourne to shoot us if occasion required. Six days of the week we hated them and called “Joey” after them, but on the seventh we merely glared at them, and let them pass in silence. They were sleek and clean, and we were gaunt as wolves, with scarcely a clean shirt among us. Philip, especially, hated them as enemies of his countrymen, all but one, who was a black man.
The people in and around the church were not all Catholics. I saw a man kneeling near me reading the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England; there was also a strict Presbyterian, to whom I spoke after Mass. He said the priest did not preach with as much energy as the ministers in Scotland. And yet I thought Father Backhaus’ sermon had that day been “powerful”, as the Yankees would say. He preached from the top of a packing case in front of the tent. The audience was very numerous, standing in close order to the distance of twenty-five or thirty yards under a large gum tree.
The preacher spoke with a German accent, but his leaning was plain. He said: “My dear brethren; Beatus ille qui post aurum non abiit. Blessed is the man who has not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money or treasures. You will never earn that blessing, my dear brethren. Why are you here? You have come from every corner of the world to look for gold. You think it is a blessing, but when you get it, it is often a curse. You go what you call ‘on the spree’; you find the ‘sly grog’; you get drunk and are robbed of your gold; sometimes you are murdered; or you fall into a hole and are killed, and you go to hell dead drunk. Patrick Doyle was here at Mass last Sunday; he was then a poor digger. Next day he found gold, ‘struck it rich,’ as you say; then he found the grog also and brought it to his tent. Yesterday he was
found dead at the bottom of his golden shaft, and he was buried in the graveyard over there near the Government camp.”
My conscience was quite easy when the sermon was finished. It would be time enough for me to take warning from the fate of Paddy Doyle when I had made my pile. Let the lucky diggers beware! I was not one of them.
4
In Gippsland
The squatters were assisted in their endeavours to diminish the numbers of their live stock by their neighbours, both black and white. It is absurd to blame the aborigines for killing sheep and cattle. You might as well say it is immoral for a cat to catch mice. Hunting was their living; the land and every animal thereon was theirs; and after we had conferred on them, as usual, the names of savages and cannibals, they were still human beings; they were our neighbours, to be treated with mercy; and to seize their lands by force and to kill them was robbery and murder. The State is a mere abstraction, has neither body nor soul, and an abstraction cannot be sent either to heaven or hell. But each individual man will be rewarded according to his works, which will follow him. Because the State erected a flag on a bluff over-looking the sea, Sandy McBean was not justified shooting every blackfellow or gin he met with on his run, as I know he did on the testimony of an eye-witness. This is the age of whitewash. There is scarcely a villain of note on whose character a new coat has not been laboriously daubed by somebody, and then we are asked take a new view of it. It does not matter very much now, but I should prefer to whitewash the aboriginals.
Australian Bush Tales (The Book of the Bush), E.W. Cole, Melbourne, 1898
Mary Durack
1959
New-born calves were slung into canvas hammocks underneath the wagonettes and when the cattle caught them up were taken into the mob to be claimed by their mothers, but as the weeks passed the new arrivals far exceeded the capacity of the slender hammocks. When as many as thirteen calves would be born in a single dinner camp there was no alternative than to destroy them. It was one of the drovers’ saddest reflections that they had been forced to dispose of no less than thirteen hundred new-born calves during the trip. It was a complete waste, for stockmen were oddly squeamish about eating veal or ‘staggering Bob’ as it was known in the cattle camps.
Keeping the bereft mothers on camp at night was an all-time job. They used every wile of their kind to escape the mob and make back along the route in desperate search of their young. Those that managed to break travelled quickly and sometimes returned three or four day stages before they could be overtaken and brought back. Often they went plodding on, far past the camp where their calves had been born, until the drought closed in on them and they perished on their tracks. This maternal instinct meant extra work for men and horses and the waste of precious time while waters along the route was sinking perilously low.
Dust driven on hot desert winds blew in the face of the mobs as they trailed over bare plains and dry creek beds.
When the drovers hit a township it was not easy to get them out.
‘Give us time to wash the dust down,’ they said, but they had collected a lot of dust and there were ‘old cobbers’ in every outback bar.
At Winton one of the wagon drivers found romance with a full-blown beauty behind the bar of the local pub and became so lovelorn at the Diamantina River that he asked for his cheque and returned to the township as fast as horse and packs would carry him. A bagman camped beside the track was glad enough to take on the job and the party continued down river to the Diamantina gates.
The stock route lay over the country flat to horizon’s end, meandering through a maze of claypan channels etched with tea-tree, salt-bush and wild cotton. Red bare sandhills, beaten by desert winds, broke the skyline as the stock veered west to Parker Springs, where round wells, warm and bubbling with soda and magnesia, overflowed into a shallow creek. Here, while the drovers enjoyed a plunge in the buoyant, effervescent waters, the cattle were allowed to browse and refresh themselves in preparation for a dreaded fifty-miles dry stage.
At the end of a three-day spell the stockmen filled their water bags, a small tank and some barrels, gave the cattle a last long drink and headed them into the setting sun. Forcing the pace, they pushed on to daylight, took five minutes for a pannikin of tea and a johnnie cake and were off again until noon. They camped for the hours of intensest heat, to press urgently on at sundown into another waterless night.
Towards dawn the leading cattle were stretching out their heads, eyes and nostrils dilated until the whole thirsty mob had broken into an urgent trot, bellowing what the drivers knew as ‘the water call’. It was still a full day stage to the Hamilton River, but knowing how thirsty cattle were quick to smell water on the wind the drovers hoped they might be nearing a billabong. When advance riders discovered that the water scent was being wafted from a private tank, all the steadying tactics of the stockman’s craft were used to force the cattle in a detour past the tantalising spot to which they continued to turn and strain for miles.
One big three-year-old bull managed to break from the mob and gallop back. Duncan McCaully turned his mare after it in the moonlight, his long whip flashing out to cut its flank. The beast turned, head down, to charge, but the rider, already off his horse, seized the bewildered animal by the horns, brought it to the ground, and flung sand into its eyes. It was an old trick, cruel but effective, for an angry, half-blinded animal will always charge the nearest moving object – invariably, unless the stockman is extremely unlucky or inexperienced, the travelling herd which quickly envelops the outlaw and carries him along with it.
The mob strung on sullenly, bellowing its misery, through another sunrise, another dinner camp, too thirsty now to pull at the tufty, dry remnants of Mitchell grass along the way. A few hours’ uneasy spell and off again, the stronger beasts stringing ahead, the weaker lagging painfully.
Towards evening a dull green line of timber marked the winding course of the Hamilton but advance riders bought news that there was not enough water for the great, dry mob at the nearest hole. The drovers knew too well how the cattle would charge the water in their frenzy of thirst until it was churned to an undrinkable slough in which the weaker animals would hopelessly bogged or be smothered in the crush. Grim tragedies of the droving track were known to them all, when perishing herds had stampeded to total destruction in boggy riverbeds.
The stronger cattle were now drafted from the various mobs and taken fifteen miles downstream to a big reach of water while the weaker animals were steadied on to the nearer hole. Only a little water, thick and foul-smelling, floated on the slimy mud, but the cattle drained it frantically and then nuzzled and sucked at the evil slime.
Late that night the sturdier mob, breaking at last from the weary drovers, plunged so precipitously into the big hole that when the mighty thirst was slaked dozens of smothered fish were found floating in the muddy waters. These provided a rare feast for the tired, hungry men, able at last to relax while the exhausted cattle fed quietly out over the river flat.
By the time they reached the big Parapitcherie waterhole on the Georgina everyone in western Queensland was talking drought and the drovers knew they must camp and wait for rain. Optimists in the party attached hopeful significance to ‘the ring around the moon’, the ‘pinky haze’ in the sky at sunset or the antics of insects and birds, but Long Michael at least had no illusions. As the horses has suffered badly over the dry stages and some had died from eating poison weed, he resolved to ride back to Brisbane for a fresh supply. Maybe an 960-mile ride to the capital with an extra mount and pack was no worse than holding cattle on a waterhole and waiting for the drought to break.
Kings in Grass Castles (1959), Random House, Sydney, 2008
Chester Eagle
1971
There was another dance at Gelantipy that night, and I expected that everyone would go home and kill time until it started, but no, not a bit of it. Two or three more jumping events were held before the sports were called off. The horses were skidding b
adly, but there was no sense of urgency, just the feeling, ‘Oh well, looks like we’d better give it away.’ Even then, most people stood around outside their cars and talked on. Lochie and a few of the stockmen-types leaned against the stock-truck that had been used to bring some horses to the meeting and out came the inevitable bottle of beer. It was soon thrown down and another one opened. When the rain became too much and most of the people clustered in cars for another session of talking, these men got up into the truck. There was a water-proof tarpaulin in the back, animal-scented and dirty. Six or seven men got under this and went on with their drinking. Every now and again a hand would reach out from under the tarpaulin and grab a fresh bottle from the sodden carton. Lochie could then be heard biting off the crown seal, and the empty bottle would be dropped out the back of the truck. The slithery tarpaulin kept changing shape like some low-grade organism, taking in beer at one end and dropping empties out the other. I expected some raucous singing, or perhaps a dirty-joke session to break out in the darkness under the cover, but this was a jaundiced and erroneous idea. These men were not the type to shuck off their individuality like that. Instead, the yarning, skiting and bull-shitting went on unabated. ‘How’s old Lumper in the woodchop? He thought he had it.’ ‘How was he; singin’ out, “I got him, I got him.” Jeezus.’ ‘Never in the race.’ ‘Tell you what, if I’d brought that little pony of mine, I’da give bloody whatsisname a go in that hurdle.’ ‘By Jeez, good horse he’s got, all the same.’ This was a male brotherhood, not a reversion to a lower type; they were drawing a terrific excitement from each other that left me amazed . . .