To Ride a Fine Horse (10 page)

A vessel had been chartered to take the men with twenty-three horses, stores and equipment from Brisbane to Darwin. Here they hired a second, smaller ship to bring them to Cambridge Gulf and also took on two Aboriginal boys, known as Pannikin and Pint-pot. After a rough trip in which several precious horses were killed by the rolling of the ship they made a landing near what they thought to be the mouth of the Ord River.

The Captain of the vessel was loath to leave the little party in this lonely and unknown land and had grave doubts that they could survive the long journey of some six hundred miles with so few horses. He 
liked even less the way, on the night of their arrival, native fires had sprung up on the surrounding hills. The two Darwin boys were full of the usual stories about the savagery and treachery of the Kimberley tribes and camped close to the white man's fire.

There were setbacks from the beginning, for the river they had thought the Ord soon petered out, and one stream after another disappointed them by turning in the wrong direction. Rough, mountainous country wore down their horses' hoofs and travelling was difficult and slow.

Natives surrounded them nightly and appeared to be following them at a distance, until one day a host of naked warriors appeared suddenly behind them, with threatening spears. Stumpy Michael felt that to fire on them would be a fatal mistake and instead ordered his men to remain quietly while he rode forward steadily with his hands outstretched. The oncoming natives paused but others leapt from behind with flaming branches and set alight the tall, rank grass. Luckily the wind was blowing in the opposite direction and at last the blacks, trapped between a river and the fire, were forced to jump into the water and swim for their lives.

At last, after the loss of several more horses, the weary travellers found the Ord and continued on their way to the coast. They had been forced to leave a great deal of equipment to lighten the load for their remaining mounts, which were too weak and footsore to be ridden over the last few hundred miles. The explorers, whose boots had long since worn out, had to stumble along with only rags and hessian to protect their blistered feet. Fever added to their discomforts, 
and when they reached the coast at last, after six months' hard travelling, the ship they had arranged to pick them up had come and gone again, thinking they must have met with disaster. They waited six weeks on the beach at Beagle Bay until the vessel returned to see whether they had turned up in the meantime.

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.

P
ATSY
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.