To Ride a Fine Horse (3 page)

 

‘One thousand pounds, no more and no less,

No more and no less,

To set you up in land and stock,

In land and stock!'

 

Sometimes he would laugh aloud at the very thought of it. He, Patsy Durack, in his second-hand clothes and battered straw hat (locally known as a ‘cabbage tree'), to be worth a thousand pounds! It seemed absurd, and yet it must come true, he thought, and a thousand pounds was a sizeable pot of gold.

Four or five miles from his destination he became aware of a strange noise, a distant but slowly
increasing roar like the approach of a mighty wave. He remarked about it to a miner he had picked up on the way and learned that it was the noise of the goldfield itself. He was told that it was a great number of noises rolled into one—the sound of more anvils and picks and shovels than he had ever seen, the banging and jangling of a few thousand buckets and tin dishes, the groaning and creaking of the waggons, the bellowing of the bullock teams and the cracking of whips. Besides all this there was the clatter of hoofs and barrows and a good deal of shouting and fighting as well.

‘The time comes when you can pick them out, one from the other,' his companion said, ‘even the rattle of the Long Toms.'

‘The Long Toms?' Patsy asked.

‘You're a new chum all right,' the other laughed. ‘They are the cradles used to sift the gold from the pebbles and the sand.'

‘So they're still getting gold?' Patsy asked eagerly.

‘Yes, they're getting it,' he was told, ‘but nothing like last year when they were playing skittles with bottles of champagne and spreading butter between five pound notes and feeding them to the dogs!'

Patsy was shocked for he did not yet know the Australian habit of leg pulling and thought this was a very foolish way to behave, no matter how much gold one might find. He had often tried to picture a goldfield, but it was not at all as he had ever imagined. Never could he have dreamed of such a motley crowd as he found among the calico tents, windlasses, ventilators, shafts and great mounds of upturned earth. Men from almost every country in the world had flocked to the call of gold. Mud and dust clung to their beards, their red shirts and blue dungaree trousers. Almost all wore shady cabbage-tree hats, many with a circle of corks dangling from the brim to keep the flies away. The women, in their poke bonnets and long dresses, were almost as grimy as the men and Patsy noticed that many of them had rough voices and manners such as he had never known.

He had brought some bolts of material among his goods and this they purchased eagerly, while the men clamoured for the mining equipment, the tin dishes, billy cans and camp ovens. His trade was brisk and he could hardly believe his eyes when payment came in gold dust or raw nuggets carefully weighed out on a pair of scales. One big Irish miner paid him in a piece of gold shaped like a horseshoe.

‘May it bring you more luck than I have had, young fellow,' he said, and Patsy, who as a simple Irish boy was superstitious about omens and signs of this sort, kept the nugget and had it set as a brooch for his mother.

The miner's life was crude and rough, but Patsy enjoyed it to the full. When he had sold all his goods, he pegged out a claim of his own and worked it hard. He made many friends on the fields and had enough experiences to provide him with good stories for the rest of his life.

. . .
he pegged out a claim of his own
. . . 

Among those he met was a police superintendent named Robert O'Hara Burke, a well educated young man from County Galway. He and Patsy would often talk together of their homeland, and discuss horses, for which they shared the same passion. Many were
inclined to laugh at Burke's romantic talk and wild ideas about opening up the unknown spaces of the continent, but Patsy never tired of listening to him. Burke had made a study of Australian exploration and had maps showing just how far the various explorers had gone, and how much of the continent was still a mystery. He told Patsy of the brave men who had gone and of others who had tried in vain to cross the continent. Up to this time no one had succeeded in doing this, except around the desolate southern coast, and many, including Burke, believed that great rivers would yet be found to flow into an inland sea.

Patsy was not surprised, therefore, to hear some seven years later that Robert O'Hara Burke was competing for a prize offered to the first man to cross the continent from coast to coast. He little thought, however, while poring over maps on the Ovens diggings, that his own land hunger would one day lead him to the country where Burke and his party met their tragic end.

After eighteen months on the fields Patsy totted up his earnings and found that they amounted to just £1000. He was tempted to go on in the hopes of doubling or trebling this amount, but remembering Mr Emanuel's advice, he said good-bye to his mining friends and returned to his family in Goulburn. He was now a strong young man of twenty and had grown a dark beard that made him look older than his years. His mother, sisters and younger brothers felt immensely proud of him, especially when people around Goulburn began to point him out as a young man who would make his mark.

Having found his pot of gold he now rode not one but several fine horses. So far both his wish and the tinker's fortune had come true, but in the meantime he had grown up and his ambitions had grown too.

P
ATSY
had been little more than a week in Goulburn when he set out again—this time in search of land, and knowing that even with the money to buy it this might not prove an easy task. There were still no fences to mark the boundaries of the different properties or to divide private from government land, while established settlers, who naturally wanted to go on using the unclaimed country as long as possible, would give no information to a newcomer in search of a selection of his own. Patsy had learned, however, that if he rode around with his eyes and ears open, telling no one his business, and striking up odd acquaintances, for which he had a gift, he would sooner or later hear something to his advantage.

At the end of 1855, some months after his return from the fields, he managed to purchase 273 acres on Dixon's Creek, about twelve miles from Goulburn, and another 240 acres about twenty miles south of that town. Other blocks around Dixon's Creek he reserved for his Uncle Darby and family and for other Irish friends and relatives who were having trouble in finding a place to settle down. They all moved in almost at once and set about pioneering their ‘selections'.

Patsy's £1000 would not have gone far without further help from Mr Emanuel, but although the word ‘mortgage' had frightened him at first he soon learned
that few men had been able to make a start in the colony without help of this kind. He decided that the Dixon's Creek property would be the family headquarters and here he would start a mixed farm with some good dairy cows, pigs, poultry and stud horses.

The other blocks would be the beginnings of a cattle run, for although up to this time most of the settlers had gone in for sheep, the population had so increased over the gold-rush years that there was now a good demand for beef. Cattle raising required less labour than sheep, and Patsy had found besides that there were ways and means of getting at least a small herd together for very little money. Cattle could be bought ‘for a song' from the pound in Goulburn where straying stock were kept until either claimed or purchased, and there was another even cheaper method for men who did not mind hard work with a spice of danger. On many of the bigger properties numbers of cattle and horses had run wild and become such a nuisance that the owners willingly issued ‘musterer's licences' free of charge to men who were prepared to hunt them up and take them away. Much of this wild stock was useless, but there were some good young animals among the ‘scrubbers', as the wild cattle were called, and horses of fine Arab strain among the ‘brumbies' in the ranges.

You can imagine how Patsy jumped at this chance of obtaining free stock, with some good hard riding thrown in. As no man could be expected to muster wild cattle and horses on his own, he joined up with groups of stockmen, who agreed to make a fair division of the spoils.

These were exciting days for Patsy. He had as yet no experience of stock work in Australia and was eager to learn all he could from his companions, some of whom were the best horsemen and stockriders in the
country. They were men of all types and from all stations in life, among them ex-convicts, sons of English aristocrats, ex-army officers—mostly from Indian regiments—and always a few Highland Scots and madcap Irishmen. Some were in the game from necessity and others simply for the thrill of those breakneck rides after the wild cattle of scrub and range with their sweeping horns and shaggy hides. All shared a love of horses and liked nothing better than to talk of the famous riding exploits of their time. Their horses were trained to ‘turn on a plate', as they said, to wheel and dodge about after the wily beasts that made off at a gallop on catching the scent of man or horse.

Here, around the Lachlan, Snowy and Murrumbidgee Rivers, was the great training ground of the Australian stockmen who, year by year, were pushing out the edges of settlement into the great unknown.

Here, too, legends were being made that would be immortalized by the famous bush balladists of later years—Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo' Paterson, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Will Ogilvie. ‘Banjo' Paterson had not yet written ‘The Man From Snowy River', but that famous muster of wild bush horses ‘where mountain ash and kurrajong grew wild' was the sort of story told around every stockman's camp fire in Patsy's youth. Many local incidents were already being strung into rough rhymes, to be recited or sung, often soon forgotten, sometimes remembered and gathered together in Paterson's volume of ‘Old Bush Songs', which tell us so much of how these early stockmen behaved and dressed.

 

“Just mark him as he jogs along, his stockwhip on his knee,

His white mole pants and polished boots and jaunty cabbage-tree.

His horsey-pattern Crimean shirt of colours bright and gay,

And the stockmen of Australia, what dressy boys are they.

 

The stockmen of Australia, what rowdy boys are they,

They will curse and swear a hurricane if you come in their way.

They dash along the forest on black, bay, brown or grey,

And the stockmen of Australia, hard-riding boys are they. . . .'

 

Another long ballad, sung to a then familiar tune, told of how the stockmen gloried in their wild and dangerous rides:

 

‘ “Oh for a tame and quiet herd,”

I hear some crawler cry,

But give to me the mountain mob

With the flash of their tameless eye. . . .

There's mischief in yon wide-horned steer,

There's danger in yon cow;

Then mount, my merry horsemen all,

The wild mob's bolting now—