There are few countries in the world
with such varieties of climate as Australia, and though
some stations are out in the great, red-hot, frying
wastes of the Never-Never, others are up in the hills
where a hot night is a thing unknown, where snow falls
occasionally, and where it is no uncommon thing to
spend a summer’s evening by the side of a roaring
fire. In the matter of improvements, too, stations
vary greatly. Some are in a wilderness, with
fittings to match; others have telephones between
homestead and out-stations, the jackeroos dress for
dinner, and the station hands are cowed into touching
their hats and saying “Sir.” Also
stations are of all sizes, and the man who is considered
quite a big squatter in the settled districts is thought
small potatoes by the magnate “out back,”
who shears a hundred and fifty thousand sheep, and
has an overdraft like the National Debt.
Kuryong was a hill-country station
of about sixty thousand acres all told; but they were
good acres, as no one knew better than old Bully Grant,
the owner, of whose history and disposition we heard
something from Pinnock at the club. It was a
highly improved place, with a fine homestead thanks
to Bully Grant’s money, for in the old days it
had been a very different sort of place and
its history is typical of the history of hundreds
of others.
When Andrew Gordon first bought it,
it was held under lease from the Crown, and there
were no improvements to speak of. The station
homestead, so lovingly descanted upon in the advertisement,
consisted of a two-roomed slab hut; the woolshed,
where the sheep were shorn, was made of gumtree trunks
roofed with bark. The wool went down to Sydney,
and station supplies came back, in huge waggons drawn
by eighteen or twenty bullocks, that travelled nine
miles a day on a journey of three hundred miles.
There were no neighbours except at the township of
Kiley’s Crossing, which consisted of two public-houses
and a store. It was a rough life for the young
squatter, and evidently he found it lonely; for on
a visit to Sydney he fell in love with and married
a dainty girl of French descent. Refined, well-educated,
and fragile-looking, she seemed about the last person
in the world to take out to a slab-hut homestead as
a squatter’s wife. But there is an old
saying that blood will tell; and with all the courage
of her Huguenot ancestry she faced the roughness and
discomforts of bush life. On her arrival at the
station the old two-roomed hut was plastered and whitewashed,
additional rooms were built, and quite a neat little
home was the result. Seasons were good, and the
young squatter might have gone on shearing sheep and
selling fat stock till the end of his life but for
the advent of free selection in 1861.
In that year the Legislature threw
open all leasehold lands to the public for purchase
on easy terms and conditions. The idea was to
settle an industrious peasantry on lands hitherto
leased in large blocks to the squatters. This
brought down a flood of settlement on Kuryong.
At the top end of the station there was a chain of
mountains, and the country was rugged and patchy rich
valleys alternating with ragged hills. Here and
there about the run were little patches of specially
good land, which were soon snapped up. The pioneers
of these small settlers were old Morgan Donohoe and
his wife, who had built the hotel at Kiley’s
Crossing; and, on their reports, all their friends
and relatives, as they came out of the “ould
country,” worked their way to Kuryong, and built
little bits of slab and bark homesteads in among the
mountains. The rougher the country, the better
they liked it. They were a horse-thieving, sheep-stealing
breed, and the talents which had made them poachers
in the old country soon made them champion bushmen
in their new surroundings. The leader of these
mountain settlers was one Doyle, a gigantic Irishman,
who had got a grant of a few hundred acres in the
mountains, and had taken to himself a Scotch wife from
among the free immigrants. The story ran that
he was too busy to go to town, but asked a friend
to go and pick a wife for him, “a fine shtrappin’
woman, wid a good brisket on her.”
The Doyles were large, slow, heavy
men, with an instinct for the management of cattle;
they were easily distinguished from the Donohoes,
who were little red-whiskered men, enterprising and
quick-witted, and ready to do anything in the world
for a good horse. Other strangers and outlanders
came to settle in the district, but from the original
settlement up to the date of our story the two great
families of the Doyles and the Donohoes governed the
neighbourhood, and the headquarters of the clans was
at Donohoe’s “Shamrock Hotel,” at
Kiley’s Crossing. Here they used to rendezvous
when they went away down to the plains country each
year for the shearing; for they added to their resources
by travelling about the country shearing, droving,
fencing, tanksinking, or doing any other job that
offered itself, but always returned to their mountain
fastnesses ready for any bit of work “on the
cross” (i.e., unlawful) that might turn up.
When times got hard they had a handy knack of finding
horses that nobody had lost, shearing sheep they did
not own, and branding and selling other people’s
calves.
When they stole stock, they moved
them on through the mountains as quickly as possible,
always having a brother or uncle, or a cousin Terry
or Timothy or Martin or Patsy who had a
holding “beyant.” By these means
they could shift stolen stock across the great range,
and dispose of them among the peaceable folk who dwelt
in the good country on the other side, whose stock
they stole in return. Many a good horse and fat
beast had made the stealthy mountain journey, lying
hidden in gaps and gullies when pursuit grew hot,
and being moved on as things quieted down.
Another striking feature was the way
in which they got themselves mixed up with each other.
Their names were so tangled up that no one could keep
tally of them. There was a Red Mick Donohoe (son
of the old publican), and his cousin Black Mick Donohoe,
and Red Mick’s son Mick, and Black Mick’s
son Mick, and Red Mick’s son Pat, and Black Mick’s
son Pat; and there was Gammy Doyle (meaning Doyle
with the lame leg), and Scrammy Doyle (meaning Doyle
with the injured arm), and Bosthoon Doyle and Omadhaun
Doyle a Bosthoon being a man who never had
any great amount of sense to speak of, while an Omadhaun
is a man who began life with some sense, but lost
most of it on his journey. It was a common saying
in the country-side that if you met a man on the mountains
you should say, “Good-day, Doyle,” and
if he replied, “That’s not my name,”
you should at once say, “Well, I meant no offence,
Mr. Donohoe.”
One could generally pick which was
which of the original stock, but when they came to
intermarry there was no telling t’other from
which. Startling likenesses cropped up among
the relatives, and it was widely rumoured that one
Doyle who was known to be in jail, and who was vaguely
spoken of by the clan as being “away,”
was in fact serving an accumulation of sentences for
himself and other members of the family, whose sins
he had for a consideration taken on himself.
With such neighbours as these fighting
him for every block of land, Andrew Gordon soon came
to the end of his resources, and it was then that
he had to take in his old manager as a partner.
Before Bully Grant had been in the firm long, he had
secured nearly all the good land, and the industrious
yeomanry that the Land Act was supposed to create were
hiding away up the gullies on miserable little patches
of bad land, stealing sheep for a living. Bully
fought them stoutly, impounded their sheep and cattle,
and prosecuted trespassers and thieves; and, his luck
being wonderful, he soon added to the enormous fortune
he had made in mining, while Andrew Gordon died impoverished.
When he died, old Bully gave the management of the
stations to his sons, and contented himself with finding
fault. But one dimly-remembered episode in his
career was talked of by the old hands around Kiley’s
Hotel, long after Grant had become a wealthy man,
and had gone for long trips to England.
Grant, in spite of the judgment and
sagacity on which he prided himself, had at various
times in his career made mistakes mistakes
in station management, mistakes about stock, mistakes
about men, and last, but not least, mistakes about
women; and it was to one of these mistakes that the
gossips referred.
When he was a young man working as
Mr. Gordon’s manager, and living with the horse-breaker
and the ration-carrier on the out-station at Kuryong
(in those days a wild, half-civilised place), he had
for neighbours Red Mick’s father and mother,
the original Mr. and Mrs. Donohoe, and their family.
Their eldest daughter, Peggy “Carrotty
Peg,” her relations called her was
at that time a fine, strapping, bush girl, and the
only unmarried white woman anywhere near the station.
She was as fair-complexioned as Red Mick himself,
with a magnificent head of red hair, and the bust
and limbs of a young Amazon.
This young woman, as she grew up,
attracted the attention of Billy the Bully, and they
used to meet a good deal out in the bush. On such
occasions, he would possibly be occupied in the inspiriting
task of dragging a dead sheep after his horse, to
make a trail to lead the wild dogs up to some poisoned
meat; while the lady, clad in light and airy garments,
with a huge white sunbonnet for head-gear, would be
riding straddle-legged in search of strayed cows.
When Grant left the station, and went away to make
his fortune in mining, it was, perhaps, just a coincidence
that this magnificent young creature grew tired of
the old place and “cleared out,” too.
She certainly went away and disappeared so utterly
that even her own people did not know what had become
of her; to the younger generation her very existence
was only a vague tradition. But it was whispered
here and muttered there among the Doyles and the Donohoes
and their friends and relations, that old Billy the
Bully, on one of his visits to the interior, had been
married to this undesirable lady by a duly accredited
parson, in the presence of responsible witnesses;
and that, when everyone had their own, Carrotty Peg,
if alive, would be the lady of Kuryong. However,
she had never come back to prove it, and no one cared
about asking her alleged husband any unpleasant questions.
So much for the history of its owners;
now to describe the homestead itself. It had
originally consisted of the two-roomed slab hut, which
had been added to from time to time. Kitchen,
outhouses, bachelors’ quarters, saddle-rooms,
and store-rooms had been built on in a kind of straggling
quadrangle, with many corners and unexpected doorways
and passages; and it is reported that a swagman once
got his dole of rations at the kitchen, went away,
and after turning two or three corners, got so tangled
up that when Fate led him back to the kitchen he didn’t
recognise it, and asked for rations over again, in
the firm belief that he was at a different part of
the house.
The original building was still the
principal living-room, but the house had grown till
it contained about twenty rooms. The slab walls
had been plastered and whitewashed, and a wide verandah
ran all along the front. Round the house were
acres of garden, with great clumps of willows and
acacias, where the magpies sat in the heat of
the day and sang to one another in their sweet, low
warble.
The house stood on a spur running
from the hills. Looking down the river from it,
one saw level flats waving with long grasses, in which
the solemn cattle waded knee-deep. Here and there
clumps of willows and stately poplars waved in the
breeze. In the clear, dry air all colours were
startlingly vivid, and round the nearer foothills wonderful
lights and shadows played and shifted, while sometimes
a white fleece of mist would drift slowly across a
distant hill, like a film of snowy lace on the face
of a beautiful woman. Away behind the foothills
were the grand old mountains, with their snow-clad
tops gleaming in the sun.
The garden was almost as lacking in
design as the house. There were acres of fruit
trees, with prairie grass growing at their roots, trees
whereon grew luscious peaches and juicy egg-plums;
long vistas of grapevines, with little turnings and
alleys, regular lovers’ walks, where the scent
of honeysuckle intoxicated the senses. At the
foot of the garden was the river, a beautiful stream,
fed by the mountain-snow, and rushing joyously over
clear gravel beds, whose million-tinted pebbles dashed
in the sunlight like so many opals.
In some parts of Australia it is difficult
to tell summer from winter; but up in this mountain-country
each season had its own attractions. In the spring
the flats were green with lush grass, speckled with
buttercups and bachelors’ buttons, and the willows
put out their new leaves, and all manner of shy dry-scented
bush flowers bloomed on the ranges; and the air was
full of the song of birds and the calling of animals.
Then came summer, when never a cloud decked the arch
of blue sky, and all animated nature drew into the
shade of big trees until the evening breeze sprang
up, bringing sweet scents of the dry grass and ripening
grain. In autumn, the leaves of the English trees
turned all tints of yellow and crimson, and the grass
in the paddocks went brown; and the big bullock
teams worked from dawn till dark, hauling in their
loads of hay from the cultivation paddocks.
But most beautiful of all was winter,
when logs blazed in the huge fireplaces, and frosts
made the ground crisp, and the stock, long-haired
and shaggy, came snuffling round the stables, picking
up odds and ends of straw; when the grey, snow-clad
mountains looked but a stone’s throw away in
the intensely clear air, and the wind brought a colour
to the cheeks and a tingling to the blood that made
life worth living.
Such was Kuryong homestead, where
lived Charlie Gordon’s mother and his brother
Hugh, with a lot of children left by another brother
who, like many others, had gone up to Queensland to
make his fortune, and had left his bones there instead;
and to look after these young folk there was a governess,
Miss Harriott.