THE OLD STATION.
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.