In the earliest days of Port Southern, settlers tracking inland or
further along the coast, had to cross the Wirree, driving their cattle
and horses before them. The shallows of the river where they crossed
began to be called the Wirree Ford. The tracks converged there, and it
was not long before a shanty appeared on the left bank a few hundred
yards from the broad and slowly-moving river.
The Wirree came down from the hills and flowed across the plains at the
foot of the ranges. The whole of the flat land it watered was spoken of
as the Wirree river district, or the Wirree. The stream emptied itself
into the waters of Bass Straits. Opposite was Van Diemen's Land, the
beautiful green island on which penal settlements had been established.
Men had been known to escape from it to the mainland. They made the
dangerous passage of the Straits in open boats, and sometimes were
picked up in an exhausted condition by a frigate policing the coast, or
a trader, and sent back to Hobart Town or Port Arthur. Sometimes their
dead bodies were tossed by the sea on the shores they had been trying to
reach, and sometimes, steering by the muddy waters of the river that
flowed out from the nearest point opposite the Island, bearing silt and
drift-wood for a couple of miles into the sea, they reached the land of
promise and freedom.
As the beaten grass path along the seaboard became the main stock route
between Port Southern and Rane, a newly-founded settlement at the
further eastern end of the coast, a township of curious mushroom growth,
cropped up about the Wirree Ford and McNab's shanty.
It was a collection of huts, wattle and dab, whitewashed, for the most
part; but some of them were of sun-baked sods, plastered together, or of
the stones which were scattered over the plains or filled the creek
beds. McNab's weatherboard shanty, with its sign-board of a black bull,
with red-rimmed eyes on a white ground, was by far the most pretentious.
The history of these dwellers about McNab's was a matter of suspicion.
They arrived from nowhere, out of the night, silently, and it was
surmised, crept up the river in the cockle-shell boats which had brought
them over the Straits and were sunk in the slowly-moving river when they
had served their purpose.
The fertile flats, stretching to the edge of the mountains, had been
taken up before McNab got his holding on an arm of the Wirree. He set
about acquiring the selvedge of the plains which was cut off from the
finer, more arable land by a scrubby line of densely growing ti-tree.
Most of the Wirree Ford men ran cattle on these strips of coarse-grassed
land, thrashed by the sea breezes. But they were no sticklers for the
niceties of boundaries and property laws. They drove their first,
wild-eyed, scraggy herds whither they listed, a cursing, blasphemous
crew, none dared gainsay them. It was reckoned better to have the
good-will than the enmity of the Wirree river men. The body of a settler
who had threatened "to have the law of them" for grazing their beasts on
his land was, a few days afterwards, found in the river, drifting with
the tide out to sea. Some of the Wirree men made a living as fishermen.
Others maintained themselves by a desultory farming. They ploughed the
grey land of the seaboard with wooden hand-ploughs. But many of them
thrived on what they could make out of the stockmen and drovers who
passed through the township on their way to Rane or to the Port.
McNab was powerful enough even in those days, and many and ingenious
were the stories he invented to account for the presence of men who came
to the Wirree Ford unexpectedly.
As the settlement grew, it did justice to the rumoured accounts of its
origin. McNab's was the meeting place of stockmen, drovers and teamsters
on the southern roads, and the carouses held there were night-long. It
was recognised as a hotbed of thieves and ruffians by the roadsters, and
no man of substance or any pretensions at all, would lodge the night in
any of the mud-built huts within a stone's throw of the river.
Before long, the Wirree men had fat cattle to dispose of. An open space
between the huts, not far from McNab's, was used as a sale yard. It was
then that settlers who wanted good prices for their beasts had to drive
them to the Wirree market. A better bargain was driven in the Wirree
square than anywhere else. So Wirree Ford became Wirreeford, and thrived
and prospered until it was the busiest cattle market in the south.
To a certain extent, its prosperity threw an air of respectability over
it. At first, cattle-owners and farmers from the hills entered the
township in the morning and left it before the shadows of night fell.
They did their business, and left the Wirree not much better off for
their coming, venturing into the shanty for a midday meal only, and
drinking sparingly, if at all, of the curious, dark spirits it vended.
Then stores were opened. There were less fearsome comings and goings.
Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty set up a shanty and proceeded to business with an
air of great propriety. Women and children were brought into the
township for the cattle sales. Sale days became weekly holidays. They
meant the donning of festive ribbands by the women and children, the
climbing into high spring-carts and buggies, and driving along the
winding track from the hills to the township, where groceries, dress
stuffs and household furnishings could be bought, and stowed in the back
of the carts for the home journey.
Sale days, however, still ended in gaming and drinking brawls at the
shanties, and sometimes in the dropping of a heavy, still body into the
Wirree, when the tides would carry it out to sea.
It was the disappearance of a young farmer from the West Hills after a
night at the Black Bull that made Donald Cameron decide to take action.
He, backed by other farmers and well-to-do hill settlers, made
representations to the Port authorities as to the lawless character and
conduct of Wirreeford township.
A trooper who rode into it a few days later was pelted with stones,
tarred and feathered, and sent back to Port Southern.
Then a building was rim-up on the outskirts of the township--a
ramshackle house built of overlapping, smooth, pine shingles. It was
whitewashed, so that it stood out on the darkest nights to remind
roisterers that law and order were in their midst. And as soon as it was
finished, John M'Laughlin, a police-sergeant from the Port, took up his
residence in it. He mitigated the impression that undue severity would
be meted out to evil-doers from the new police head-quarters, by
genially brawling with most of his neighbours at McNab's as soon as he
arrived, very successfully intimating that he was far too long-sighted,
easy-going and convivial a soul to interfere with the Wirree's little
way of doing things.
Donald Cameron was well known in Wirreeford when it began to be a cattle
market of importance. So was Davey--Young Davey--as he was called when
he began to go regularly to the sales in the years that followed the
fires.
Cameron worked all day in the sale-yards with his men. He drove in his
own beasts in the morning, threw off his coat for the drafting and, when
the sales were over, went out of the township, a stolid, stooping
figure, on his heavy bay cob. Although he sometimes made close on a
thousand pounds on a day's sales, he went out of the township, as often
as not, without spending a penny.
It was said that he was the wealthiest man in the countryside, and as
"mean as they make 'em." Yet his disinclination to spend money was made
subservient to his sense of justice; and a spirit of matter-of-fact
integrity that he carried round with him made the Wirree people regard
him with suspicious awe. The iron quality of his will, the hard,
straight gaze of his eyes, were difficult things for men with uneasy
consciences to encounter. Because he was the first man in the country,
it was reckoned a matter of prestige to have the patronage of Donald
Cameron of Ayrmuir, whether for a meal, store order, or any job
whatever. In jest, half earnest, he was called the Laird of Ayrmuir.
Wirree men said that Thad McNab loathed Donald Cameron "as the devil
loathes holy water."
McNab was not the devil in their eyes, nor Donald Cameron holy water,
but the saying perhaps suggested to them the composite forces of the two
men. Thad, with his twisted mind, his cruel eyes, his treacherous
underhand ways, stood to them for something in the nature of the power
of evil. Donald Cameron, with his harsh integrity, his unbending virtue,
his parsimony, and sober respectability, stood for something in the
nature of abstract good. They had the respect for him that people
sometimes have for a standard which has been hung before their eyes, and
which they have not been able to live up to. But Thad was their aider
and abettor.
Thad, for all his tyrannies, blackmail, petulances, made life easier for
them. They stood by him and blessed him, cursing Donald Cameron and his
sort, who would have sent them back to the prison cells and torture of
the Island. It was not from motives of sheer kindness that McNab stood
by them, they knew, but because it paid him. Nevertheless, the thing
worked out in the same way. Donald Cameron was more their enemy than
Thad. Thad's feud with him amused them as much as a cock fight; their
money was on their own bird, and they barracked for him, idly,
light-heartedly, scoffing at his enemy.
Almost every man in the Wirree was in McNab's debt. He knew more about
their lives and antecedents than was to their soul's comfort. They
suspected that more than one of the men who had been taken back to the
Island had been put away by McNab, and that those lean, crooked hands of
his had fingered Government money--rewards for the capture of escaped
convicts. But so long as they were in with Thad McNab, Wirreeford men
with pasts that would not bear looking into thought they were all right.
Although there were rumours of treacherous dealings on his part, with
child-like simplicity, with the faith of the desperate, they trusted
McNab, believing that he stood between them and the prisons of Port
Arthur. They believed that if they were "in with Thad," they need not
wake, sweating, out of their sleep at the thought of the "cat," or worry
if, forgetful of consequences, they gave that tell-tale start at the
clank and rattle of irons.
It was pretty well understood that Thad McNab and Sergeant M'Laughlin
"worked" together. Thad had been hand-in-glove with him since he came to
the Wirree River. The fact sometimes stood unruly spirits in good stead
when there was a merry night at the Black Bull. But when there was an
inconvenient accident over the cards once or twice, and when there was a
hold-up on the Rane road just outside the township, too, it was conceded
that M'Laughlin had earned his screw. Thad saw to it that occasionally
he made an appearance of doing his duty. If it had been imagined at
head-quarters that Sergeant M'Laughlin winked at irregularities in the
application of the law at Wirreeford, he might have been moved on, and
that would not have suited the landlord of the Black Bull, who would
then have had another man to deal with, or have found that another man
was dealing with him.
Donald Cameron made no secret of his attitude to McNab. After M'Laughlin
had been several months in the township, and there was no outward or
visible sight of his having mended its ways, Mr. Cameron made
representation to the authorities at Port Southern, and through them to
the powers that had their official residence in Melbourne, in respect to
Thadeus McNab's position and breaches of the law in Wirreeford. He was
clear in his own mind that there was a case against McNab; first, for
harbouring convicts escaped from Van Diemen's Land; and secondly, for
being the possessor of a still, and for turning it to account in sly
grog making. John Ross, Mathew Morrison, and the rest of the hill folk
and settlers at the farther end of the plains, upheld him in this effort
to rid the district of McNab; but although an inquiry was made, nothing
came of it.
Donald Cameron gained no extra popularity in the Wirree on the first of
his counts. Thad's position was, if anything, strengthened by Cameron's
hostility. Every man in the township knew that he had to stand by McNab,
or McNab would not stand by him; therefore when an officer from the Port
came to investigate conditions in Wirreeford, he found nothing to take
exception to. He reported that the local police officer was efficient,
and that complaints of the hill settlers were due to a personal rancour
existing between Donald Cameron and the landlord of the Black Bull.
Thad flourished like a green bay tree after this failure to move him,
and forged the weapon of a very serviceable hate against Donald Cameron.
He kept it very carefully scabbarded, but occasionally it leapt forth,
and its mettle was visible to all and sundry. Ordinarily, Thad kept a
locked brain; it was only in rare transports of rage that he revealed
anything of its crooked workings. And then those who saw them looked to
their own behaviour, and were careful to do nothing that would bring
them into its toils.
Probably nobody but Cameron himself thought McNab had swallowed that
little business of the inquiry when, a few months later, he was fawning
round him, telling him that dinners were to be served at the "Bull" on
sale days, and that his patronage would be an esteemed favour. Those who
heard him say: "Things has not been as they might have been, always, at
the Black Bull, Mr. Cameron--you have had reason to complain in the
past--but everything is goin' to be different for the future," could not
believe their ears. It was very humbly, with a flattering deference,
that McNab had asked "the laird" to help him to improve the tone of the
place by occasionally having a meal in it.
Donald Cameron had been in the habit of taking his meat-pasty, or bread
and cheese sandwich to the sale yards in his pocket. He ate his lunch
there at midday when most of the men made tracks for the bar opposite.
But after a while, he took his meals at the Black Bull, lowering not a
whit of his dignity in the doing of it, and treating McNab as curtly in
his own establishment as he did anywhere else. When he was down with
rheumatics in the early spring, the place had open doors to Davey. He
was served like a duke in it.
Young Davey promised to be a chip of the old block, the Wirree said. He
worked as insatiably as the old man, and was no more than a roadmender
by the look of him. His grey trousers had many a patch on them, and his
hat was as weathered a bit of felt as was seen in the yards. He walked
with the slouch of the cattle-men--men who have spent most of their days
in the saddle.
When he flung off his hat, it was seen he was good-looking enough, with
an air of breed about him, a something the Wirree did not quite get.
There was a great deal of his mother in the cast of his features, and
his eyes were grey and green like hers, but his mouth was Donald
Cameron's set in a boy's face. Davey was a shy, awkward fellow and spoke
as little as the old man, though it was acknowledged that if his hand
was as rarely in his breeches' pockets as his father's, it was because
there was nothing in them. It was well known that Donald Cameron worked
his son like a convict, and kept him on short commons, giving him
neither wages nor pocket-money, so that he blushed when a down-and-out
blackguard asked him for the price of drink and he had not got it to
give.
He fed with the old man, this young Davey Cameron, and was never seen in
the bars. Few of the men who entered the shanties could say that they
had had much to do with Cameron and his son, except John Ross and the
Morrison boys, who occasionally dropped into McNab's. But they were of
the same sort--hardworking, thrifty, God-fearing, respectable, homely
people of the hills, who despised the Wirree River township, its
antecedents, descendants, and associations, and did business with it
only because business was better done there than anywhere else.
The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had been gone from the hills for over a
year when Wirreeford began to make concessions for the sake of the
younger generation.
Although cards were shuffled and dice were thrown at the Black Bull,
when the rush-lights flickered in the windows after the sales, and the
little fires of cow-dung--lighted before the doors of the houses to keep
away the sandflies and mosquitoes--glowed in the dusk, sending up faint
wreaths of blue smoke, Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty threw open her parlour, and
there was dancing in it until the small hours.
The hill people lent the countenance of their presence to days of
out-door sports, and to the dancing at Mrs. Hegarty's on Christmas and
New Year's day. The Ross boys danced with bright-eyed Wirree girls.
Morrison's Kitty and some of the other girls from the hills learnt the
reels and jigs that their parents had danced in the country beyond the
seas, they were always talking of. The old people danced too. There were
nights of wholesome, heart-warming merriment and the singing of old
songs.
Only Donald Cameron and his wife held aloof from these festivities. But
before long it was observed that Young Davey was going to the monthly
dancing with the Rosses. He rode down from the hills with the boys and
Jess. They made the Wirree streets ring as they galloped to Hegarty's,
and their laughter streeled out on the wind behind them, as they went
home in the early hours of the morning, when even the roisterers at the
Black Bull had fallen asleep in uneasy attitudes about its verandahs.