To Ride a Fine Horse (2 page)

‘Are you so rich then,' he said, ‘that you will not accept a small reward?'

Patsy, who was too proud to appear eager for money, said that he hoped one day to be rich enough to own such a carriage for himself, since he planned to go to Australia and dig for gold. The man, who proved to be none other than the great Lord Dunraven of Adare, pressed a coin into Patsy's hand.

‘Then here's a piece to go on with,' he said as he stepped back into his coach and drove away.

Many years later Patsy was to meet this man's son, who became a great fighter for the Irish cause.

‘Your father once gave me a sovereign,' Patsy told him, ‘but for which I might well have lived and died a struggling tenant farmer in County Clare.'

‘Nonsense,' said the younger Dunraven when he
had told his story. ‘Many are given such a chance but few know how to use it.'

No doubt what he said was true, but all his life Patsy was to remember that as a magic moment. He had stood, open-mouthed, looking after the retreating vehicle, then, with a cry of joy, had jumped into his cart and driven back to market. There he purchased a sow, two laying hens and, to celebrate his great good luck, a tiny present for each member of his family.

In later years he would tell his children how that had seemed indeed an enchanted coin, for the hens laid well and the sow soon produced a litter of fat piglets. The sick children grew stronger with better food, and before long they had managed to save enough for the passage money to Australia.

Sadly but hopefully the family—mother, father, Patsy with his five sisters and little brother—packed their bags and bundles of homespun clothes and gathered together their few possessions—a spinning wheel, a few cooking utensils and a wooden cradle that had rocked generations of Irish children. They then said good-bye to friends and relatives and set off across the channel to England and the port of Plymouth.

It was a cold February morning of the year 1853 as the good ship
Harriet,
its decks lined with sad-faced migrants, sailed off into the mist. Patsy, who had always been musical, took out the old fiddle left him by his grandfather, and began to play a merry tune. Soon many of the tearful travellers were dancing on the deck, for it was hard not to be infected by this boy's cheerful spirit. It began to seem to others as well as himself that the land of exile might also prove to be the place of dreams come true.

 

B
UT
after all, for many on board the
Harriet,
it was a tragic journey. Conditions on migrant ships had improved by that time, but such vessels were still overcrowded, the food was poor and sicknesses and even deaths were taken for granted. This time an epidemic of measles had broken out on the way. Eleven children died and were buried at sea, but Patsy's family, even little Sarah, who had always been so small and delicate, somehow survived.

In other ways it was considered a good trip for they covered the thirteen thousand sea miles to New South Wales in three and a half months.

Sydney was still a rough, young town but it had grown quickly since the gold rush and already boasted fine homes and big business houses. Patsy's parents were shocked at the behaviour of many of the people but, for himself, the boy was thrilled and excited by all these new sights and sounds. He was fascinated to notice men and women of so many races and colours, some quite black like those they had seen when the ship stopped briefly at the Cape of Good Hope. A number of these he learned were Pacific Islanders, but others, selling pots of bush honey, clothes-props and rush brooms, were true Australian Aborigines. He watched them curiously and asked questions about them, but no one seemed much interested.

‘They are poor things,' he was told, ‘not very intelligent and of little use to the white man. They can be a great nuisance at times, but as they are supposed to be dying out so quickly, you need not concern yourself about them.'

So Patsy, little knowing how often his fate was to lie in the hands of these people and how much their friendship and help would mean to him, began instead to ask how soon a man might come to own a horse. Almost everybody went on horseback here as a matter of course. He could see too that the mounts were no mean hacks, and that many had the proud step and arched necks of the Arab breed. His Uncle Darby, who had come from inland to meet the family, said he must be patient, for after three years in the colony, although he rode good horses on the property where he was employed, they were not his own.

Almost everybody went on horseback here
 . . . 

To a boy of seventeen, three years seemed far too long to wait to own a horse and Patsy then enquired about getting to the goldfields. Both his father and uncle chided him for this. He must content himself with a steady job, they said, learn how to work as a farmer in the new land, and one day, if he was hard-working, careful and patient, he could save enough to buy some land and stock of his own.

On arrival in Australia his Uncle Darby had been engaged to work on Kippilaw, a fine property near Goulburn, one hundred and thirty miles inland from Sydney. Here he had since remained with his wife, the baby girl born on the ship, and two Australian-born sons called John and Patrick.

As the station owner, Mr Chisholm, had also offered to find work and a home for Darby's relatives, it was
to Goulburn they set out together in one of the waggons that brought the big bales of wool from Kippilaw to the port.

All the way along, Darby told them about the country, about the convict days, then past, and the bushrangers, some of whom were still at large. He told of the first men to cross the mountains with their flocks and herds and to take up land in the virgin bush, of those who had prospered and those who had failed.

He told too of the time news came to Goulburn that gold had been discovered in the Turon River valley about 160 miles west of Sydney, and how the population had gone almost mad. Men, women and even children had joined the procession of prospectors, simply walking out of their homes and businesses. They had gone on horseback, by cart, waggon, buggy or on foot, carrying their goods on their backs or in barrows, which were sometimes no more than wooden packing-cases hastily mounted on wheels.

Almost all Mr Chisholm's labourers made off with the rest, but Darby had stayed and very glad he was to have had so much good sense. A few had found their fortunes, to be sure, but most had been disappointed and had either returned to their jobs or gone hopefully on from one new gold strike to the next. Patsy's heart sank as he listened.

‘But surely it is not all over?' he asked. ‘There must be more gold still to be found?'

His uncle shrugged. ‘Oh, there are still some diggings being worked in Victoria, but from what I hear of it they are almost at an end.'

And as they jogged along Darby sang a popular ditty about a man who had returned sadder and wiser from ‘the diggins-oh':

‘I've come back all skin and bone

From the diggins-oh.

And I wish I'd never gone

To the diggins-oh.

Believe me, 'tis no fun

I once weighed fifteen stone,

But they brought me down to one

At the diggins-oh! . . .

 

I built a hut with mud

At the diggins-oh.

That got washed away by flood

At the diggins-oh.

I used to dig, and cry

It wouldn't do to die,

Undertaker's charge too high

At the diggins-oh! . . .'

 

Somewhere inside himself Patsy still believed that at least a little pot of gold must be waiting for him, and he was happy as they jolted along over the mountains and across the wide Australian plains. To many newcomers the country seemed harsh and forbidding, but Patsy had loved it from the start. It seemed to call to his youth and energy and he revelled in its strangeness and spaciousness.

His first sight of the big plains from the mountain summit was one he would never forget, for here was a vast, open land, unbroken by fences or walls, where a man on a good horse might go galloping for miles and miles. Most of this country, his uncle explained, was already ‘taken up', but government or crown
land was all the time being broken into selections for small settlers.

‘I have saved all I can to put into a block and four legs,' he said, which was a saying of the times meaning a piece of land and stock to graze on it. ‘A block', he explained, in answer to Patsy's question, might be anything from twenty to fifty acres, at about £1 an acre, but to make a decent start a man needed three or four times as much, and that meant a lot of money. At the time fifty or a hundred acres seemed to Patsy a tremendous property and he felt that when he could own so much land he would be well satisfied. He could then ride his estate like a fine squire indeed, but how long must he wait?

Mr Chisholm of Kippilaw had been well pleased to have two more such as Darby Durack who were not afraid of work and knew how a job should be done. Patsy's father, Michael Durack, was an expert carpenter and thatcher as well as being a practical man who could handle stock and grow crops and vegetables. Fortunately he had already taught his son a great deal, for he was not to be spared to help his family settle in the new land. They had been little more than two months at Kippilaw when he was run over by a horse and dray and died in his son's arms.

Kind people, touched by the grief of the family, so newly arrived and almost penniless, came to their assistance. One family offered a home to the widow, her younger children and the baby son, little Jerry, born in Goulburn just after his father's death. The older girls were given employment on near-by farms, while Patsy, as you may not be surprised to hear, set off at once in search of his pot of gold.

P
ATSY
at eighteen was a lean stripling with black curly hair, merry blue eyes and friendly ways. He was a good runner, could dance an Irish fling and nimbly tap dance as he played on his fiddle, flute or tin whistle. After his father's death he had needed his gift for making friends as never before and he used it well. Two men who helped him were Mr Chisholm of Kippilaw and Mr Solomon Emanuel, who had a bank, a store, a hotel and other businesses in Goulburn. To both of these he had gone for advice and had told them of his great wish to seek his fortune at the goldfield. They had not discouraged him, for they could see he was a sensible youth and desperately anxious to earn enough to make a home for his family. They had given him good advice, however, to which he listened carefully.

He should go, they said, to the diggings at Ovens, in Victoria, some two hundred and twenty miles south of Goulburn. Here prospects were still fairly good and he might strike it lucky, but he should have another string to his bow. Mr Chisholm supplied him with the loan of a horse and cart and Mr Emanuel stocked it with merchandise to sell to the diggers. When Patsy protested that he had no money for all this, the kindly Jew explained that he might sell the goods on commission and pay only for what he could dispose of.

Patsy was deeply touched by such confidence in a poor Irish boy, and almost a stranger at that, but Mr Emanuel was a shrewd judge of character and knew he would not regret his generosity. What he did not know was that this was to be only the beginning of a lifelong friendship and that he and Patsy Durack would do greater things in partnership than sell pots and pans, picks and shovels to miners on the Ovens River.

One last piece of advice the good man gave Patsy before he drove away.

‘Come back when you've made one thousand pounds—no more and no less,' he said. ‘You can raise credit enough on that to set you up in land and stock, but if you stay on in the hopes of making more you may very well find yourself back where you started, like so many others I have known.'

Driving south in his covered cart over the winding, dusty bush roads, the words ran through Patsy's head like a persistent tune.