Kings in Grass Castles [Paperback]

This is the great modern day classic of Australian settlement that I just had to read. The true story is set in the last half of the nineteenth century and spans the lifetime of Irishman Patrick "Patsy" Durack. Patsy arrived in Australia as an 18 year old with his poor immigrant parents, five sisters and two brothers in 1853. The strictly catholic family was looking to escape the "troubles" in Ireland, the poverty, the famine, the hardship, the bigotry and the lack of opportunity. This young man would found a pioneering dynasty establishing enormous cattle stations from New South Wales, through Queensland and into Western Australia.

If he thought life in Ireland was hard he was yet to encounter the extremes of flood and drought, the one following the other as night follows day. There was the isolation of the bush, malaria, beri-beri, dysentery, the sun and the heat to overcome. Poison bush, cattle tick, and crocodiles were a real threat to the livestock, while white ants ate away at the timber homesteads, and man-made hurdles such as the depression, land rents, industrial strikes and petty jealousies added to the challenges. Possibly the most difficult challenge was that from the "blacks" as they are called throughout this book, drawn from the diaries of Patsy's father, Patsy himself and his own son. From his immediate family he lost a brother who was shot and a cousin who was speared by Aboriginals. The cattle too were frequent victims of spearing. Yet some Aboriginals were almost part of the family as they were cared for by the Duracks, leaning English with an Irish brogue and having given names such as Pumpkin, Kangaroo and Melon Head. On the last day of his life Patsy declares Pumpkin to have been the best fiend he ever had.

It is difficult to conceive how anyone could even contemplate, let alone achieve covering thousands of miles overland, settling the land, building homes, bringing up families, establishing stock routes and then driving thousands of head of cattle to markets a third of a continent away. At the height of his success, and defending his ownership of enormous land tracts, some bigger than small European countries, Patsy responds to a newspaper critic "Cattle Kings you call us, If so, then we are Kings in Grass Castles that may be blown away upon a puff of wind". How prophetic.

This book was written by Patsy's granddaughter Mary, and first published in 1959. Apart from drawing heavily on 19th century diaries, her style of writing is very old fashioned and takes some getting used to as the chapters pass by. It is not very easy reading but the rewards for perseverance are great. The details have been carefully researched and the story unwinds with perhaps too many characters coming into the story for but a page or two, only to vanish as quickly as they appeared. That's not much of a complaint about such a historical saga which should be compulsory reading not only for all Australian school children but also all new immigrants to this young and dynamic country.

Though Australia, like North America, came to its present form through immigration and pioneering settlement, its history contains major differences, perhaps partly because everything happened much later, and partly because it was so far away from the mother countries. Whatever the case, Australia's pioneering stories are not nearly as well known in the wider world as are those of the USA. American mythology dwells long and lovingly on those pioneer journeys, the struggles with nature and the Indians, and the toughness of those who began to farm or ranch the new lands. Australia no doubt has its own mythology, but not a powerful media industry to spread it around the world. KINGS IN GRASS CASTLES is an exceptionally good family history that gives the authentic flavor of what it was like to explore and settle vast swathes of that vast part of the southern continent known as "the Outback". If anyone wishes to acquire matter-of-fact knowledge about the period, they could do far worse than to read Mary Durack's family story, created from letters, diaries, from interviews and reminiscences years later, and from various documents found among her relatives. She made an effort to present the whole thing, warts and all, minus mythology.

Covering the period 1849-1898, Durack starts with the immigration of her paternal grandfather from Irish poverty to Sydney's sunny shores. The book covers not only him, but many of his siblings and cousins, tracing their move to Goulburn, New South Wales, episodic ventures on the Victorian goldfields, and then a great migration with herds and all, up into the dry, flat country of western Queensland, at that time still inhabited by groups of Aborigines who had been there for untold thousands of years. The family story is, on one hand, the story of struggles to build vast land empires of watered pasture in a country most prone to drought and sudden flood, to make a home where no European had ever lived before. On the other, it is an amazing tale of constant movement---men on horseback driving cattle for thousands of miles, riding three hundred miles across country for the most trivial of reasons, going to the coast or Goulburn, coming back, sailing around to Perth, incessant motion for half a century. Australia, more than North America, was (and is) a land of boom and bust. With rain, cattle and sheep multiplied and brought great riches to the Durack family. With drought or with financial collapse in the over-extended property markets of the cities, they could, and ultimately did, lose everything, their grass castles swept away by the winds of fate. Undeterred, the Durack clan made an epic cross-continent march of close to 2,000 miles with a large herd of cattle, winding up in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia, where they proceeded to establish yet another `castle' built of grass. There, if drought was not such a big problem, ticks, labor shortage, diseases, distant markets, and Aborigines who resented intruders proved difficult. If family fortunes rose and fell, we at least get a marvelous picture of what pioneers went through in Australian history, almost still within living memory.

KINGS IN GRASS CASTLES provides an absorbing read, provokes admiration of the guts of these people, sorrow for the fate of the Aborigines, (brushed aside and often murdered), and disappointment that no one now will ever see that magnificent, untouched land again. The only flaw is that, as a family history, Durack perhaps put in too much detail for the outsider, recording the to's and fro's of various relatives, confusing the reader with an amazing number of characters named Mary, Michael or Patrick ! Her writing style might be a little clunky, but believe me, you will never get such a true, "from the horse's mouth" picture anywhere else. An Australian classic.