Valley: A Story from the Heart of the Land

The

VALLEY

Michael McKernan is a well-known historian who is fascinated by the story of Australia. Michael has written about the Australian people at war, in politics, facing drought, in their churches and in sport. He has written and edited more than twenty books.

The

VALLEY

A story from the heart of the land

MICHAEL McKERNAN

First published in 2009

Copyright © Michael McKernan 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Contents

Prologue

Introduction

1 The Jugiong mystery

2 ‘A typically thrifty Ulsterman’

3 Life on the run

4 Walking in a cemetery

5 Jugiong at war

6 Learning his craft

7 Jugiong’s most famous citizen

8 The soldier-settler

9 Workers on the land

10 New life

Epilogue

A note on sources

Acknowledgements

Prologue

From the highest point on Bundarbo the views are magnificent. To the south there is a village in the distance; the Murrumbidgee, a mighty river in Australian terms, denotes the property’s northern boundary. The land is that light fawny brown that speaks of drought. Although the heifers and their calves dotted in the paddocks are well provided for, there is nothing for them in the ground. It takes some faith to believe that pasture will re-emerge from soil so barren, so hard, so dry. But it will rain again and this land will be transformed.

By contrast, the Bundarbo homestead and the several surrounding buildings are set in a park and garden that are as lush as they are restful. Lawns run down the edge of the river; buildings, half-hidden by luxuriant bushes and shrubs, blend into the park. An Edna Walling garden with improvements. There are roses in abundance, lavender, a herb garden surrounding the Chinaman’s hut—perhaps the oldest, certainly the simplest building on the property. But it is the trees that draw the eye. The ancient poplars that line the drive. The pepper trees, native of South America and Mexico, introduced into Australia in the 1870s and 1880s; they are fire and drought resistant, the guidebook tells, and were popular around station homesteads in Victoria and New South Wales for their colour and shade. Bundarbo’s must have been planted in the 1880s; they are now gnarled, spreading and majestic.

But the river gums speak more authoritatively of the land. Down on the banks of the Murrumbidgee they take their water from a river that never ceases running; these trees have been taking it for hundreds of years, their ancestors for thousands of years. They are thriving, these river gums: magnificent, solid trees, they evoke a permanence beyond the settled human occupation of Bundarbo.

Yet what battles and human misery have these river gums witnessed? What hopes have they encouraged in the minds of the people who came here to own the land and make it productive? Surely they told of a presence that was here before the stock, the crops, the fences, the homes and sheds, the creation of this Bundarbo. The homestead, with its verandahs and wide windows, the guest houses likewise, look out to these river gums, reminding all who have worked and enjoyed Bundarbo of a country that has always been here. Men might have cut these trees down to make things easier for cultivation of crops and stock, but they did not. The men and women who settled Bundarbo were awed, in all likelihood, by the permanence and magnificence of these trees. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Walk among them and meditate on them, and they will lead you to the story of the valley.

Introduction

In the early nineteenth century, before the vast paddocks of the grazing lands were fenced, there were many shepherds in Australia. They were central to creating the wealth that merino sheep were bringing to the new colonies. There were thousands of these shepherds, men half-mad from loneliness and isolation—many of them, of course, current or former convicts. What a horrible and enduring punishment their crimes—whether innocent or serial and violent—caused for these first Australian shepherds. Most found themselves lost forever to family and friends, alone in the bush, half-terrified much of the time from a fear of the unknown that could be either human or animal, with a monotonous and largely unhealthy diet, lacking any conversation for months on end, and without companionable sex or even any real companionship. Lacking almost all of the things, in short, that broadly make us human.

There were shepherds in a part of France in the nineteenth century who watched over their flocks on stilts, who could travel great distances in this way—at speed, when required—to protect their sheep. How alien these shepherds on stilts now seem to us. The life of the convict shepherds in Australia is equally alien to us, so remote from the lives that we live today. Yet a settler living in the Jugiong valley in the 1860s would easily have understood the life the convict shepherd endured, just as he would have recognised many of the features of the life of a rural worker in the same valley in the 1930s. But there has been great change in rural Australia in the last four decades compared with the two hundred years that preceded them—and not to mention the tens of thousands of years before that.

Jugiong is a village roughly 150 miles (240 kilometres) to the south of Sydney, in a region known as the South West Slopes. Not that distance from Sydney is especially significant in defining anything about the character of the place. The valley has been formed by the Murrumbidgee, in former times a river prone to flood and roar but often the typical Australian excuse for a river. The area is hilly but they are, for the most part, gentle hills. The beauty of the land across the changing seasons is simply quite staggering.

For the best part of 150 years, the main south road from Sydney to Melbourne passed through Jugiong. And then there was a bypass and now you can hear the roar of the trucks and the gentle hum of the cars as they flash up the steep hill near the southern end of the village, but there is very little activity and movement in the village itself. From the new road you can look down on Jugiong. Perhaps travellers notice the pub, of typical Australian design. They would also see the Catholic church, halfway up the hill, open every day, though largely priestless now. But Jugiong deserves a closer look than that.

Driving into the village from the north, houses begin to appear in paddocks to the right; there is one service station (another, further along the road on the left, is closed and dilapidated). Then there is a motel in good order. A couple of cross streets give promise of further houses; were you to take either of these streets you would discover, in no particular order, a school, a former village hall and quite a number of residences. Travelling the side roads, you would quite soon come to the limits of village settlement. Back on the old highway, the central spine of the village, on the left you would see what seems to be either a sports field or even a rudimentary racetrack, with modest-looking gates which also serve as Jugiong’s memorial to the Second World War.

Oddly, the town lacks the more traditional and elaborate memorials that inevitably commemorate the First World War in most towns in Australia. On such a memorial, marble tablets list the names of those who served as well as those who died. But Jugiong restricts itself to the names of those killed in the Second World War. There are two names.

Across the road from the war memorial gates are a couple of shops, long past their prime; one of them is currently doing duty as a pleasant café and the other features regional wines and produce. Next to the shops, still on the right-hand side of the road as you head south, is the pub. A substantial building, two storeys with a lovely second-floor verandah, promising, it would seem, cold beer and good food. Bad luck. The pub has been closed for several years and shows no sign of ever re-opening. A village without a working pub, many Australians would assume, is a village in its death throes.

The pub is on the corner of crossroads. To its right is the road to Harden some 25 kilometres away, through which runs the main railway line between Sydney and Melbourne. To the left a lesser road runs down towards the river. Diagonally opposite the pub, but somewhat hidden by the trees, is Jugiong’s most substantial private dwelling, known modestly as ‘The Cottage’. The main road (the old highway) now runs up the hill, with the Catholic church on the left, to rejoin the bypassing Hume Highway. You could probably see all of the village in five minutes—Jugiong is not and has never been a big place. Pretty enough in some seasons and in a certain light but tiny and, it would seem, private, for at any time of day there are precious few people about. It could remind you of the comedian Peter Sellers’ jest about an English village: ‘time has passed her by and so shall we’.

If you wish to leave the village of Jugiong to explore the hills surrounding it, to get onto the land itself, you only have two broad alternatives. You can head for Harden to the west through rolling country that looks good even in drought, or you can cross the Murrumbidgee heading east and move into more private territory. You will need to drive carefully now because the sealed road is well behind you, and the road is narrow and, in parts, steep, and the cattle assume a right of way that you would be unwise to challenge. This road would ultimately take you to Tumut and along the way you will steal glimpses of some of the people’s houses. This is squatter country: private, and once, at least, privileged and proud.

My destination was Bundarbo, one of the region’s first great sheep stations. The promised map had not arrived. I need not have worried that I would lose my way because the signpost at Jugiong announced the Bundarbo road. It must be a property of substance, I thought, if the station itself gives its name to the road. Perhaps 15 kilometres or so from the village, with the road running alongside a beautiful stretch of the river, red gums, rocks and black Angus cattle, my car rattled across a cattle grid (curiously known as a ramp in this part of the world) and through two stone pillars. I was at ‘Strychnine Gate’, I later learned, so named because a man had once taken his life there. And now I was at Bundarbo. Once again the road was sealed and would be until well beyond the homestead, ‘to keep the dust down’, the owner told me. I was looking for the homestead. A substantial dwelling came up in front of me, but this was clearly the manager’s house; instead I was directed to drive on until I reached a sign saying ‘Bundarbo Homestead’, and another sign saying ‘Private Road’.

Sam Chisholm, Australian businessman and former television executive, is the current owner of Bundarbo. He bought the property from Pat Osborne in 1994 to make him one of the few non-Osbornes ever to own even a part of Bundarbo land. Arriving at the homestead, I imagine the scene when Pat Osborne and his wife Peg drove off Bundarbo for the last time as owners. On this land they have lived almost all their married life, they have raised their children, they have worked hard to make the place productive, they have added to the value that other Osbornes had already created on Bundarbo, and they have played, partied and loved here. And now they are driving off Bundarbo, their Bundarbo, for the last time. New money, and lots of it, will come in and renew this proud property, possibly raise it beyond the dreams of all those Osbornes. Sam Chisholm explains that he did not see himself as the laird of Bundarbo and does not see himself as the owner of the land, but more as its custodian.

Around Bundarbo are many other properties that once belonged to the Osbornes and have changed hands over the years. These places introduce to our story many of the people who have worked this land for astonishingly long periods of time (fifty years or more is by no means unusual). The story of Bundarbo encompasses, too, the village of Jugiong in all its surprising diversity, and will also take us around the world. We will start in the valley and then move to Ireland, we will visit Cambridge and also the one-teacher school at Jugiong, we will find ourselves in Sydney at rest and at work, we will learn of trades and skills no longer practised and mostly forgotten that were once the key to survival and profit on the land.

The Valley is, above all else, about people, because people are at the heart of the land. People taking their meaning from the village that nurtures them. People moving from their village, if only temporarily, to go to school, to the cities, to the wider world, for fun and relaxation, to show to the world their produce and their achievement, to escape rural Australia, to return to it when they needed to do so. People going to war, for war has been such a significant part of the story of Australia in the twentieth century. People going abroad to learn more; people going elsewhere to seek work—in politics to make a difference, to a professional life in the cities, or to other parts of rural Australia to establish their own land and a new life. Families interrelated; families that are part of this place as they are part of no other: the Sheahans, the Fairalls, the Sheehans, the Osbornes, the Taits, the Waughs. Some of them owners, most of them workers.

We will meet Henry Osborne, an immigrant from Ireland, already a wealthy man when he arrived in Australia, who then accumulated vast wealth in his thirty years here, and started a family that would expand and grow until the Osbornes were a power in the land. We will meet men who tried to take squatters’ land, Osborne land, from those who possessed it. The most successful of these was a soldier-settler, Geoff Sheehan, who earned his right to land by fighting for his country in the Second World War and who, despite how tough life could be in the bush and how hard it was to make a quid, wanted no other type of life. We will meet Billy Sheahan, soldier, politician and minister, a bantam of a man but passionate in his love for Australia and its people. Cocksure, feisty, a Labor man, with huge majorities in the bush and equally loved by those in the valley. In this book you will meet the owners and the workers, the wives and children who created a community that sustained them. You will meet people who bonded so intensely with the land that they knew away from it life would lose much of its meaning. We will meet, in shadowy form, the first inhabitants of this place, whose family bond with the land was longer and more stable than any other race in any place in the course of human history.

Although The Valley is focused on a small part of Australia, it shows us that the bush was never isolated, that rural people were never less than fully engaged with the issues that also confronted Australians who lived their lives in the cities. The story of the Jugiong valley shows that rural Australia matters—hugely; and rather than ask if one form of life is more authentically Australian than any other, by coming to know something of the characters of this valley, it is my hope that we will understand more of what it means to be Australian.

1

The Jugiong mystery

Sweep down from the hills into the village of Jugiong from the south, from the direction of Gundagai, and you will pass, before you come into the village itself, Christ Church on the left, St John’s on the right. The one Anglican, the other Catholic; both solid, substantial buildings, though small in scale as befits a village of this size. Approach Jugiong from the north, from the direction of Yass, and before you reach the village you will pass, on the right, the Catholic cemetery. Further towards the village, again on the right, a side street will lead you to the general cemetery.

You can discover a great deal about this village and its people from these four places. From them you can learn who lived here; which families established dynasties here; how rich and healthy—or otherwise—was the living. You can also discover something of the spirit of the people who lived here: what was their faith; what animated their lives and gave them meaning; what was it that allowed the people to understand their place in the world. The churches and the cemeteries will reveal these things to you.

People cannot now say which is the oldest grave in either of Jugiong’s cemeteries, for some of the earliest headstones have been lost. The first that can be dated in the Catholic cemetery is that of John Mallon, who died on 19 June 1848 at twenty-five years of age. John was the son of Garrett Mallon, who had died ten years earlier, the son of another Garrett, late of County Langford, Ireland, who had died in 1818. John’s headstone is an oddity, carved from sandstone, of which there is none at all to be found in the region. The headstone had to be carried to Jugiong from a long way off.

Few would wander for very long in either of the cemeteries, or look closely at either of the churches, without there emerging a sense of gratitude that the stories of those who have gone before can be told. That we can be, in some sense, in contact with those who came from other lands to settle this region.

But the Lloyds and the Sheahans of the cemeteries, the Coggans and the Osbornes of the churches, were very far indeed from being the first people to inhabit the region. They were not the first people to work the land and to find a happy and harmonious living here. They were not the first people to bond so closely with the land of the Jugiong valley and its region that the land itself gave them meaning and understanding of life. Those of us who can trace our own personal story in Australia back two, three, possibly five or more generations, know that the land we live in has been inhabited for thousands of generations before the settlement of Europeans in Australia.

This is when the cemeteries of Jugiong begin to make you reflective. Who had lived here before European settlement and how had they lived? There is a hunger to know, if we are to know much about this place at all. The local people ask the question whenever you begin to talk with them about the past. ‘I would love to know the story of the first Australians here,’ says a man who can trace his own family’s connection to Jugiong to the early 1840s. His sense of the valley is intense. He understands himself through his personal attachment to place and through his family’s long, unbroken connection with this land. And he knows that the land had been nourishing and supporting people in much the same way for thousands of years before his own family arrived—perhaps for as long as sixty thousand years. It was only recently that those of us who came here from afar began to give thought to the intimate, life-nourishing and life-sustaining bond of the first Australians to their land.

Jugiong gives no easy evidence now of the lives of the Indigenous Australians along its river banks, on the river flats and among its gentle hills. You ask the old people in Jugiong, the great-grandchildren of the pioneers, and they can tell you nothing. Nothing has come down to them in family lore although many other stories have been handed down across the generations. Indeed the people you ask for the story, the old-timers at Jugiong, ask you, in their turn, how the story might be found. There are few records, nor can we seek answers from the tribal equivalents of the cemeteries and churches in the region. The sad fact is that we have lost the places of Indigenous history comparable to the cemeteries, churches, schools and stations that tell us so much about those Europeans who first settled here.

There was a sickness in Australian history for too long, a sickness that can be found in the story of most settler societies until they mature. Our sickness was a failure to acknowledge the story of those who were here before the white settlers said that this land was as if without people with rights, in effect an uninhabited land, when the evidence of a long and sophisticated habitation was everywhere for the first settlers to see. Now so routinely and so sensibly we begin our major public ceremonies, and even our more minor activities, with a ‘welcome to country’. I cannot perform a ‘welcome to country’ for Jugiong because it is not my country. But I can begin this book with an acknowledgement of the first Australians who lived in harmony with the land on the banks of the Murrumbidgee for thousands of generations.

These people were, and are, Wiradjuri people, once one of the largest groups of Aboriginal Australians in terms both of population and of the area of country that was their own. Their lands were formed by geographical boundaries, as the historian of the Wiradjuri, Peter Read, tells us: ‘the Blue Mountains in the east, the foot of the western slopes in the south’, and to the north, the land where ‘the open eucalyptus forest gave way to the grassy plains and mallee scrub’. Although there was great diversity among the Wiradjuri people and no firm political unity, the fact that three great rivers—the Macquarie, the Lachlan and the Murrumbidgee—crossed their lands gave some common bonds to all of them: they were known as ‘river people’.

Jugiong was border country for the Wiradjuri. It is known that Ngunawal people from the region that we now know as Yass extended down towards Jugiong and the Murrumbidgee, which also ran through their land. Some have said that so well sited and so pleasing was the land on the Murrumbidgee at Jugiong that it was shared between the two peoples, or used as a meeting place for both of the tribes. Certainly the Ngunawal people were less numerous than the Wiradjuri, with a much smaller land area. Both peoples contribute to the story of Indigenous Australians at Jugiong.

At the time when Arthur Phillip brought his sad little collection of convicts and marines first to Botany Bay and then on to Sydney Cove there were, writes Peter Read, perhaps some 3000 Wiradjuri people living across their lands. However, I wonder if there might have been more, because in 1848 when Commissioner for Crown Lands Henry Bingham sent in his annual report from the Murrumbidgee district, he estimated that the Indigenous population of the district consisted of some 1500 people. As the Indigenous population would have been much reduced since 1788, Read’s estimate of 3000 for the total population at the time of the First Fleet does seem a small number. Perhaps Henry Bingham was mistaken; in his report he continued: ‘there have been many deaths amongst them, and some of the best Men of their tribes’. In