The Trail of the Bootless Toe – part 1

So he bore to the North!  The indent of his big toe
that protruded through his worn boot faintly marking the dry dust as he went.

All sinewy and almost  as straight as a sapling that nature has bent, just a fraction, where the shoulder stem supports the grey foliage, as a gentle reminder that no growth of hers, at seventy three, can completely pretend to have the sap of a new shoot — and happy—Tom Traine, of Victoria Park, Perth, is one of the dwindling band of pioneers that found the “tracks” wherein were laid the beginnings of a nation and, in the solitude of the wilderness, kept inseparable company with the three unchanging companions of human happiness —

health, peace and competence

the health that men gather in the open life of the endless plains with the unending skyline, the peace of a mind thoroughly occupied in its tasks and the competence of the thirsty rock holes and the damper and beef delicacies, of the wood coals that glowed, the bushman’s beginning of civilisation.

Looking back, over the cork tipped cigarette balanced between his thumb and forefinger, to that tremendous trail. Old Tom said, softly, “I have nothing but the pleasantest recollections”; and the deep sunken blue eyes that looked out, like field glasses, between the high cheek bone, over the long straight nose, gave supporting testimony to the tale of a happiness. Of course no man can be happy who does not think himself so. It seems a little incredible that the life that Tom Traine has lived should have brought him nothing but happiness. It sounds like a challenge to the millions in the Australian cities who, having everything to hand, seem to miss what makes for happiness. Yet, it is not altogether strange. Happiness, after all, is largely the union of ourselves with our environment. Service is its first principle; sacrifice its second, it is to be gathered in grains and enjoyed every day. It will not keep. It cannot be accumulated!

Tom Traine

Upon remote places and crowded cities it rains alike from the skies. But so many people put off enjoying it, centering their hopes of happiness on a distant star, some future achievement, and never grasp it. If Tom Traine had gone into the ‘Never Never’ to do something in a hurry, achieve competence quickly, and come out of it, he would not have been happy. But he went into the ‘Never Never’ to be of the ‘Never Never’, where content and necessity are neighbors, where love begets love, and men loving nature, find that nature loves them, and, where others cry with discontent, go mad, and die, they live on, in union with environment, prosper and are happy.

Thus is a nation built, by those who match themselves against adversity and emerge triumphant to say, “I have nothing but the pleasantest recollections.” To Tom Traine’s story. The fate of many a pioneer in this country is linked with that of the early explorers. When Ernest Favin, the explorer, died in Sydney only a few years ago, they could have written this epitaph on his tombstone:

“He was destiny to thousands of his fellows.”

On his report on his explorations of that vast Barkly Tableland, men of substance drew out their cheque books and freighted mobs of cattle and bewhiskered bushmen into the virgin land.  Amongst them was Alex and Tom Traine, young men in their twenties, and brothers, who undertook to establish and stock what was later known as the Eva Downs Station in the Northern Territory, for Messrs. Marr Mackinnon and Co. (the Mackinnon’s of Melbourne “Argus” repute). Eighteen months it took them to shepherd their mob of cattle on that tremendous trek, and the reader picks them up at Burketown, on the Gregory River, at the south-east corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the last Queensland point of civilisation before passing into the Northern Territory.

At Burketown the Traine brothers met a man named Reid. who had just sold out of business, and who was contemplating going out in his lugger to open up a port to the virgin country that the Traine brothers, and others behind them, would be settling. A capital idea for the Traine brothers, and after consultation, it was agreed that McArthur River was the most likely port for the new country. To encourage Reid, Alex Train gave him half their stores landed from the steamer to freight in his lugger, the “Good Intent,” and with this bit of encouragement Reid set sail. At that time a Queensland paper had supplied the information that stores taken by settlers into the new country were duty free, and this was taken for the gospel of the pioneers. So off the “Good Intent” sailed with half of the Traine brothers stores, the balance going forward with the expedition on the slow and dry march of three months duration from Burketown to the McArthur.

He arrived at Anthony Lagoon, the site of the future Eva Downs Station, Alex Traine took the station teams to open up a track from the property to Baroloota at the north of the McArthur, and discovered to his horror, that a Customs officer had been round from Port Darwin, and seized and confiscated the “Good Intent” and all its freight. Out on the Tableland the party was lingering, with the station plant, very short of provisions, and minus sugar and tea and flour; only beef and water to drink and eat. It was a position likely to make a man see red. The ruling of ‘Red Tape’ is ever strange. Had the Traine brothers carried the whole of their provisions on the teams to their station. there would have been no Customs Officer to meet them and collect duty, but because they had attempted to assist Reid and his “Good Intent” in opening up a port to the new country by giving him half their stores as freightage, all that was most valuable to them in the world at that moment— their stores— had been confiscated.

Luckily, the Customs Officer had come and gone before Alex Train arrived. Subsequently, he went to the Overland Telegraph at Powell’s Creek and telegraphed the facts to his Company. They naturally, raised a storm, and the authorities agreed to hand over all the money received from the sale of the confiscated stores, less the expenses of the seizure. As the expenses absorbed the whole of the proceeds, the tardy commission brought no amelioration to the pioneers, but its recital serves to illustrate how officialdom is always –

As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be!

These men could starve in the wilderness, but the law unwittingly offended, must he vindicated. “Pitch a lucky man into the Nile,” says an Arabian proverb, “and he will come up with a fish in his mouth.” The old pioneers nearly all held a profound belief in the strict relation of ’cause to effect’, but even Alex Traine must have felt inclined to turn his money in his pocket at the first new moon, when within a fortnight, in sailed Willie McLeod, with a boat load of edibles and other useful things. McLeod, a famous old prospector and explorer, had been a member of the Hunt, Steel and O’Brien, Syndicate that financed a lot of gold hunts, and found the Cumberland reef during a period when old Bill happened to be out of the syndicate.

For Auld Lang Syne, his lucky cobbers fitted him out with a shipload of general merchandise to start him in business in the new port at the mouth of the McArthur river. Alex Traine lost no time in negotiating with McLeod and post-haste some pack horses, under the charge of a team of buffalo hunters engaged by Alex was on the track with stores to the beef sickened party. Meantime, Alex Traine loaded up his team and made for Powell’s Creek, where he made the Overland wires buzz with messages to his Company. Then the brothers settled down to the task of founding Eva Downs Station, pioneering that great new tract of Tableland in face of a series of knocks and kicks from the hand of Fate,

THE DUTCHMAN’S CURSE – the tick

The Dutch, generations earlier, with the best of intent, landed buffaloes on the North coast and with them the dreaded tick. As the generations passed, the buffaloes, through plagues of tick disease and death, became immune, and multiplied in their thousands along the coast. Came the cattle of civilised men, little dreaming of the scourge introduced and held in check by the buffaloes in sheer passage of time. The cattle took to the tick, or the tick to the cattle, like fleas to a dog—with more deadly intent. Hundreds died in night. Like the buffaloes, the early cattle, through sheer process of disease and death started to develop immunity, but each fresh mob stepped on to the tick infested area of scourge and death. The settlers on the Barkley Tableland, were more fortunate than the cattle owners on the coast, Their cattle throve and multiplied, the company and the Traine Brothers little dreaming of the official avalanche that was to come upon them like a cloud burst.

Meantime, there was not a cloud in the sky, when Alex Traine went to fetch his bride of the wilderness. Alice Smith was her name, and Maitland, New South Wales her home town. “Some girl,” she must have been, to face life in that far, new country, where the only white men would be her husband, and his brother, and the nearest station 50 and 100 miles away. She had, however, the heart of a young lioness, and was bone and flesh of those pioneering women, willing to do and dare, that are as hard to find as a needle in a haystack in our city of millions today. To Tom, the job of making the humpy more pretentious for the bride —the first white woman to set foot in that virgin land. Handy with tools and a fair supply of galvanised iron, Tom made quite a decent fist of the job, even to the bush furniture and box seats. But bless his simple heart, Tom had yet to learn the quality of feminine taste, as the bridegroom himself was learning, the real business of carting a bride’s luggage. That luggage comprised, amongst numerous and dainty personal effects, her own complete suit of furniture, and her piano. Yes, the bride persisted in bringing her piano with her. A piano in the wilderness of blacks and cattle!

Alex Traine, youthful and in love, was not the sort of bridegroom to deny his bride her slightest wish. From Sydney to Thursday Island the honeymoon couple, their furniture and piano, travelled by steamer; thence by sailing boat to McArthur river, and thence, a “pad” of 300 miles to Eva Downs. In due course, and with all fitting ceremony they arrived at the house that Jack (Tom) built. The bride was a little brick. If Tom and Alex’s elaborate humpy of bush timber and galvanised iron fell short of her expectations, she breathed not a word of it. She expressed sheer delight in everything, and took to life in the wilderness like a duck to water. Of such stuff were these pioneering lassies made, bringing joy and gladness to the remote regions of the earth! The one white woman in that stretch of country, she became a queen. The news of her arrival spread and from stations 100 miles or more away, men saddled up their horses and came to Eva Downs to pay their respects to the only white woman, to hear her voice, and listen, with hearts tender under newly washed shirts, and eyes often dimmed with secret moisture, the familiar countries old and new, love and romance that she played to them in the silent land, peopled only by men of their kind with golden hearts disguised by the roughest exterior. To the local aboriginals, the woman’s voice they could understand, but the piano mesmerised them. To watch the white woman’s fingers dance up and down the white keyboard and hear the strange and wonderful sounds she produced, was mystery profound.

All Tom’s spare time he spent in exploring until the time came when he could say that of that vast stretch of country, lying between the Overland Telegraph and the Queensland Border, none living knew as much as he. If he knew that a tribe of aboriginals lay in one direction, he went in another; there was, he reasoned, no need to risk a clash. Ugly had been some of the meetings between whites and blacks in other parts, and cruel the slaughter on both sides, and there was wisdom in the youth of him that said it were better not to give trust at all than to repent a trust misplaced.

THE SPLOGER AND HIS MATE

It was while Alex was away, and Tom alone at Eva Downs, that ‘The Sploger’ and Jack Blake came their way on the trail of the diggers before them. One day, two other men, with packhorses, had passed that way, and told the Traine’s that a gold rush had broken out in a place called Kimberley in West Australia. These two prospectors were the first to come through that route, though others passing to and fro came later in batches of five and six, including The Sploger and Jack Blake. They were passing through, these last two, back from Hall’s Creek into Queensland, when fate played them a cruel jest at what should have been the kindest of all places, the Bundarra water hole, discovered by Alex Traine. The Sploger insisted that the track went north. Jack Blake insisted that it should go south. The Sploger was right, But youth must be served, and they turned south, for ten miles when an argument arose between them, and in the heat of it they agreed to differ and struck off at right angles, Blake going further South and the Sploger bearing east. It was blistering weather. After a day or two of severe privation, the Sploger hit the track that runs north and south between Munkaderry station and Eva Downs. There the wilderness swallowed him up.

LOST IN THE NEVER NEVER

Blake, after pursuing his own selected route South apparently determined at last, that he was wrong and bore East, and he too, struck the Munkaderry-Eva Downs track at a spot within 20 miles of the former and 40 miles of the latter. To turn south, to Munkaderry, 20 miles away meant safety. To turn north, to Eva Downs, forty miles away meant almost certain death. Poor Blake knew not the distances nor the stations. He saw only the track, that led north and south respectively.  So he bore to the north, the indent of his Toe, protruding through his worn out boot, faintly marking the dry dust as he went.