KAVANAGH ON THURSDAY,
Courier Mail Article published 4 August 1994

Life was tough and unpredictable in the early settlement days of the Aussie bush and nowhere more so than that lived around the Dawson River township of Taroom.

Its’ record for death and disaster since nearby Taroom Station (now Carrabah) opened the district to white settlement in 1848 on the heels of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt reads more like a rip-roaring port-of-entry town than a village in the scrub.

A contributing factor was the fierceness of the Dawson River Aborigines, in defence of tribal land, which made the district a deadly one for lone travellers and shepherds.

That fierceness also helped the Taroom district to an unenviable record as the scene of one of Australia’s worst Aboriginal massacres of whites when 11 men, women and children were murdered in their beds on Hornet Bank Station, 40km west of Taroom, in 1857.

But such violence, and the retribution taken on Aborigines by police and settlers, were only part of a high rate of violent death by accident or design in the district.

Violent deaths were common-place

Local history shows most years stained with violent death: locals were shot, accidentally or otherwise, poisoned (sometimes drinking at local pubs, sometimes from impure water), charged down by scrub bulls and crushed by brumby stallions, bitten by deadly snakes, drowned, starved, speared, struck by lightning, axed, clubbed, knifed and burnt to death.

A snake bite claimed the life of a Crimean War hero who had ridden to glory at the Charge of the Light Brigade years before. Harry Beaumont, a former 17^th Lancer, survived that famous charge into the Valley of Death at Balaclava only to die a lonely death by snake bite at Glenhaughton Station in 1875.

The same year an unknown shepherd, Bill Watchman, was found hanging by the leg from a tree on Baroondah Station.  He had been dead for three days and an inquest heard he had climbed the tree “for his own amusement” and tied his leg to a branch with his shirt for reasons unknown.

His knife fell from his pocket, and he was left strung upside down to die from exposure and starvation.

Once a Taroom murder suspect gobbled down a handful of strychnine when confronted by a policeman. In a desperate attempt to bring his man to justice, the constable jammed a stick down his throat trying to make him vomit up the poison. It didn’t work, but the constable got him to cough up a confession minutes before he died.

Taroom Town itself was hit over the years by frequent floods, violent hailstorms and cyclones which wrecked many buildings.

Was it any wonder, then, after six years pioneering Taroom Station during which he was one of the first on the bloody massacre scene at neighbouring Hornet Bank Station, Willie Yaldwyn returned to his family estate in West Sussex, England, in 1864 for a well-earned rest. He later wrote: “The four succeeding years (at the estate) were amongst the pleasantest of my life. I led there an ideal country life. I shot, fished and hunted with an ardour born of long abstention… It was a halcyon time indeed for we were young and strong with the verve of perfect health and a potentiality forenjoyment, the offspring of those priceless possessions.

“In the midst of the most beautiful scenery, enjoying the society of refined and intellectual neighbours, possessed of the ‘golden mean’ and that spirit of contentment that makes for peace…”

I would like to relate that a man of such refinement and eloquence as Willie Yaldwyn went right on living the life of an English gentleman, but he was not so bright business-wise, nor was he equipped to handle the aforementioned harshness of the Queensland bush, particularly the deadly expanse around Taroom to which he was forced to return in the late 1860s.

To that time Willie had been living off a great pile of money his father, William Yaldwyn, made from the sale of Taroom Station in 1862 when the market for Queensland properties went through the roof.

Yaldwyn snr bought the property bargain-basement in 1856 when it was at the frontier of white settlement and, with the help of Willie and good seasons, made good.
(Leichhardt explored Taroom district in 1844, blazing a tree, ‘The Leichhardt Tree’, which holds pride of place today in Taroom’s main street, Yaldwyn St.)

By 1862, three years after separation, Queensland was booming with Sydney bankers throwing money at clients wanting to invest. It was in this buoyant market that Yaldwyn snr sold Taroom Station to Walter Davidson for £30,000; £10,000 down and the rest over three years at 8 percent interest.

That was the peak, and shortly after the market crashed. So, while Willie jnr was enjoying the “pleasantest” years with refined and intellectual neighbours in West Sussex, his debtor Walter Davidson was going downhill fast back at Taroom and could not keep up repayments or interest, which had jumped to 17.5 percent in Sydney.

Unfortunately, Willie had also made some disastrous investments on borrowed money in England. Even so he was able to repossess Taroom Station, by now Carrabah Station, debt-free in the late ‘60s. But this time, without the help of his father who had died in 1866, it became clear he was more suited to halcyon days of shooting, fishing and hunting in the Old Dart than running a Taroom sheep station. By 1870 he had lost the station and everything he owned to the Queensland National Bank. I don’t know if he lived to see that bank crash in spectacular style in the mid-1890s, but when it did poor old Taroom town also copped a financial battering with, among others, the local Church of England losing £150 and the Taroom Divisional Board £850.

THINGS are more normal in Taroom today although a lovely lady with a soft smile, is a living reminder of how tough and isolated conditions were there even within living memory.

MRS HAYES, who turned 90 recently, moved to isolated Bedourie Station, north-west of Taroom, with her husband, Jack, and their three small children in 1928. Quite unexpectedly Jack collapsed and died at the age of 41, leaving his wife and babies alone about 60km from the nearest help.

There was no telephone or motor vehicle, so Mrs Hayes caught and yoked a horse into the dray and loaded it with provisions; but before she could gather her children, the horse bolted with the dray.

She caught the night horse to carry some provisions and water and, holding her five-month-old baby in her arms and with her two-year-old daughter and four-year-old son beside her, walked off for help.

They were almost two days on the track, a young mother and three babies, and might never have made it but for two stockmen chancing on them the following night.

“It was a terrible time, but we were lucky I suppose,” Mrs Hayes told me recently.

Luck, indeed! It didn’t seem to play a big part in the lives of early Queensland settlers, particularly those whose fortunes, or misfortunes, lured them to Taroom.

• Courier Mail Article supplied by Terry Ingram
• (from the Archive collection of late Freddy Ingram)