Free To Ride a Fine Horse by Mary Durack

two miles downstream. The station people lent them some casks and helped them cut timber with which to make a broad raft or ‘pontoon bridge’. This was attached to an overhead rope, slung between trees on either side of the river. Luggage, saddles, buggy and family were then mounted and hauled across—more or less high and dry.
    It was a hard trip, the horses straining through mud and slush, maddened by sandflies that attacked the travellers just as fiercely. As they moved steadily south, however, conditions improved and they were invited to sleep at station homesteads. On one of these the boys, who up to this time had seen no fruit except the wild bush berries, were able to pick and feast upon peaches, apricots, grapes and oranges. They felt they were in Paradise.
    Patsy and his wife told their boys how they had taken this track north for the first time in ’68, notknowing what the future held for them. So much had happened in those eleven years and although Mrs Patsy seemed just the same to her husband, others who had known her then were shocked to see how the harsh sun and wind had aged her fair skin.
    So the family returned to Goulburn, where there were happy reunions with many relatives and friends. Mr Emanuel, delighted to know how the family had prospered, recalled their first meeting and how Patsy had loaded up his waggon to find his pot of gold at the Ovens diggings.
    â€˜I wanted the gold to buy a fine horse,’ Patsy laughed. ‘Now I have a thousand fine horses and am still not satisfied.’
    Having established the boys at St Patrick’s College, he returned with his wife to Thylungra, but somehow the place did not seem the same as before, for now their hearts were half the time a thousand miles away with the boys at school, and often too with John Costello on the Queensland coast. Still, the race meeting of 1880 was the biggest ever held in the far west and Patsy was cheered to see a crowd of some three hundred men, women and children, most of whom he had been in some way responsible for bringing into the country.
    They had had a wonderful run of good seasons and become rich on the sale of land and stock. Thylungra and other Cooper stations were now carrying not only cattle and horses but also sheep, which gave promise of thriving splendidly. Still Patsy was not entirely satisfied. The country had been kind to them in many ways, but no one knew better than himself that it could also be cruel and hard. The threat of droughtand flood was always present, while terrible heat, harsh desert winds and frightful duststorms made life almost unendurable at times. Patsy began to feel that perhaps he should use some of his money to find a kinder, more reliable country for the younger generation to settle on and that he should build a comfortable city home for his wife and two little girls.
    John Costello, who had not long been satisfied with his established station on the coast, had already taken up another station near the border of the Northern Territory and had gone riding west in search of still more and better land. Patsy did not feel attracted to the Territory, however, for although in some ways richer and less arid than Western Queensland he knew that it too was a difficult and unpredictable land.
    One day in 1881, when on a visit to his sons in Goulburn, Patsy came on a report written by the West Australian explorer Alexander Forrest, who a few months before had taken a party right across from the north-west coast to the Overland Telegraph line in the Territory. Although only a hurried trip, Forrest had been delighted with what he saw, and reported the district he named Kimberley as a rich pasture country where it seemed that little need be feared from either drought or flood.
    Patsy went at once to Mr Emanuel who, since his own sons were interested in the land, agreed that they should make further enquiries. The first step was a visit to Mr Alexander Forrest in Perth, capital of