Aramac, Qld.
Buchanan and Landsborough almost perished near here
Nat Buchanan and William Landsborough almost perished near where Aramac now stands while exploring the region in 1859.
Aramac road sign
According to local road signage, Robert Ramsay Mackenzie had been there before Buchanan and Landsborough and named the place ‘Marathon’. Landsborough had called it ‘Aramac’ because of the initials ,’R R Mac’, Mackenzie had carved into a tree. Mackenzie, fierce advocate for the squatters, succeeded his bête noire, Arthur Macalister, as Queensland’s Premier in 1867.
Bowen Downs
Nat Buchanan’s son, Gordon, tells us in Packhorse and Waterhole that his father pioneered a stock route from Bowen (though the signage suggests it was from Nebo), Queensland, to the newly established Bowen Downs Station in October 1862. Nat Buchanan was the station manager. More a drover than manager, Buchanan relinquished his stake and departed, defeated by drought, around the time Mackenzie formed government. Buchanan’s grandson, also called Nat, took part in the first Redex trial.
Irene Bobs’ navigator in the 1954 Redex trial, Willie Bachhuber, tells us that she, the driver of their Holden in Peter Carey’s 2017 novel A Long Way from Home, went into the Betts Creek Post Office to make a phone call. It must have been an old sign because less than three months after being established in October 1884, Betts Creek was renamed Pentland. It’s fifty-odd kilometres northeast of Torrens Creek on the Flinders Highway. Bowen Downs Station is on Route 18, the Aramac-Torrens Creek Road.
On Tuesday, August 7th 2018, P G Henry left the Jericho free-camp and headed west along the Capricorn Highway (Route A4) toward Barcaldine. Approaching roadkill, he neglected to reduce speed sufficiently and might have collided with a mature wedge-tailed eagle but for the fact that it followed the street-mart crows with whom it was feasting on the carcass. Chastened, Henry slowed; five or six kilometres later he rounded a bend as a large kangaroo leisurely walked onto the road into the path of the campervan. He braked hard and swerved but fortunately maintained control. All good.
Aberfoyle Station
Taking the narrow bitumen strip that is Route 19 north from Barcaldine, Henry drove the seventy-odd kilometres to Aramac. Bowen Downs Station, on the eastern edge of the Mitchell Grass Downs, is about the same distance northwest of the town. Aberfoyle Station is due north, halfway to Torrens Creek from Aramac along Route 18.
Poor cousin to Bowen Downs, Aberfoyle Station was run by Jack Jardine and his wife Lizzie (nee Murray-Prior) at the time of the Shearers’ strikes in the 1890s. Jack’s brothers, Alexander and Frank, had committed atrocities when ‘conquering’ Cape York Peninsula in 1865 just as his father-in-law, Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, had at Hornet Bank Station in 1856. Lizzie’s sister, Rosa, married Arthur Praed and moved to England where she became a successful writer of numerous fictions set in outback Queensland. Don Watson regularly cites Rosa Praed in The Bush and in ‘Colonial Eyes: Rosa Praed’s Queensland’ Patricia Clarke reckons she’s a significant Australian woman whose novels “represent the creation of a colonial world, unique in its way in Australian fiction, apart perhaps from the Victoria of Henry Handel Richardson.” Belinda McKay, more circumspect, acknowledges that the novels set in the vicinity of Aberfoyle station capture something of the strain put on a marriage in such a remote region where the socially isolated and culturally deprived settlers had to come to terms with the fact that they were taking the drought prone land from the first inhabitants on the one hand while fending off the demands of unionised labour on the other; nevertheless, says McKay in By the Book, Praed’s attention to the historical and botanical fact of the matter is wanting and the stories are melodramatic.
Like Thea Astley, Rosa Praed had actual physical locations in mind when creating fictional landscapes. Fictional characters, too, were modelled on people in the wider family circle. When, for instance in Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land, Lady Bridget puts it to Colin McKeith that “The Premier said that you were the terror of the natives. He told me about a gun you have with a great many notches on the barrel of it, and he said that each notch represented a black-fellow that you had killed” she had Frank Jardine in mind.
Aramac’s main claim to fame, nowadays, is the Harry Redford Cattle Drive, the annual commemoration of Harry Readford’s theft of a thousand head of Bowen Downs cattle in 1870 – this year’s being on the sesquicentenary of the celebrated heist. Being branded, the stolen cattle couldn’t be sold in Queensland or NSW so Harry (the cattle duffer known as Captain Starlight) and his gang overlanded them down the Thomson River to the confluence with the Barcoo from where the watercourse becomes Cooper’s Creek.
The rustlers successfully piloted the mob of cattle through harsh terrain but when they ran low on supplies thirteen hundred kilometres to the southwest Harry (masquerading as Henry Collins) exchanged a white bull for the necessary provisions. The bull – a rare pedigree stud import from England – gave the game away and Harry was arraigned. The jury found him ‘Not guilty’ by virtue (goes the yarn) of his having done what Burke and Wills hadn’t.
