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    To Ride a Fine Horse
    To Ride a Fine Horse
    To Ride a Fine Horse
    Ebook150 pages1 hour

    To Ride a Fine Horse

    By Mary Durack

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    About this ebook

    To Ride a Fine Horse is an Australian classic - Mary Durack's Kings in Grass Castles - adapted for young readers. It tells the story of Mary's grandfather, Patsy, a poor Irish boy who came to Australia at seventeen, made his fortune on the gold fields, and then founded a pastoral empire in the remote outback. Patsy's ambition had always been to 'ride a fine horse,' but he would far exceed this dream, becoming one of the nation's top horse breeders, with his choice of the finest thoroughbred mounts in the land. This account of Patsy Durack's life is based on letters, notebooks, and documents discovered by his granddaughter Mary in an old tin trunk more than fifty years after his death. The illustrations that appear throughout the text are the work of Mary's sister, Elizabeth, and are reproduced from the original 1963 edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHouse of Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2012
    ISBN9781742699431
    To Ride a Fine Horse

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      Book preview

      To Ride a Fine Horse - Mary Durack

      Horizon

      1

      The Magic Coin

      ‘MY life,’ Patsy Durack told his children, ‘began like a fairy tale with a boy who made a wish.’

      He had never actually seen the Leprechauns, as they call fairies in the Irish countryside where he was born. His grandmother, however, had often shown him the place where they danced and so it was to her he confided how he had gone there one frosty night and spoken his wish aloud under the full moon.

      ‘I wished,’ he said, ‘that I might some day ride a fine horse of my very own.’

      The old woman had stopped her spinning and looked at the eager, curly-haired lad with tears in her eyes. Those were hard days for the Irish people and she knew how little chance he had of owning the horse of his dreams, or in fact of ever having anything to call his own. It was almost impossible, with the heavy taxes they had to pay, for the poor people to keep out of debt and often hard enough even to keep themselves alive.

      ‘Sure, and you must not be dreaming so much, Patsy boy,’ she said, ‘or you will have the grass grow under your feet.’

      Later Patsy was to smile as he remembered her words, for although he always loved to dream he was never in one place long enough for the grass to grow under his feet, much as he sometimes wished that it would in a country where grass was often more precious than gold.

      By that time he knew he had been right in believing that a wish could become a horse, but he also knew that just wishing was not enough. One had to work as well, and this, as the eldest son of a poor farming family, he had done for as long as he could remember. At first he had had to feed and tend the animals, milk the cows, shepherd the sheep and cut the wet turf into slabs to dry for fuel. Later he had ploughed the fields, sown and dug the potato crops, learned to build and thatch houses, shoe horses, drive the donkey cart to town and bargain in the market-place.

      But sometimes on high days and holidays he had gone fishing at the salmon leap or had caught trout in the quieter reaches of the River Shannon. He had danced and sung and played his fiddle and flute with other young people in the village square, and sometimes he had slipped away on his own to the top of the mountain behind his father’s farm where he could look down over the countryside, across the quiet loch and the silver river winding to the sea.

      There he would dream of the old days when his people had owned the land, as far as the eye could see, and his forebears had ridden horses like those on which the rich, red-coated hunting squires flashed across patchwork fields and over the walls and hedges of Galway and Clare. To give the Irish back their lands again seemed beyond even the power of the Leprechauns, but a splendid horse—surely that was not impossible?

      When he was twelve years old he was given a precious penny for his birthday, and was wondering what he would spend it on when he met a poor tinker woman begging for food for her sick children.

      ‘Tell my fortune then,’ Patsy said, ‘and you shall have my penny,’ for almost all the Irish tinkers or gypsy people told fortunes to make a little money from the simple people who believed in such things.

      The woman called down blessings on his head as he shuffled the tattered cards. ‘Praised be God,’ she cried, spreading them on the ground, ‘but it is a fine fortune ye have here.’

      ‘What do you see?’ Patsy asked anxiously.

      ‘I see,’ she said, probably wracking her brains for what to say that might please him, ‘why, yes, I see ye will be finding a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.’

      Patsy’s family laughed at his foolishness, but though he pretended not to believe the tinker’s nonsense, he never forgot what she had said. Sometimes he would dig secretly where he thought he had seen a rainbow end.

      Then, as he grew older, he began to think of the end of the rainbow as maybe America or South Africa, to which more and more Irish families were migrating every year. It was little wonder, for with the terrible famine of 1845 a people already so poor were bowed under a further weight of sorrow and suffering. Nobody had enough to eat, while thousands, homeless and destitute, were dying on the roads and in the frozen ditches; but even if Patsy’s family had had enough money to migrate, the younger children were then too weak and sick to have survived the shortest journey.

      In 1849, however, Patsy’s Uncle Darby and Aunt Margaret, newly married, managed somehow to scrape up the passage money to Australia, where it was said that land was being almost given away and that a rich wool industry was flourishing. The young couple set off with high hopes, but soon wrote to say that although Australia was a land of plenty compared to Ireland fortunes were not so quickly and easily come by as some had said. It did not sound to young Patsy like his long dreamed of rainbow’s end until suddenly, in 1851, the newspapers announced that gold had been struck in New South Wales.

      From that time on Patsy could think of little else. He had learned that some ships would carry entire migrant families for the sum of £8, though after they arrived in Australia they were supposed to pay the rest of the passage money within a certain time. In poverty stricken Ireland £8 seemed a fortune, but Patsy began hopefully to put away every hard-earned penny that came his way.

      One day when returning from market he had an adventure that was to alter the whole course of his life and that of his family. Along the road he came upon a carriage that had become stuck in the mud. The coachman was old and feeble and the richly dressed owner of the vehicle was helping him heave and push without effect. Patsy, then nearly seventeen, although thin and not very tall for his age, had always been strong and practical. He stopped his donkey cart, went to the back of the carriage and put his shoulder under the hub of the wheel. In no time he had it free and, touching his cap, was about to go on his way when the traveller called him back.

      ‘Are you so rich then,’ he said, ‘that you will not accept a small reward?’

      Patsy, who was too proud to appear eager for money, said that he hoped one day to be rich enough to own such a carriage for himself, since he planned to go to Australia and dig for gold. The man, who proved to be none other than the great Lord Dunraven of Adare, pressed a coin into Patsy’s hand.

      ‘Then here’s a piece to go on with,’ he said as he stepped back into his coach and drove away.

      Many years later Patsy was to meet this man’s son, who became a great fighter for the Irish cause.

      ‘Your father once gave me a sovereign,’ Patsy told him, ‘but for which I might well have lived and died a struggling tenant farmer in County Clare.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ said the younger Dunraven when he had told his story. ‘Many are given such a chance but few know how to use it.’

      No doubt what he said was true, but all his life Patsy was to remember that as a magic moment. He had stood, open-mouthed, looking after the retreating vehicle, then, with a cry of joy, had jumped into his cart and driven back to market. There he purchased a sow, two laying hens and, to celebrate his great good luck, a tiny present for each member of his family.

      In later years he would tell his children how that had seemed indeed an enchanted coin, for the hens laid well and the sow soon produced a litter of fat piglets. The sick children grew stronger with better food, and before long they had managed to save enough for the passage money to Australia.

      Sadly but hopefully the family—mother, father, Patsy with his five sisters and little brother—packed their bags and bundles of homespun clothes and gathered together their few possessions—a spinning wheel, a few cooking utensils and a wooden cradle that had rocked generations of Irish children. They then said good-bye to friends and relatives and set off across the channel to England and the port of Plymouth.

      It was a

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