TheBanyanTree: How Harry shot his master

[Peter Macinnis]

I don't think I have told this tale here before -- I was asked to post 
it to another list, to help celebrate the Australia Day weekend.  The 
Sam Kekovich reference may need some Googling -- Sam is real, the 
character he portrays is a shock jock, but be aware that the red light 
is on to indicate satire in the vicinity.

peter

*************

Here is a vignette that was told around OUR barbecue on Australia Day. 
We had been discussing the state of Mr Blaxland's bowels, but that was 
deemed inappropriate in the presence of food, leaving us with a choice 
of doing Sam Kekovich impressions, or discussing killer camels.  For 
obvious reasons, the killer camels won.

The teller was my old friend, Henry Cruciform, whose sight is failing, 
so he did not see (or chose to ignore) the tape I placed near him.  This 
is verbatim, save that his often inaccurate quotes-from-memory have been 
checked and inserted from reliable sources, and most of his salty 
colloquialisms have been edited out.

**************

There was a genuine belief in England that Australia was terra nullius, 
almost entirely unpopulated and ready for the plucking, even if the 
logic behind the belief is a little peculiar. By February 1788, though, 
Watkin Tench was ready to question it slightly, while still expressing 
the belief, based on no evidence, that the inland areas would be open 
for the taking.

"I have already hinted, that the country is more populous than it was 
generally believed to be in Europe at the time of our sailing. But this 
remark is not meant to be extended to the interior parts of the 
continent, which there is every reason to conclude from our researches, 
as well as from the manner of living practised by the natives, to be 
uninhabited."

By 1817, any thought that the interior was uninhabited had been shown to 
be wrong, though the numbers were still open to question. John Oxley was 
told to look into the matter:

"If the people are sufficiently numerous to form tribes, it is important 
to ascertain their condition, and rules of the society . . .".

The general levels of ignorance in Whitehall can be detected in an 
instruction to Lieutenant P. P. King, the following year, to determine 
the inhabitants'

" . . . means of subsistence, whether chiefly, or to what extent by 
fishing, hunting, feeding sheep or other animals, by agriculture or by 
commerce".

Fishing and hunting make sense, but "feeding sheep" as an occupation is 
about as likely as a corroboree breaking into a rousing chorus of "All 
we like sheep" from 'The Messiah', or miming the Sam Kekovich lamb 
backstrap commercial.

The instructions to Oxley came from Macquarie, the first governor to 
make an official use of "Australia", and the text is noteworthy as being 
the earliest reference I have found, thus far, to the formal name we use 
now for the people who had always been, up until then, called Indians or 
natives. In the instructions, he is ordered to furnish a

" . . . description of such natives or aborigines of the country as you 
may happen to see, or fall in with . . . ".

The capitalisation that is now the norm came as a later courtesy. By the 
late 1830s, large groups of Aborigines had been met in many places, but 
there was an impetus that would not be denied, and more and more free 
settlers arrived hungry for land, as were the convicts whose sentences 
had expired.

In Australia, as in America, there was land that clearly was not under 
the plough, not fenced, not filled with herds of docile stock (people 
here knew there were no indigenous sheep). Clearly, that land was there 
for any man of daring and resolve to seize, but then you had to persuade 
the government to let you keep what you had grabbed by squatting on it, 
when the time came for official surveyors to map the area.

John Ainsworth Horrocks was one of those who moved out into the supposed 
wilderness, took the best land, and hoped to keep it when civilisation 
and land allocation caught up. With his brother Eustace, and their 
faithful butler, John Green, Horrocks reached South Australia in March 
1839. They were accompanied by other family servants, four merino rams 
and some sheepdogs, they came well-supplied with stores and equipment, 
and they landed at Holdfast Bay on John's 21st birthday.

The Horrocks boys came of a wealthy English cotton-mill-owning family — 
their grandfather was an influential member of Parliament, and had 
installed the first all-metal power looms, and made a fortune out of 
muslin manufacture. So without too much trouble, their father had paid 
for them to acquire 1000 acres of land in the new colony of South 
Australia, but the land surveys were in a mess as more would-be settlers 
arrived, all demanding land.

Edward John Eyre had reported excellent land near the Hutt River (where 
the town of Clare stands today), so Horrocks and the dutiful Green went, 
looked, and decided to take a chance on settling there. To make his 
prior claim known to others who might arrive in the interim, John 
Horrocks remained behind, sheltering in a hollow tree while his butler 
went and fetched the younger brother, stores and stock, and the other 
servants.

The brothers, the faithful Green and their other servants established 
Hope Farm and a village called Penwortham, after the ancestral home in 
Lancashire. By 1842, there were 24 people, 3200 sheep, 26 cattle and 
four horses there, but no camels as yet. Soon though, Horrocks began 
ranging further afield, seeking yet greener pastures.

Writing in 1914, a historian quotes an unnamed source who described 
Horrocks as "a young man of splendid physique". Tall, handsome in a 
dashing Byronic manner, Horrocks named his favourite greyhound Gulnare 
after a slave-girl in Byron's 'The Corsair', and he also endowed a plain 
that he passed with the same name, thus commemorating his hound's 
faithful efforts in that vicinity in catching and killing emus for him 
to eat in 1841.

He kept an open house, feeding all those who called in for a supper, 
lodging and breakfast, and acquiring staff from odd sources. One of 
them, an indigent sculptor called Theakston, he acquired from a debtors' 
prison, but Horrocks remained slightly aloof, eating at a barrel 
specially set up for him each night with a clean cloth and a silver fork 
and spoon.

In hindsight, taking Theakston may not have been such a good idea, 
because less than two years earlier, Theakston had been out as 
second-in-command with explorer John Darke, when Darke was speared to 
death on the Eyre Peninsula. Horrocks, however, had no thought of 
jinxes, and saw only a man with experience.

So it was that he set off in late July of 1846, with Theakston as his 
second-in-command, a cook called Garlick, and a 'black boy' (an 
Aborigine) named Jimmy Moorhouse. They were accompanied by the 
soon-to-be-famous artist and lithographer, S. T. Gill, who came along at 
no salary, to record the expedition.

Gill had conceived a hope of being able to sell some of his works on his 
return. There was also a camel driver named Kilroy, and, of course, a 
camel, in this case named Harry, the only survivor of nine camels 
imported from Tenerife by Henry Phillips. Horrocks paid Phillips six 
cows, to the value of 90 pounds. It was not a good bargain, because 
Harry was by no means the best-natured of animals.

While John Horrocks modelled himself on Lord Byron in some respects, he 
was a deeply religious man, and perhaps Harry heard his master citing 
Isaiah 40:6 and took it too literally, treating all flesh as grass, but 
whatever the reason, Harry often bit people and other animals. He also 
bit holes in flour bags and engaged in other annoying practices, but 
mainly he bit people and animals.

No sooner had the expedition set out than Harry bit Garlick on the head, 
badly enough for him to need dressing and sticking plaster. In his 
journal, Horrocks notes that the camel

" . . . had in the morning taken one of the goats in his mouth across 
the loins, and would have broken his back if Jimmy had not speedily run 
to its rescue."

The goats themselves were something of a problem (unless the occasional 
camel-mauling made them skittish). The explorers had taken goats as a 
source of meat in preference to sheep, because goats would be harder to 
steal, something Horrocks explains in his journal:

" . . . as they give tongue immediately they are caught, so the natives 
could not take any beast without being heard."

All the same, on the night of July 31, the goats fled the camp, 
apparently having scented a wild dog, and had to be gathered in from a 
mile away, but once the adventurers learned to tether the leading goat, 
the flock stayed with the camp.

The goats had other tricks to play, though. For starters, all but one of 
them went lame, and they leapt on the tent, ripping it in places, but 
there must have been more that was left unmentioned, because Horrocks 
records killing a goat,

" . . . the one that has given us so much trouble, and which Jimmy was 
delighted to see slaughtered, having in his hatred to the animal 
promised Garlick, the tent-keeper, a pint of ale if he would kill it next."

This does not sound like a group that felt any comfort in their 
dominance over their animals, but worse was to come.

To return to our camels, the party pushed on into dry country, leaving 
their horses behind, but accompanied by the surly camel, carrying 356 
pounds weight. Horrocks, Kilroy and Gill were on foot near a body of 
water that Horrocks had named Lake Gill (it is now Lake Dutton) when 
misfortune struck. The account that follows was dictated by Horrocks, 
but it is necessary to note that guns back then were generally 
muzzle-loaders, and Horrocks had one with two barrels:

". . . Bernard Kilroy, who was walking ahead of the party, stopped, 
saying he saw a beautiful bird, which he recommended me to shoot to add 
to the collection. My gun was loaded with slugs in one barrel and ball 
in the other, I stopped the camel to get at the shot belt, which I could 
not get without his laying down.

"Whilst Mr. Gill was unfastening it I was screwing the ramrod into the 
wadding over the slugs close alongside of the camel. At this moment the 
camel gave a lurch to one side, and caught his pack in the cock of my 
gun, which discharged the barrel I was unloading, the contents of which 
first took off the middle fingers of my right hand between the second 
and third joints, and entered my left cheek by my lower jaw, knocking 
out a row of teeth from my lower jaw."

They were, he goes on to say, 65 miles from the depot where the horses 
were, and they had just five gallons of water remaining. Kilroy headed 
back to Theakston and the horses, leaving Gill to mind the invalid. Gill 
cared for Horrocks and more: he took down dictation from the wounded 
man, and he even created pictures of the area, with himself seen lying 
on the ground outside the invalid's tent, while a slightly sheepish and 
embarrassed Harry is to be seen in the background. He also wrote his 
account of the events:

"The right-hand barrel, with the ramrod in it, went off, taking the 
middle finger of Mr. H.'s right hand and lodged the charge in his left 
cheek. He instantly fell back bleeding copiously. We succeeded in 
staunching the blood with our handkerchiefs, and after cutting off a 
part of the finger which hung slightly on, managed to dress it with such 
stuff as we had brought in case of spear wounds, treating the face in 
the same way; we laid him down, and fixed the tent; after getting him 
in, Kilroy started back to the Depot the same evening, leaving me in 
charge of Mr. H. until relief arrived. Soon after Kilroy left, Mr. H. 
rallied sufficiently to speak, and convinced me that his brain was not 
affected. We had, of course, a wretched night of it."

Kilroy arrived back after four days, with Theakston and two horses. 
Loading Horrocks on a horse and placing a tarpaulin over his legs to 
keep him on the horse, they set off, Theakston riding the other horse 
and Gill and Kilroy taking turns to drive the camel. A week later, they 
got Horrocks back to Penwortham, where Green dressed his wounds, but 
gangrene had set in, and Horrocks died, even after an operation on the 
gangrenous finger — by then, the infection had spread too far up the arm.

It was agreed by all that Harry the camel must die for his part in the 
death of his master (Horrocks had recommended that it be done, but only 
so that the good name of camels as a species should be no further 
besmirched by Harry and his antics).  When the first bullet did not kill 
him, Harry turned and bit the head of Jimmy Moorhouse who was holding 
him, but the second bullet settled his fate.

It seems a pity that Australians call somebody "game as Ned Kelly", and 
not "game as Harry the camel" — perhaps if Harry had risen to the moment 
and bitten or shot the man with the gun, we might do so more willingly.


-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis, occasional acknowledger of Jalopi, the god
  /     \   of broken skateboards, damaged psyches and generic personal
  \.--._*   hygiene products which have passed their use-by dates.
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm