In that year the Legislature threw open all leasehold lands to the
public for purchase on easy terms and conditions. The idea was to
settle an industrious peasantry on lands hitherto leased in large
blocks to the squatters. This brought down a flood of settlement
on Kuryong. At the top end of the station there was a chain
of mountains, and the country was rugged and patchy--rich valleys
alternating with ragged hills. Here and there about the run were
little patches of specially good land, which were soon snapped up.
The pioneers of these small settlers were old Morgan Donohoe and
his wife, who had built the hotel at Kiley's Crossing; and, on their
reports, all their friends and relatives, as they came out of the
"ould country," worked their way to Kuryong, and built little bits
of slab and bark homesteads in among the mountains. The rougher
the country, the better they liked it. They were a horse-thieving,
sheep-stealing breed, and the talents which had made them poachers
in the old country soon made them champion bushmen in their new
surroundings. The leader of these mountain settlers was one Doyle,
a gigantic Irishman, who had got a grant of a few hundred acres in
the mountains, and had taken to himself a Scotch wife from among
the free immigrants. The story ran that he was too busy to go to
town, but asked a friend to go and pick a wife for him, "a fine
shtrappin' woman, wid a good brisket on her."
The Doyles were large, slow, heavy men, with an instinct for the
management of cattle; they were easily distinguished from the Donohoes,
who were little red-whiskered men, enterprising and quick-witted,
and ready to do anything in the world for a good horse. Other
strangers and outlanders came to settle in the district, but from
the original settlement up to the date of our story the two great
families of the Doyles and the Donohoes governed the neighbourhood,
and the headquarters of the clans was at Donohoe's "Shamrock Hotel,"
at Kiley's Crossing. Here they used to rendezvous when they went
away down to the plains country each year for the shearing; for they
added to their resources by travelling about the country shearing,
droving, fencing, tanksinking, or doing any other job that offered
itself, but always returned to their mountain fastnesses ready for
any bit of work "on the cross" (i.e., unlawful) that might turn up.
When times got hard they had a handy knack of finding horses that
nobody had lost, shearing sheep they did not own, and branding and
selling other people's calves.
When they stole stock, they moved them on through the mountains
as quickly as possible, always having a brother or uncle, or
a cousin--Terry or Timothy or Martin or Patsy--who had a holding
"beyant." By these means they could shift stolen stock across
the great range, and dispose of them among the peaceable folk who
dwelt in the good country on the other side, whose stock they stole
in return. Many a good horse and fat beast had made the stealthy
mountain journey, lying hidden in gaps and gullies when pursuit
grew hot, and being moved on as things quieted down.