SACRED
TO THE MEMORY OF
HUGH PROBY
THIRD SON OF THE EARL OF
CARYSFORT
WHO WAS DROWNED
WHILE CROSSING
THE WILLOCKRA CREEK
AUGUST 3Oth 1852
AGED 24 YEARS
Take Ye Heed Watch And Pray: For Ye
Know Not When The Time Is. MARK XIII.33
THIS TABLET
WAS PLACED OVER HIS GRAVE BY HIS
BROTHERS & SISTERS IN THE YEAR
1858
Only a few years before these words had to be chiselled into a big slab of Scottish granite weighing about one and a half tons, had Hugh Proby arrived in the growing colony of South Australia.
“The earliest records show that the first Pastoral Lease of Kanyaka was to Hugh Proby on 1st of July 1851, although he could have held it under an Occupational Licence as early as 1849. When the leases were granted in 1851, they were declared to be stocked with 1200 cattle. Two of the leases, totalling 101 square miles, were the beginning of Kanyaka. “
Schmidt,R.H., “Kanyaka”, District Council of Kanyaka, 1988, p. 7
Kanyaka Station was situated about halfway between Quorn and Hawker and, not having experienced those years of drought which were to ruin many settlers a few years later, the Kanyaka Run thrived. Fate however had sadder events in store for its first owner. In August 1852, a thunderstorm caused a herd of cattle to break into a stampede. In the middle of the night, Hugh Proby and a native stockman tried to rescue the cattle. Misjudging the power of the heavily flowing Willochra Creek, Hugh Proby was swept away and drowned. About six years later, the heavy granite-tablet was shipped to Port Augusta and then hauled overland by bullock-teams to the site of the accident.
“That a monument from his native land marks, and forms part of, his resting place half a world away is certainly unique, and, in view of all the circumstances, this grave probably has no parallel in Australia. “
ibid, p. 5
Not far beyond the grave, I had to cross a now subdued Willochra Creek, only a foot deep but still quite forceful. The climb out of the deeply cut creek bed led me towards a small number of totally dilapidated ruins, the last sad remains of what had been planned as a town on the scale of Adelaide: Simmonston, the centre of the envisaged wheatbelt. With “wheat dreams” shattered in a series of droughts, the only remaining residents in the spot were lizards and wildflowers.
Later on, l passed the ruins of the old Kanyaka Homestead, the place which could have been the long-term home of Hugh Proby. With many buildings having been constructed by Proby’s successor, today’s ruins still reveal clearly what a busy place Kanyaka had been. One of the more unique features surrounding the homestead are the stonewalls. About three feet high and two feet thick, they were built for a length of about 30 miles and much of that laborious construction seems to be still intact. Rocky ground, too hard to dig post-holes, high cost of fencing wire and transport, and the availability of cheap labour were the main factors for creating a bit of “Connemara in the desert”.
Proby’s death was not the only catastrophe to hit Kanyaka Homestead. In the mid-1860′s, drought reduced the number of sheep from 41.000 to 10.000, furthermore, the brother of Proby’s successor perished in the desert, later, an itinerant hawker, Thomas Smythe Holyoake, was murdered there and a young boy, aged two years and ten months, James Bole, was lost in the hills and died. Well, to add to that, the naming of the name of the place is linked to a big rock close by which, according to one interpretation is a place where natives “… when at the point of death, were brought … and laid down to die…” (ibid, p.6). Dear me, I had had enough of mortality for the moment and hastily made my way to Hawker.
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