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While he was at Argyle Reg heard occasional vague and somewhat menacing stories about a Durack property
called Bullita, an area of wild and rough ranges on the headwaters of the East Baines River. Bullita and the
sandstone country south and west was still home to some of the last ‘bush’ blacks in the region, and it was only 10
years earlier that a white man had been speared and killed on the station.
In 1929 Bullita was being de-stocked prior to resumption by the government. Towards the end of the year
Reg was sent from Argyle to take over the station and oversee the final muster. Accompanied by one Aboriginal
stockman and one white jackeroo, Reg took a plant of Argyle horses and pack mules 200 kilometres across to
Bullita and began work. Apart from a quick round trip from Bullita to return the Argyle plant and enjoy Christmas
with Patsy Durack and his family, Reg spent the next six months with his men mustering the remaining cattle
on Bullita. At the end of six months they delivered 500 stragglers to Newry station and then Reg returned to the
Argyle stock camp. When the station was finally resumed, no one was willing to take it on, so it was leased back
to Connor, Doherty and Durack.
For the next six years Reg was based in an Argyle stock camp, but he was constantly being called on by his
father to do other work, including stints as caretaker-manager of Argyle and Ivanhoe. Reg found this continual
disruption to his working routine stressful. In addition, he felt the need to travel to broaden his horizons and work
out his philosophy of life. In 1937 Reg hitched a ride to Victoria River Downs (VRD) with the idea of joining a
droving plant taking cattle to Queensland. As it turned out he left VRD by plane and made his way to Sydney.
For a period he attended lectures at the University of Sydney, not as a formal student, but, as he describes it, as
an ‘academic hobo’. It was in Sydney that Reg discovered the ideas of Marx, which seemed to him to be logical
and an ideal system. One of the friends he made was an elderly European radical named Ben Palley, who owned
the ‘Advance Bookshop’ in Campbell Street. Reg and Ben held many opinions in common, including Marxist
ideals. The infamous Stalinist trials were being held in Russia at the time and both men were appalled at the fate
of prominent Russian revolutionaries and intellectuals.
Eventually Reg’s money began to run low and he decided to work his way back to the East Kimberleys.
He knew that he would be passing through ‘Durack country’ in Queensland, but the burden of carrying the Durack
name—being a member of a widely known and wealthy ‘celebrity family’—weighed heavily on young Reg.
To avoid being pre-judged because of his name he decided to change his identity. He arranged to have his mail sent
to the Advance Bookshop where Ben Palley would re-address it to ‘Jimmy Gale’, the new name Reg adopted, and
forward it on to wherever he happened to be working. Then he took a train to Cairns and from there began hitching
rides across western Queensland.
As his money ran out, Reg often found himself camping with ‘hobos’ and sharing their troubles. By the time
he reached Cloncurry he was broke, but he was able to borrow enough money from a friend to buy a bike and a
good supply of stores, and continue his westward journey. Riding across the treeless plains of western Queensland
and the Barkly tableland had unexpected problems. The water from many of the bores along the route caused
sudden attacks of diarrhoea. In the absence of trees or fence posts, Reg had to take care of this problem while at
the same time holding his bike upright to prevent the waterbag from spilling! From Cloncurry he pedalled over
700 kilometres to Anthony’s Lagoon, where he got a job fencing. He was still working there when he heard that a
new manager was required for Auvergne station.
The previous manager of Auvergne, Harry Shadforth, had died in 1937 from blood poisoning after being gored
in the leg by a micky bull. The pastoral company, Connor, Doherty and Durack, owned Auvergne so Reg applied
for the job, but only on condition that he was treated in the same way that the company treated managers on its
other stations. The company agreed and Reg took over management of Auvergne early in 1939. He was to manage
the station for the next 11 years.
Soon after he took control of Auvergne, Reg discovered a sickle in the Auvergne dump. Then he found an
engineer’s hammer in the station workshop and on a whim, he wired the two together to form the communist
hammer and sickle. Reg fixed it above the inside of the door to the station store and then promptly forgot about
it. A few years later it caused some consternation when soldiers noticed it camped at Auvergne during the Second
World War. Fortunately the local policeman had known Reg for years and was able to reassure the soldiers that he
was ‘harmless’, and thus defuse the situation. At the time, the story did the rounds of the cattle stations and caused
great mirth, but the first Reg knew of it was when he read the story in a book published more than 50 years later.
During wet season holidays in Perth, Reg met Enid Tulloch, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who lived
with his family in a house next door to the Durack family in Perth. Romance blossomed and in 1944 Reg and Enid
were married. Their honeymoon was a 28-day trip from Perth to Auvergne in a new truck Reg had bought for the
station—a suitable slow introduction for a city girl to the joys and rigours of an outback wet season.
In 1950 Connor, Doherty and Durack sold most of their pastoral holdings in the Northern Territory and Western
Australia, including Auvergne station. Reg held shares in the company, but he was only prepared to surrender them
in exchange for a satisfactory area of land to develop as a station. A deal was struck that a section of Auvergne
known as the Magdharba Block would be excluded from the sale and title transferred to Reg. The name Magdharba
came from a First World War battle in Egypt where Reg’s uncle Neil had fought. Later Neil had a ‘battle’ with some
wild bulls on the block and declared that it was ‘worse than Magdharba’. Reg later changed the name of the block
to Kildurk, a name derived from parts of the names of M P Durack and Tom Kilfoyle, and which these men had
applied to the area in the very early days.
In 1950 Kildurk was almost completely undeveloped wild bush country. Reg’s first ‘homestead’ was a stock
camp at Stewart’s Yard Billabong, east of the West Baines River on the northeast side of the station. On a stony
ridge above the billabong and in the best bush tradition, Reg built a homestead, outbuildings and fences of local
stone bound with ant bed mortar. Iron for roofing came from the old Victoria River Depot Store buildings that Reg