Joe by Brown

Joe Byrne, from Australian Son by Max Brown.

The following are 'sections' from the text of Max Brown.

Joe Byrne.

The fourth member of the bunch, Joe Byrne, came from the Woolshed, a few miles out of Beechworth where Reedy Creek tumbles down between granite boulders and chatters through Sebastapol towards Wangaratta. The Byrne home stood towards the western end in a half-acre clearing up against the southern flank of hills. A typical slab hut lined with hessian and paper, it had a broad chimney of granite one end and a tiny bedroom and skillion adjoining the kitchen.

Joe's grandfather was an Irish rebel, transported not for theft like Red Kelly, but for a political crime which is to say intellectual misdemeanour. Patrick Byrne, the father, a teamster and goldminer, was not long dead, and Mrs Margaret Byrne, with four girls and two boys, did as best she could, drawing water from a spring a few metres from her door, growing a few vegetables and cooking on the broad hearth with its camp oven, three‑legged pots and other necessities.

The Byrnes were a nice looking family, Mrs Byrne a quiet, active woman, the girls pretty, and Joe a lithe, intelligent youngster, clean and tidy and a little old ?fashioned and grave in his ways.

The Woolshed was one place in the North-East where fossickers could still earn a living. Hundreds of huts followed the white and yellow coach-road down the valley, and although many diggers had moved on, thousands of others especially Chinese panned and sluiced beside the lively stream. Opposite the Byrnes' were Chinese workings; the Chinese had a joss house in the valley, and each Easter staged a dragon procession up the hill into Beechworth.

Despite a clash with Irish diggers on the Buckland River some years before, the Chinese were well-liked and Joe had learned enough Cantonese to make himself understood.

By the time Joe was twenty, he was a handsome young man of more than medium height, with regular features, blue eyes and light, wavy hair. Dressed in the trousers and jacket of the sober citizen of the day, he made no attempt to ape the gentry with their strapped trousers and bright waistcoats. Times were leisurely and the food plain and plentiful. He roamed the district on horseback. If Joe liked to stop the night he was welcome. So Joe came and went often on other men's horses never imagining that many years later an elderly lady approaching death would rise from her bed in an old weatherboard house in Beechworth specially to speak of him. Reaching down tremblingly into the well of years to the time she was fourteen and Joe eighteen, she recited the songs he wrote.

She said: "There was no harm in Joe. He was a nice boy. He brought me two curlews, but the mother bird followed them down. When night came, they commenced to squeal so we let them go. Then he brought me a lamb. You never knew where he got it; and it followed me around for years, even after he himself was dead. He was a nice, quiet boy, not flash, and a fine horse-man. He would come in at any old hour to stay for the night, and my father would say, "Whose horse have you got tonight?" and Joe would tell him. He probably did a bit of cattle duffing just kill a cow where it stood for meat but that was no great crime, unless you were caught. A lot of people did it and with good reason. He got in with Sherritt, and that was when the trouble began. After spending six months of 1876 in Beechworth for possessing stolen meat, Joe and Aaron were charged the following January with injuring a Chinese digger who surprised them diving into a dam near his camp and ordered them off.