Review by Al McCall
Kings in Grass Castles has been and gone from our TV screens without so much as a hoot or bother. Neither promoted vigorously by Channel 7 nor noted by industry or government as worthy of much to-do, the four-hour miniseries seemed to warrant hardly a moment's chitchat. Perhaps, since the series delivered itself as an indigenous potboiler, it was hard to credit it as something out of the ordinary. I think it was.
The disinterest which has greeted this television adaptation of Mary Durack's 1959 novel stunk of calculation. Kings in Grass Castles is basically the biography of Patrick Durack (1834-1898), Mary's grandfather. Dirt poor tenant farmers in County Clare, Ireland, what remained of his family after the famine of the 1840s migrated to Australia in 1853.
Within two months of reaching the Goulburn district, his father was accidentally killed. Determined to change the family fortunes, Patrick went to the Ovens River diggings in Victoria and returned in 18 months with £1000. With that, he began to establish the Durack pastoral empire.
By the 1870s he had pegged land claims to 44,000 square kilometres in south-west Queensland, and his original cattle herd had grown from 100 head to 30,000. Durack owned hotels, a butchery and town properties and was doing a fast trade selling off land blocks to incoming settlers. He was a rich man indeed.
In the TV series, at the height of Durack's entrepreneurial achievements his syndicate tries to buy most of the Brisbane CBD. Soon after, the Durack empire goes bust. During the depression of the 1890s, Patrick's fortune is lost and his wife dies of malaria.
All this promise and tragedy make for a grand epic, especially as Tony Morphett's screenplay draws on the wretched condition of the Duracks' Irish past to emphasise the huge scale of the family's good fortune in Australia.
But the really significant twist, which is drawn out and woven through the Durack story, is the relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors. In Ireland, the English landlords brutally exploit the local tenant farmers. In Australia, the squatters treat indentured migrants like chattels. And the Duracks — when it becomes their turn to lord it over the land — are no different.
A major theme in Kings in Grass Castles is the changes in the relationship between the Durack family and the Aboriginal peoples. Despite his ready rapport and reliance on the tribes, Patrick Durack's business interests inevitably mean he is incapable of living up to his ideals.
Owning title to the land encourages the Durack family of companies to do what they please as the new kings of this grass monarchy. So despite Patrick's tender regard for his land's original "owners", a massacre is perpetrated in the name of Durack land hunger (and with the complicity of his own sons).
This contradiction between who the Duracks were and what they later became pivots on the question of native title. For as soon as the Duracks take land which was not theirs — despite a government title to the contrary — they became no better than the English landlords or the squattocracy which had previously made their lives so wretched.
While Patrick Durack gets to call himself "Australian" just before the end titles start rolling, no viewer could be left in any doubt how his Australia was forged. Such a passionate statement of historical fact on the eve of the Wik debate perhaps explains some of the silence that greeted this program.