By James Aitchison

The country around South Australia’s Flinders Ranges is unforgiving.  It is also deceptive.

Some years there’s enough grass to support thousands of sheep; in others, the pastures become an arid wasteland.  Boom and bust, boom and bust — the cycle is endless.  And when the rains do come, the ground is baked so dry that walls of water race along desolate creek beds and vanish into distant salty lakes.

In early colonial days, British settlers believed they could tame the land successfully.  They had no concept of the heartbreak awaiting them. 

Hugh Proby was no exception.  Proby, the third son of the Earl of Carysfort, first stepped ashore at Port Adelaide, South Australia, brimming with confidence and enthusiasm; we can only imagine his dreams.  On 30 May 1851, the young nobleman was just 23, determined to make his fortune in the colony and build a pastoral empire.  Within months he would be dead.

He took up a lease at an isolated property called Kanyaka.  The indigenous nation which had claimed this land for countless thousands of years — the Barnggala people — called it “the place of stone”.  Proby, undeterred by the hostile land and fickle pastures, paid ten shillings per square mile, and chose to run cattle. 

Proby and his workers lived in huts, a far cry from the comforts of Glenart Castle in County Wicklow. 

On 30 August 1852, he and a native stockman were mustering cattle on the western portion of the property. Without warning, a violent thunderstorm caused the cattle to stampede.  The two men saddled their horses and rode out to the mob.  The deluge turned barren Willochra Creek into a savage torrent; floodwaters raged along its course.  Proby misjudged the danger.  When he attempted to cross the swirling waters, he was swept from his horse and drowned.

Six years after his death, his family shipped out a gravestone made of Scottish granite.  It was hauled to Proby’s grave by a bullock team.  Estimates put its weight at one and a half tons.  In the early 1900s, his sister Lady Hamilton came to Australia to visit his grave. 

His epitaph read: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”