Recently, a man caught under a log, severed his leg at the knee then crawled kilometres to get help. Another climber, caught in a canyon under a boulder, cut off his arm to get away. These stories are not new to the Australian outback.
Missing Stockman Found Dead
In 1912, a young man, Deveney, was employed as a stockman on the cattle property, Terrick Station. One day he didn't return from his usual rounds. Concern grew with each passing day until a search was mounted. His decomposed body was found a few days later.
He was lying in a grove of trees with one arm missing. It was obvious he had died of loss of blood from the stump on his shoulder. But where was the arm? And how did he lose it?
Suspecting foul play, the searchers notified police at Longreach and Sub Inspector McGrath started investigations. They found no sign of Deveney's horse, no evidence of a struggle and knew no reason why anyone would want to do away with the young stockman.
How Did Deveney Die?
Puzzled, the investigators sat around the death site, trying to piece together the events. One man looked up at a nearby tree and noticed a galah's nest in a hollow branch about four metres off the ground. Below the nest the bark of the tree was heavily scoured. They climbed up to the branch and found the final clue in the grisly death: the missing arm. McGrath now had a good theory of Deveney's final hours.
The young stockman was riding his horse through the grove of trees and spotted the nest of galahs. Standing on his horse’s back he reached up to get the fledglings. For some reason, the horse moved and Deveney fell, his arm catching in the hollow branch. And there he stayed. Calling for help was no use: no-one could hear him. His horse wandered off, oblivious to his master's plight.
He tried to free himself using his spurs to climb the tree, but the weight of his body and the downward slope of the hole in the tree trapped him. These efforts left the scuff marks on the trunk, evidence of his final, agonising hours.
Cutting Off a Limb to Safe a life
It must have taken the sheer courage inherent in these early Australian pioneering stockmen to take the only option left. He managed to get out his small knife with his free hand and hacked off his arm at the shoulder.
After chopping away at his bare flesh, the weight of his body overcame the hold of the last tendrils of skin and he fell clear. But the ordeal was too much. He crawled a few metres from the tree and fainted, his heart pumping his lifeblood onto the dirt. Finally he passed away from loss of blood.
Later when the police attempted to remove the arm from the hollow branch, they realised why the young stockman was committed to his gruesome fate. The arm was wedged so tight that even they had difficulty retrieving it. It was not only the effect of his weight hanging down the trunk that held him, but also the arm being caught in the hollow.
Unlike the recent events, Deveney's story hardly rated as news in the rugged days of the early 1900s in outback Australia. These type of events were almost too common to be reported. There were no heroic stories of his attempt to cut away a limb for survival. In fact, this incident only received a short piece in Brisbane’s Courier-mail, that didn't even acknowledge Deveney's first name or age.
Some other stories of early Australian pioneering life are:
The outback ghost town of Betoota and Simon “Ziggy” Remienko.
Bruce Iliff - Hello from an Australian freelancer! I’ve been scratching articles together in Australia in a range of subjects for a number of ...
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