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Pumpkin (c. 1850–1908), Punthamara (Boontamurra) stockman, was about eighteen when the European colonist Patrick (Patsy) Durack established Thylungra station on a tributary of Cooper Creek, west Queensland, in 1868. Pumpkin claimed Durack as his ‘brother’, a relationship he honoured for the rest of his life. A splendid rider and stockman, he interested himself in all aspects of station work and soon acquired a useful knowledge of carpentry, building, fencing, and gardening. He accompanied Durack and other family members on droving and buggy trips throughout Queensland and New South Wales.
In 1885 when Durack left Thylungra to make his home in Brisbane, he gave Pumpkin a plant of horses but refused to take him from his Country. Pumpkin followed the family to the city and persuaded them that, as a childless widower, his responsibility lay with the two Durack sons who were then establishing Argyle station on the Ord River, Western Australia. Accordingly, in April 1887, he accompanied Durack by ship from Brisbane to the East Kimberley, where he assumed a many-sided task, from the building of homesteads and yards to stock-tailing, droving, horse-breaking, and even tracking horse thieves. Although suspicious of local Aboriginal people and suspected by them, when he learned that Mary Durack was coming to make her home at Argyle, he negotiated for a young wife to help her in the house. This encouraged other Aboriginal people to enter station employment and Pumpkin undertook their training. His pupils bore the stamp of his own conscientiousness and included such workers as Argyle Charlie, Ulysses, and Boxer; the last a Queensland Aboriginal man whom Pumpkin had adopted as a child. Pumpkin died in 1908. His grave at Argyle is marked by a memorial headstone (erected 1950) that reads:
Here lies Pumpkin, a member of the
Boontamurra tribe of Cooper Creek, who
from boyhood served Patrick Durack of
Thylungra, W. Queensland, following
his sons to the West in 1887 and
rendering faithful service and devotion
to the day of his death in 1908.
♦♦ This article was revised on 11 July 2025
Mary Durack, 'Pumpkin (1850–1908)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/pumpkin-4418/text7213, published first in hardcopy 1974, accessed online 11 February 2026.
This article was published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 5, (Melbourne University Press), 1974
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