Advance Australia!

[Illustration: THE QUEEN OF THE SOUTH.]

Advance Australia!

_AN ACCOUNT OF EIGHT YEARS’ WORK, WANDERING, AND AMUSEMENT, IN QUEENSLAND, NEW SOUTH WALES, AND VICTORIA_

By

The Hon. Harold Finch-Hatton

Second Edition

London

W. H. Allen & Co.

13 Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, S.W.

1886

(_All rights reserved_)

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.

Contents

Chap. Page

I. The Voyage 1

II. THE VOYAGE (_continued_) 12

III. Somerset 21

IV. First Impressions Of The Bush 35

V. Life In The Bush 54

VI. Life On The Station 69

VII. Plagues And Pleasures Of The Bush 80

VIII. Wild Cattle 95

IX. Comparison Of Cattle And Sheep Stations 107

X. The Blacks 123

XI. Sugar 138

XII. Gold-Mining 154

XIII. Gold-Digging 174

XIV. Drink 197

XV. Gold-Digging 208

XVI. Gold-Digging 224

XVII. Queensland And Her Resources And Prospects 242

XVIII. Brisbane 276

XIX. Sydney 291

XX. Melbourne 300

XXI. Melbourne 315

XXII. Imperial Federation 328

Index 341

List Of Illustrations

THE QUEEN OF THE SOUTH _Frontispiece_

A QUEENSLAND BLACK _To face page_ 22

The Hermitage Paddock ” 27

Mount Spencer Head Station ” 46

The Farm, Mount Spencer ” 54

Ground-Plan Of A Stock-Yard ” 69

The Branding Bail ” 71

A Bushman’S Camp ” 77

Black Fellow Preparing To Go Up A Tree ” 124

A Black “Gin” At Home ” 136

Gold-Digging: Cradling ” 166

Bullock Team Crossing A Log Bridge ” 177

Down-Hill Without A Brake ” 215

The End Of A Gold Rush ” 238

Government House, Sydney ” 292

Advance Australia!

Chapter I.

The Voyage

In January, about nine years ago, I climbed on board the Messageries Maritimes steamer _Irouaddy_, for the purpose of getting to a cattle-station in Queensland. Like many others of the same line, the _Irouaddy_ is a grand boat, clean, well ventilated, very fast, and steady in bad weather.

Three days after leaving Marseilles we got to Naples. I had been there before, but as I never can be twenty minutes in a steamer without wanting to get out, of course I went ashore. There was nothing fresh to be seen, and certainly nothing fresh to be smelt. In appearance the whole place resembles a very inferior chromo-lithograph; and I cannot help thinking that the saying, “_Vede Napoli e poi Mori_,” has more reference to the asphyxiating nature of its smells than to any overpowering beauty about the place.

Leaving Naples, we passed through the Straits of Messina, and soon lost sight of land. The weather was glorious, and one morning observing the chief officer laboriously employed in doing nothing, I sauntered up to him with a view to engaging him in conversation. With the originality that distinguishes the British traveller, I observed that it was a fine day. If I had had the foggiest idea of the effect that this remark would have on him, I certainly should not have ventured to make it. He looked at the sky: it was blue. He looked at the sea: it was blue too; and I then noticed for the first time that the expression of his face was infinitely more blue than either of them. Shrugging his shoulders with an emphasis that would have fractured the collar-bone of anyone but a Frenchman, he called the Deity to witness that although the weather was indeed fine enough just now, neither he nor anyone else could possibly foretell what it would be like in twenty-four hours’ time. If it did come on to blow, he said, we were in a very exposed part of the Mediterranean, and, as our present course lay, over 400 miles from land. I left him, to meditate upon the extraordinary effect that being out of sight of land has on a French sailor. It is true they do not seem to come to grief very often, but still I rather mistrust these French sailors in a bad time. The least thing puts them into such a ludicrous state of fluster, one cannot help thinking that a good gale of wind would dishearten them altogether. They never seem to be quite at ease until they get back to Marseilles, and even then religious enthusiasm, or the prospect of another voyage, often wrings a votive offering to the Virgin out of the dregs of their past terror. The Church of the Virgin and Child at Marseilles absolutely bristles with these offerings, many of which indicate a singularly bad taste on the part of the donor. Among a host of paltry toys calculated to amuse none but the youngest children, I noticed one or two perambulators in a prominent position. Now, under certain circumstances, a perambulator might be a very neat and appropriate gift to the mother of a young child; but when we consider to Whom they are in reality offered, such presents become shocking in the extreme. It is impossible that people can have any real veneration for a Deity Whom they like to imagine wheeled about in a perambulator, or amusing Himself with the mechanical movements of a woollen rabbit. Indeed, except on the supposition that they are entirely destitute of any sense of humour, it is difficult to acquit such people of wilful profanity.

Upon this occasion, however, nothing occurred that the most pious or pusillanimous Frenchman could distort into a pretext for presenting his Maker with a toy, and three days after leaving Naples we reached Port Said. This town forms a receptacle for all the scum and dregs of every nation under the sun, and is undoubtedly one of the most villainous dens in existence. Composed almost entirely of casinos, gambling saloons, and houses sacred to the worship of blind Cupid, it is a sink of iniquity whose waters, like those of the Dead Sea, are so dense as to support numbers who would go to the bottom elsewhere. The lighthouse and the coalsheds are probably the only buildings in the place that have not a professional tendency towards the subversion of morals and the encouragement of vice.

Leaving Port Said, we crawled through the Canal, and after calling at Suez, steamed away down the oily expanse of the Red Sea. Between October and May the Red Sea is not often oppressively hot; but for the rest of the year the heat is excessive, and deaths from heat apoplexy not unfrequently occur.

How is it that one so very seldom meets any nice people travelling at sea, and then never discovers them until just before leaving the ship? It cannot be that no nice people travel by sea. It must be that the sea has a demoralising effect upon those who do. But it would seem that a prolonged sojourn upon the ocean has exactly the opposite effect of a temporary cruise, for sailors are, as a rule, as conspicuous for those qualities that make a man a pleasant companion as passengers are the reverse. Assuredly a passenger-ship presents humanity under a most unfavourable aspect. Sea-sickness alone renders most people positively misanthropic while it lasts, and excessively irritable for some time after it has passed away. But besides this, and such minor annoyances as having your cabin deluged with salt water if you leave the port open, and being suffocated with foul air if you keep it shut, the bare fact of being boxed up in the same ship with a number of fellow-sufferers is often very exasperating. Just as in hot weather a man is never so thirsty as when he knows that he can get nothing to drink, so on board ship a wild yearning for solitude is apt to overtake him, all the more violent that it cannot possibly be gratified. As to the ordeal of being obliged to live in the same cabin with one or more individuals for any length of time, it is not only sufficient to cause unreasoning hatred between strangers, but often to destroy a friendship of long standing. I am convinced that if David and Jonathan had been subjected to the disenchanting test of sharing a small cabin in a gale of wind, they would have been famous to posterity, less for the great love that they bare one another than for a propensity to quarrel savagely over trifles.

Certainly the sea develops the worst qualities of human nature more rapidly and more surely than any other phase of existence. In particular, I remember one man in whose company it was once my misfortune to make a voyage. My previous experience of him as a fellow-traveller, on dry land, had led me to suppose he was rather a pleasant companion than otherwise. Beyond an insane habit of appearing on every possible occasion in a variety of hideous and fantastic caps, he appeared to be unusually free from the vices of travellers. That is to say, he was neither inordinately greedy nor passionately selfish. He had no particular taste either for sight-seeing or for grumbling, and when in the presence of strangers, he did not consider it necessary either to insult them with impertinent familiarity or to repel them with churlish incivility. When I say that he was capable of visiting the Alhambra, St. Marc’s Cathedral, and the Pyramids, without displaying the slightest desire to engrave his name on the walls of any of them with a penknife, it will at once be seen that he had no ordinary claims to respect. Furthermore, his manners were those of a gentleman, and his language remarkable for the absence of anything like expletives. After he had been at sea a week, his own mother would not have recognised him.

For the first few days it was calm, and everything went well enough. My friend justified the sanguine expectations I had formed of him, by reclining all day in a long chair, puffing at a pipe with a head as big as his own, and with twice as much in it. This sort of thing was too good to last. We dropped in for a spell of bad weather. It did not last long, but from the moment that it began he was an altered man. An expression dismal as the latter end of tea-time took permanent possession of his usually cheerful countenance, and even the reappearance of fine weather entirely failed to restore him. He became exceedingly restless, and would indulge for hours at a time in the reprehensible practice of pacing up and down the deck, which is of all performances the most trying to the nerves of the spectators. Suddenly he would flump down into a chair with a violence extremely distracting to anyone who happened to be seeking repose within a radius of five yards. Just as one began to hope that he was settled at last, he would bound up again out of his chair, upsetting it against someone’s shins, and, without thinking it necessary to apologise, resume his detestable pastime of patrolling the deck.

But what astonished me more than anything was the bad language that he took to using upon the most trivial provocation. I lived in the next cabin to him, separated only by a partition open at the top. One day, as I was lying on my bunk reading, I heard him fossicking about among the things in his cabin in that spasmodic way which, even when a man is out of sight, never fails to convey an idea of awful passion to the listener. For a while his movements were only illuminated by smothered execrations, which the partition rendered nearly inaudible. Suddenly, however, he broke out into a torrent of oaths so fluent, so comprehensive, and so ornamental, that, shocked as I was at his profanity, I could not help admiring his genius. I have since reason to believe that he borrowed a great deal of it from the form of cursing employed by the Church of Rome against persons who happen to disagree with her doctrines. At the time, however, I thought it was quite original, and, of course, shouted to him to know what was the matter, “Oh! are you there?” he replied. “Nothing; only I cannot hang up my towel.”

He grew rapidly worse, but it was not until about a week later that his downward career reached its Nadir of demoralisation. I hardly expect to be believed when I say, that one day, without the slightest provocation, at a distance of over 1500 miles from land, he appeared in broad daylight, on the ship’s quarter-deck, in knickerbockers. The spectacle of such a self-constituted pariah of society was extremely depressing. I cannot help thinking that a man who wears knickerbockers on board ship in the tropics must be capable of committing almost any crime. It was a painful occurrence altogether, and I should not have mentioned it, except with a view to showing how apparently harmless people frequently become exceedingly disagreeable at sea.

Six days out from Suez we got to Aden, a most magnificent cinder-heap, quite unlike anything else I have ever seen. The town of Aden lies at the foot of a range of most discouraging-looking mountains, so forlornly barren, so pitilessly rugged, they do not appear to be made of anything half so cheerful as rocks and stones. They have more the appearance of the material by means of which an inferior birdstuffer endeavours to reproduce the handiwork of Nature in a rockwork at the back of his specimens. There is something genuine and hearty about a good mass of rock very different to the attenuated peaks of Aden, compared to which a granite boulder is affability itself.

When lit up by the splendour of a tropical sunset, however, the mountains of Aden assume a different aspect. They are usually of a pale mauve colour, which deepens, as the sun sets, to a glorious purple, forming a startling contrast to the green and golden expanse of the surrounding sea. Gradually the purple fades, the opal light dies out of the sea, and a spectral gloom creeps over everything but the highest peaks. Round these the rays of the departed sun linger with an unearthly glare, till in the increasing darkness they seem to glow like the ragged teeth of a red-hot saw.

On the whole, the scenery of the tropics can never compare with that of higher latitudes. The strength of the sunlight is so great that objects are either defined with unpleasant sharpness or blurred in a quivering haze of heat. There is none of that glorious depth of colouring and softness of outline, one distance fading into another, softer and softer, yet still distinct, that the moist atmosphere of the west coast of Scotland or of the fen countries produces in such perfection. For my own part, I do not believe the scenery of the west coast of Scotland has a rival in the world. Of course it is easy to find places constructed on a far larger scale, but it is not altogether upon this that the beauty of scenery depends. It is very doubtful whether a mountain derives much additional beauty from its summit being invisible; and certainly a river so broad that no one can see across it, is less picturesque than one which affords a view of both its banks at the same time. For a few minutes at sunrise, and at sunset, it is difficult to imagine anything more gorgeous than the colouring of the tropics. But it quickly fades, and even while it lasts it is more calculated to dazzle than to please. There is too much of the patchwork counterpane and the circus-poster about it. Of course a tropical sunset is a sight that it does not happen to everyone to witness, but anyone can get a very fair idea of what it is like by eating a quantity of cold pork-pie and unripe apples just before going to bed.

Leaving Aden, we passed one night to the northward of the island of Socotra, and were fortunate enough to come across the phenomenon known as a “milky sea.” It was a wonderfully beautiful sight. The sea was deadly calm, and all round as far as the eye could reach it was as white and as transparent as London milk. Out of this the mountains of Socotra, distant eight miles, rose up clear and distinct in the brilliant starlight, and black as ink by contrast with the whiteness of the sea. Several ambitious passengers ladled up some of the water, to try and discover its component parts, but I don’t think they found out much, except that if it was allowed to stand some time, a thick sediment was precipitated, leaving the water quite clear again.

Crossing the Indian Ocean, the weather was so monotonously calm, that one day the captain was encouraged to give the order for fire and boat station practice. If intended to display the smart discipline and efficiency of the ship’s company, this exhibition had better have been suppressed; but if merely to warn passengers against the incautious use of matches, and the danger of falling overboard, it was invaluable. Whether the crew had been expecting the order or not, I cannot say; but I will do them the justice to affirm that the ringing of the fire-bell was followed by no sort of confusion or hurry. It was only after an interval had elapsed, sufficient to allow the strongest swimmer to drown, and the smallest spark to become a conflagration, that they began to saunter leisurely aft, dragging after them coils of hose, with the dejected air of men who have seen the same thing done a dozen times before and never known any good to come of it. Far more activity was displayed by a vast army of stewards who swarmed up the companion at the first sound of the bell, headed by the chief steward, or _maître d’hôtel_, with a drawn sword in his hand. As these worthies took no part in the subsequent proceedings, they probably only came up to be saved.

After some consultation it was agreed that an attempt should be made to lower one of the quarter-boats, and to this the crew turned their attention. But an unforeseen difficulty presented itself. Who was to undertake the arduous task of climbing into the boat, and removing the canvas cover? An animated discussion took place, the result of which was that one man was singled out, apparently much against his inclination, for the enterprise in hand. With a vast effort he collected his energies, and, scattering a glance of melancholy defiance at his recreant companions, he ascended the bulwarks and climbed cautiously on to the boat. It soon became evident that there was far more cause for his alarm than at first appeared. As long as he was engaged in unlashing the boat’s cover, the crew amused themselves by rolling up cigarettes and smoking them. But he had no sooner finished than the men stationed at the after “fall” of the boat suddenly awoke to an enthusiastic sense of duty, and lowered away. Those at the other “fall” were not so alert, and the consequence was the stem of the boat went down with a run, sending oars, stretchers, planks, and everything movable in her except the man, flying into the sea. Fortunately for himself, this hero got mixed up round one of the thwarts and remained there until the boat was once more raised to a horizontal position, when he was extricated, positively gibbering with terror and rage. It having been conclusively proved that in case of emergency one end of the boat at any rate could be lowered, this was considered sufficient, and the fire-hose became the next object of interest to the company. After some minutes of patient toil, one end of this ingenious contrivance was connected with the machinery, and the order to start pumping was given. An ominous pause followed, during which not a drop of water appeared. The men began to look grave and to whisper hurriedly and excitedly together. But a breathless silence fell upon all present when the second lieutenant advanced to the business end of the hose, with the air of a man who knows his duty and is prepared to perform it at all risks. The excitement now became so intense as to be quite painful, but still silence prevailed. Suddenly a terrible gurgle was heard in the pipe, absolutely paralysing the lieutenant, who remained rooted to the spot with countenance transfigured by terror. In a moment a young Niagara burst from the pipe, discharging itself full upon the unfortunate officer, and hurling the hose in convulsions about the deck. The shock at once restored the use of his limbs to the lieutenant. With a loud yell of anguish he turned and fled from a foe, with whom, to judge by appearances, it was some time since he had had an encounter.

This concluded the diversion of fire and boat station practice, and the ship’s company returned once more to their ordinary duties. The captain resumed his occupation of walking up and down, spitting frequently and emphatically upon his own quarterdeck. The chief engineer took up his position by the rails of the engine-room, and, with his watch in his hand, counted the revolutions of the propeller. The doctor and the first lieutenant threw quoits into a bucket, and the remainder of the crew, with the exception of a few who still retained sufficient energy to smoke, went fast asleep.

Chapter II.

THE VOYAGE--(_Continued_)

Among the passengers on board, there were several newly-married couples, and their behaviour was sometimes rather interesting. Of all places to spend a honeymoon, I can conceive none more discouraging than the sea. We all know that some of the gilt must come off the gingerbread sooner or later, but there are many ways of removing it, and it is just as well to take care that the more solid material beneath it is not injured during the process.

It would be interesting to a psychologist who was also a good sailor, to study the appalling effects of sea-sickness upon the soul, no less remarkable in the case of a subject who does not actually suffer, but is merely compelled to witness the misery of others. Cervantes, we are told, smiled away the chivalry of Spain. Fortunate for Spain that he did so. Had he lived in an age when globe-trotting and going down to the sea in ships was as fashionable as it is now, he would have been spared the effort of smiling. All the finer feelings of human nature are more or less in abeyance during the reign of sea-sickness, but when it has passed off, they, most of them, readily reassert their sway. Not so with the feeling which we term chivalry, now rapidly becoming an obsolete word in these days of social progress. Its loss is the less felt, since its place has been supplied by coxcombry, a feeling more nearly allied to chivalry than might at first be imagined. Both have a common end in view, which is to please. But there is this distinction, that whereas chivalry arises from a man’s exalted ideas of the intrinsic perfections of the opposite sex, coxcombry originates in an exaggerated notion of the perfections of his own. Chivalry, however, cannot exist without a profound and sincere respect for woman; and when that is once destroyed, or even severely shaken, chivalry receives its deathblow. Sea-sickness is, of all iconoclasts, the most terrible, and before its fell advances chivalry withers more quickly and more surely than ever it did before the smile of Cervantes, and it withers to anything but the tune of a smile. If it were only for this reason alone, life at sea would present matrimony under the most unfavourable aspect it is possible to imagine. Can anything be more terrible than to watch a countenance in which you take the deepest interest, transfigured by sea-sickness into the ghastly semblance of a frost-bitten turnip, and every atom of self-respect crushed by this most levelling malady.

But there are other annoyances besides. Careful and comparative observation leads me to believe that a woman whose digestive organs have so far rallied from sea-sickness as to allow her to eat, but whose appearance still forbids her to leave her cabin, is the most transcendently selfish of all God’s creatures. Under such circumstances I have seen offices of vicarious selfishness thrust upon the unfortunate husband, which the veriest egotist would shrink from negotiating for himself. He is expected to secure the undivided attention of the doctor, the purser, all the stewardesses, and half of the stewards, regardless of how many other passengers there may happen to be in exactly the same, or in a worse, predicament than his wife. He is further expected to ascertain from the captain (at intervals varying from five to fifteen minutes, according to the severity of the weather), the exact position of the ship, the amount of present danger, the prospect of fine weather, and the precise moment when the destination will be reached--distant, possibly, some two or three thousand miles. Most likely he will be sent to ask the quartermaster to prevent the crew from walking about overhead, and to induce the officer of the watch to moderate the noise made by the creaking of the ship’s timbers and the working of the donkey-engine. Occasionally I have seen even severer tests applied to the devotion of man, but these have been amongst people who have been some time married. One day the vessel was rolling rather heavily, and though most of the passengers had got their sea-legs, some few remained below. Among the latter was the wife of a man whom I noticed staggering up the companion one morning, with the watery eye and uncertain gait of one just recovering from violent sickness. He reached the deck safely, however, and with a considerable slue to port, brought himself up in a deck-chair. I saw him scatter a glance round, possibly to discover the whereabouts of his better half. Finding himself quite alone, his eye brightened, and he blew his nose in that triumphant manner which a man never adopts except when he is quite at ease. He even pulled out his cigar-case and looked at it, but discretion overcame valour, and he put it back in his pocket, and prepared for perfect repose. He was not destined to enjoy it long. In a few minutes a whey-faced domestic appeared at the door of the companion, shepherding two of the most disagreeable-looking children I ever saw. They had faces like badly-baked buns, and were dressed as outrageously as only the offspring of British parents of a certain class ever are. Their legs and feet were like hockey-sticks, and looked so utterly incapable of supporting the distended waistcoats above them, that their prudent mother had attached a long red ribbon to each of their arms, to act as a sort of reins. These were now entrusted to the hands of paterfamilias, with instructions to drive his progeny up and down the deck for exercise. Of course he did so, and very ridiculous he looked; but there was a pathetic side to the picture as well. In his eye there was a piteous glance of retrospection, which seemed to recall the time when he could take his ease or his exercise, as the spirit moved him, without being required to make a greater fool of himself than Nature intended him to be.

Eight days after leaving Aden we got to Galle, and a greater contrast than the two places it would be difficult to find. At Aden, all the inhabitants who can afford the luxury drive out daily a distance of four miles to refresh their weary eyes with the sight of the Botanical Gardens, which consist of six weak-looking trees and twelve blades of grass in a flower-pot. But at Galle the sight is over-powered by the extraordinary luxuriance of the vegetation, and the variety of shades of green displayed among the trees and bushes. Round the edges, of course, there is a decided preponderance of cocoa-nut trees, but a little distance from the shore the crowded way in which all sorts of trees and creepers are arranged is quite bewildering. There is a sort of show place, called Wak-Walleh, a few miles from Galle, to which everyone rushes directly they land, to get a view of the island. It is needless to say that there is a public-house and a tea-garden there; and as you approach it, the “spoor” of the British tourist, in the shape of orange-peel and beer-bottles, is very strongly marked. The view is glorious. A broad valley of green paddy-fields, fringed on each side with densely-wooded hills, lies stretched out below. It is mapped out almost into islands, so winding is the course of the river which runs through it, its waters shining like silver in the sunlight. In the distance rises the bold outline of Adam’s Peak, supported by numerous other mountains of lesser pretensions. In the foreground are several marble tables with iron legs, chairs to match, and a party of tourists. Partly disguised by pith helmets and white trousers, nevertheless these last remind one forcibly of Greenwich Fair. They are shouting--positively shouting--and laughing in that aggressive way that only a Briton out for a holiday is master of. Several of them are drinking beer and throwing sticks at cocoa-nuts; and one or two, more utterly degraded than the rest, pick up little pieces of stone to carry away as relics of Wak-Walleh. The native jewellers do a very healthy trade in counterfeit stones, manufactured at Birmingham expressly for exportation to Ceylon. Sapphires are the favourite importations offered to the verdant traveller. I saw one man beautifully let in. He was offered a sapphire about the size of a small tea-cup, of a brilliant hue that would have shamed the waters of the Mediterranean. Two hundred pounds was the price demanded for this startling gem. The traveller to whom it was offered had heard something of the dishonest practices of the jewellers of Galle, and was anxious to display his capacity for dealing. He winked at an admiring crowd of fellow-passengers, and offered the man three pounds. Much to his disgust, the native instantly closed with his offer, and, securing the coins, left the ship with all possible speed. Of course the sapphire was glass, and, with the setting, might have been worth half-a-crown. There are some real sapphires but no very good ones to be had, as all that are worth anything go direct to the London market.

Five days after leaving Galle we got to Singapore, and had to wait there a week, which was a nuisance, as there is only one hotel in the place fit to live in, and even that one is certainly one of the vilest in the world. The food is simply filthy, and not much of it, the attendance wretched, and the manager gratuitously insulting to everyone. While I was there he was knocked down and shut up in his own coal-cellar by a resident in the town, to whom he had been impertinent, to the intense delight of everyone else in the place.

Singapore itself is a lovely place, with rather a disagreeable climate. The thermometer never varies above a few degrees, and stands at about 85° day and night, all the year round. The wealthier class of inhabitants live in bungalows scattered about over the ridges in the neighbourhood of the town, most of them surrounded by beautiful gardens. They all seem utterly depressed by the enervating climate, and do not aspire to any higher interest in life than a generous rivalry in the concoction of marvellous curries. An old resident of Singapore takes as much interest and pride in his curries as an Englishman does in his racehorses or his hunters, and he always speaks of a rival connoisseur with deep feeling and respect. Both men and women look very faded and washed-out, and the only colour in their faces is yellow from a prolonged course of curry. I used to walk all round the place for miles every day, in the heat of the day, and never felt anything but better for it. Nothing will induce Indians to expose themselves to the sun, for fear of sunstroke, and nothing makes them so angry as to be told that if they drank less, led a more healthy life, and took more exercise, they would be able to stand the sun with impunity. And yet it is the case. Of course, a man who lies on his back drinking brandy and beer half the day, sleeps the other half, and sits up most of the night, cannot safely expose himself to the full power of an Indian sun without risk. There is something peculiarly treacherous in the sun all over India and the East Indies, but the medical profession know that nine-tenths of the cases of sunstroke that occur are the result of drink.

The only residents I ever saw, either in India, Ceylon, or Singapore, who enjoyed perfect health, and had not the slightest fear of exposing themselves to the sun, were invariably men who led most temperate lives, and who were out of doors all day long. In the bush of Australia, where men work all day long under a vertical sun, with little covering on their heads, sunstroke is absolutely unknown. But in the towns, where they drink all day, and take no exercise, it is not an uncommon thing at all for a man to be knocked over by the sun just in crossing the street.

A week’s loafing around Singapore produced a wild longing to leave it, but I must say I was not exhilarated by the sight of the boat that was to carry me to Australia. She was called the _Somerset_, and was the property of the Eastern and Australian Company, and was about as depressing an old tub as I ever travelled in. In the best of weather she was not good for more than eight knots, and if it came on to blow ahead she went astern. The captain was in every respect worthy of the ship he commanded. He spent most of his time sulking in his cabin, and the remainder in entertaining the passengers with most gloomy forebodings. Three days after leaving Singapore the weather got very squally, and the rain came down in such torrents that, when standing on the bridge, it was sometimes impossible to see the foremast. After dark it grew worse, and the captain, who had been blowing an infernal fog-whistle at intervals of five minutes all through the day, informed the passengers that he had no idea where he was, but about three in the morning he ought to go through a winding passage two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, between two sunken reefs. After which, he turned the fog-whistle permanently on, and retired into his cabin.

Anything like the horrors of that voyage I never remember. The smell of bilge-water and cockroaches in the saloon was so overpowering that it was almost impossible to stay down long enough to swallow a meal. There were 320 Chinese emigrants forward, who not only smelt horribly themselves, but spent their whole time in cooking nauseous oily messes, the stench from which was wafted aft in a continuous stream from one day’s end to another. For days at a time there was not a breath of air, and the heat was so intense that the pitch used to melt and bubble up in the seams of the deck. I used to lie on deck all day and smoke, with a saucer of chloride of lime under my nose as a disinfectant. It was beginning to make the whole crowd of us quite ill. The captain, the officers, and, I believe every one in the ship except myself, took to being sick as violently as if they had never been to sea before. Fortunately, when we got to the Arafura Sea we dropped in for a gale of wind. This, as Robinson Crusoe observed, was an amusement the other way. It delayed us three days, but I have not a doubt it saved some of our lives. In the middle of the night, when the gale was at its height, the boiler of the old _Somerset_ burst. The manhole plate flew clean off, and every particle of steam, of course, escaped. It took seventeen hours to repair it, during which time we lay like a log in the trough of the sea, with the waves breaking over us fore and aft. It cleaned us a little, though, which was very healthy.

Two nights afterwards we ran down a native boat, and drowned everyone in it. How many men there were in her I do not know, but we never picked up one. The next day we lost a man overboard ourselves. He was on the jibboom, where he had no business to have been sent, as there was a heavy sea on at the time. The old _Somerset_ put her nose right into a wave, and, of course, the man was washed away. In spite of the sea that was running, he swam like a duck for about twenty minutes, during which time the captain was busily engaged in turning his old craft round to pick him up. I believe naval authorities are divided as to the advisability of going astern or turning the ship round to pick up a man overboard; but in the case of the _Somerset_ I should certainly have preferred the former process, as she had at all times a natural inclination to go astern instead of ahead. However, the captain turned round, and I thought we should have got the poor fellow on board again all right. He was swimming beautifully, keeping his head and shoulders right out of the water, when suddenly he threw up his arms, rose half out of the water, and then sank like a stone. I expect a shark must have got him, as one had been prowling after us for some time. This incident brought the captain’s ill-humour to a climax, and next day, when he found me throwing little pieces of stick over the side to see which way the vessel was going, he became quite uncivil.

Chapter III.

Somerset

No one was sorry when, about sixteen days after leaving Singapore, the coast of Australia hove in sight. We passed through Torres Straits, which were adorned with the remains of three recent wrecks, and anchored off Somerset, the northernmost township in Australia. It is merely a pearl-fishing station, and will never develop into anything, as there is no back country to it. The pearl-fishers who live there are a rough-looking lot, not encumbered with any superfluous clothing, and generally without shoes or stockings. Their trade, which is an exceedingly profitable one, is carried on by means of black divers, who go down and bring up the mother-of-pearl shells. These shells, which are about a foot or sixteen inches across, and shaped like an oyster-shell, were worth at that time nearly £250 per ton. The pearls found in the shell were reckoned to pay all expenses, and the profits were enormous. Even at the present time, when pearl-shell has fallen in value to £140 a ton, it pays well to get. There is another pearl-fishery on the western coast of Australia, and some of the pearls obtained there fetch large prices. Though they are never equal to the Oriental pearls in colour, they make up for it in size, and I heard of one being sold in London recently for £1500. The West Australian pearl-fisheries are liable to the most terrific hurricanes. The signs which herald their approach are perfectly well known, and give ample time to a vessel to secure a good offing. But the pearl-fishers are generally much too recklessly intent on their occupation to take any such precaution, and every now and then the whole lot of them get swept right away, some of their boats being sent to the bottom, and others blown clean out of the water into the mangroves that fringe the shore. The few that are not drowned in one of these visitations do not seem to care or take any warning. _Mox reficit rates_, the pearl-fisher picks up the pieces, sends off for another schooner if his own is hopelessly damaged, and goes on again as if such a thing as a hurricane was unknown.

One or two white men, who have nothing to do with the pearl-fishing, have taken up their permanent abode at Somerset for no reason at all that I could see, except to enjoy the society of black women and to run an imminent risk of being knocked on the head by black men. The blacks in the neighbourhood of Somerset are very bad. They are a fierce warlike race of athletic savages, with a cross of the Malay in them. The Government Resident at Somerset wages an endless war with them, and from the intrepid bravery which he has always displayed in his encounters with them he has established a wonderful prestige. So recklessly daring, and so successful have some of his raids against them been, that he is firmly believed to be the Devil by all the natives in the Somerset district. A mob of about 200 of them once came and camped on an island opposite to his residence. He knew that they would very shortly attack him, so he determined not to wait for them. As soon as it was dark, he stripped himself naked, and tying his rifle and his ammunition on to his head to keep them dry, he swam across to the island. The tide ran very strong, and the channel was a quarter of a mile wide, but he got across all right.

[Illustration: A QUEENSLAND BLACK.]

Without the slightest fear he attacked the whole camp of blacks single handed, and routed them utterly. So terrified were they at the fact of one white man daring to attack them alone, that they came to the conclusion that there must be something superhuman about him, and cleared out with all speed. It was months before he was troubled with them again. He has been there now for a good many years, and numerous are the hairbreadth escapes that he has had during that time. So far his courage has carried him safely through, and though he has often been wounded, he has never come to serious harm. But his enemies are numerous and implacable, and it is odd if a spear or a tomahawk does not finish him at last.

From Torres Straits right away to below Cape Capricorn, runs the great barrier reef of Australia. Inside this the navigation is very intricate; a perfect network of islands and reefs. We took a pilot on board at Somerset, but even then we had occasionally to anchor at night when there was no room. The scenery all down the coast of Queensland is very wild, and in some parts extremely beautiful. Endless masses of wooded mountain-ranges run all along the mainland, and some of the islands with their emerald slopes dotted over with patches of dark green firs are very picturesque.

Whit-sunday passage, just before coming to Bowen, is one of the prettiest bits of scenery on the whole coast of Australia. The ranges on the mainland here are very broken, and just off the shore is a large group of lovely islands, between which and the mainland the coasting-steamers’ track passes. It looked very beautiful in the evening, when the mountains were turning to that soft clear smoky blue, peculiar to Australian scenery, and the crimson fire of sunset was still smouldering in the golden west.

The _Somerset_ did not call off Mackay, which was my destination, so I had to go on to Keppel Bay, the port for Rockhampton, 200 miles farther south, and wait for a boat back to Mackay.

I left the _Somerset_ with feelings of unmixed joy, and with a hearty hope that she might go to the bottom when she got into Sydney harbour, and stay there. Since that time, to the great delight of everyone who ever travelled in any of their boats, the Eastern and Australian Company have abandoned the Queensland mail service, after losing nearly all their boats. The _Brisbane_, the best boat they had, was wrecked near Torres Straits. The _Normanby_ shared her fate soon after. The _Singapore_ ran ashore near Mackay and was totally lost, and the _Queensland_ was run into by the _Barrabool_, and sunk just off Sydney. They were altogether a most unfortunate company, and were very badly treated by the New South Wales Government, who induced them to start by the promise of a large subsidy, which promise was repudiated as soon as the company’s ships began running. Their place has been taken by the British India Company, who run a service of very fine boats from London to Brisbane _viâ_ Batavia, carrying the mails, and calling at Thursday Island, Cooktown, Townsville, Bowen, Mackay, and Keppel Bay on the Queensland coast. They do not run farther south than Brisbane, and have no subsidy from any Government except that of Queensland.

My brother met me in Rockhampton, and we were fortunate enough to find a boat sailing for Mackay a few hours after I landed. We ran up to the entrance of the Pioneer River, on which Mackay is situated, in about twenty-four hours, and had to anchor there and wait for the tide to get in. We amused ourselves by fishing for sharks, and caught one about six feet long. About one o’clock in the morning the tide served, and we steamed up the Pioneer for a couple of miles, and lay alongside of a rather dilapidated wharf. No one appeared to take sufficient interest in the arrival of the steamer to be on the wharf, and, beyond a few sheds, I could not, at first, see any signs of a town at all. My brother knew the way, however, and, collaring as much of my luggage as we could carry, we set off to the hotel. Following his lead, I floundered through a mass of black mud and several deep puddles of water, and emerged on to a road about three inches deep in dust. After going along this for a hundred yards, some buildings began to loom up against the starlit sky, and a little farther on we turned a corner, and found ourselves in the main street of Mackay.

It might have been the city of the dead for any signs of a population. Not a light was to be seen in the rows of uneven, low, wooden buildings that ran along each side of the street, and the only living creatures were several dogs fast asleep in the middle of the road. Turning another corner, we stumbled over the body of a man with his heels on the pavement and his head in the gutter. His hat was off, and he was evidently in the total-collapse stage of drunkenness. My brother struck a match and examined his features.

“Ah, I thought so,” he observed; “it’s the doctor. He’s been like that, off and on, for a fortnight. Here, lend a hand, and pull him out of the gutter. He’ll have a fit if he lies like that much longer.”

Having dragged him into a less apoplectic position, we turned into the hotel. There was no one up, but it was open; so we went upstairs and hunted about for a couple of empty rooms. After one or two bad shots, which disclosed the prostrate forms of several sleepers, most of whom had gone to bed in their boots, we found what we wanted, and turned in. It was pretty hot, and the musquitoes made it rather lively, but we got a few hours’ sleep, and next morning turned out early to get ready for a start up to the station. The first thing we heard from my brother’s black boy, who was waiting about the town for him, was that the horses had got out of the paddock. They were certain to go straight back to the station, so my brother borrowed a horse and sent the boy down the road to look for them. He got them about ten miles away, and did not reappear till the middle of the day.

Meanwhile, I amused myself by examining the town of Mackay. Of all horrible places to live in, the worst is a small coast town in Queensland. They are all alike. The streets are very broad, and almost all the houses built entirely of wood, with verandahs in front of them, extending over the pavement. There is not a green thing to be seen anywhere. Dust is everywhere, inches deep in the streets that are not macadamised, and trees, bushes, houses, and everything are powdered over with it. In summer it is sweltering hot, the glare is frightful, and before I had been half an hour in Mackay, I began to understand why my brother was in such a hurry to get out of it. When I first landed there, the white population of the whole district was under 2000, and that of the actual township under 1000, but I counted seventeen public-houses in the place. The first thing that struck me was that not a single man in the town had a coat or waistcoat on, and the next thing that struck me was what very sensible people they all were, for it was about the middle of March, and the weather was so hot that any superfluous clothing was unbearable.

[Illustration: THE HERMITAGE PADDOCK--MACKAY.]

There was a _table d’hôte_ at the hotel at which we camped, and at dinner-time a crowd of men assembled for the feed. Squatters down from the country, bank-clerks, planters, and business men, not one of them had a coat on. Their invariable costume was a pair of moleskins or tweed trousers, fastened round the waist with a leather belt, a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a silk handkerchief loosely tied round the neck. The Bushmen were easily distinguished by the mahogany brown to which constant exposure to the sun had turned their faces, necks, and arms.

The fashion of wearing no coats is peculiar to Mackay, and has been adopted by the planters, who consider themselves the _elite_ of the place. At a dinner-party on one of the plantations, it is a most curious sight to see all the ladies, _en grande tenue_, dressed in the latest fashion, and the gentlemen sitting down with no coat or waistcoat, and their arms bare to the elbow.

It was one o’clock before we were ready for a start, and, as our station was forty-five miles away, we settled to go out and camp at a station about five-and-twenty miles up the Pioneer River, and go on home next day. The country round Mackay is a dead level alluvial plain for ten or twelve miles, and is all under cultivation for sugar-growing. Our road for the first mile and a half went through a sort of straggling township of small detached houses, each surrounded by a grass paddock; but after this we got among the cane-fields, and the sight of them was very refreshing after being shut up for weeks at sea. There are few prettier plants than sugar, and the panorama of the Mackay cane-fields is really beautiful. For miles the cane stretches away in a level sea of emerald green, here and there a tall brick chimney rising up to indicate the whereabouts of a mill. A broad belt of dark green forest marks the course of the Pioneer, winding through the plains, and beyond this again the cane-fields rise right away to the base of rugged mountains, thickly wooded to the very summit. All along the horizon the mountains of the coast range are piled one behind the other in dark blue masses, their outline rising here and there into sharp peaks against the western sky, and forty miles away towers the mighty form of Mount Dalrymple, over 4000 feet high, the second highest mountain in Queensland. On both banks of the Pioneer, at intervals of a few miles, are the residences of the planters, and certainly the lines have fallen to them in pleasant places. Their houses, as a rule, are extremely comfortable and very well furnished, and the gardens of many of them are paradises of beauty. In good times they make tremendous profits, and their occupation chiefly consists in watching other people work, in the intervals of which they recline in a shady verandah with a pipe and a novel, and drink rum-swizzles. Most of them keep a manager, so that they can always get away for a run down south, or a kangaroo hunt up the country. They are very hospitable, and keep their houses always open to strangers visiting the place, and to their friends in the country who come uninvited, and are welcome to stay as long as they please.

About fourteen miles from Mackay, we passed the last plantation, and got among the gum-trees, and shortly afterwards the track struck the bank of the Pioneer. I have seldom seen a more beautiful river. As a rule, Queensland rivers are muddy, sluggish streams, with low banks covered with mangroves, and many of them would not be called rivers at all in a country where water was more plentiful. But the scenery along the Pioneer is lovely. Its whole length is only about one hundred miles, but it drains a large extent of country, and for the last thirty miles the average width of its bed is from one to two hundred yards. It rises in the coast range, and its course lies through heavily-timbered country all the way to the sea. The banks, sometimes sloping, sometimes very steep, vary in height from fifty to a hundred feet, and are thickly covered with a dense forest of trees and creepers. The river itself is a succession of deep black pools of beautifully clear water, some of them nearly a mile in length, with long rocky rapids between them.

The track wound along the banks for some miles, and every now and then we pulled up to admire some more than usually beautiful reach, where the water was turned to gold in the evening sunlight, and the dim blue mountains showed up through the forest beyond. Swarms of ducks of every description were paddling about in the pools, and sunning themselves on the rocks and sandbanks.

At one bend of the river, just at the head of a deep pool, where the “scrub” on the banks was very thick, my brother said there was pretty sure to be an alligator, and if we went quietly we might get a sight of it; so we got off, hung our horses up to a tree, and crawled through the scrub down the bank to the water’s edge. Peering cautiously through a tangled curtain of creepers that hung over the water, we were rewarded by the sight of a huge alligator, basking on a sandbank about sixty yards off, and apparently fast asleep. The instant we showed ourselves, however, he shuffled into the water with incredible speed. The upper waters of the Pioneer are inhabited by numbers of these brutes, and some of them grow to an enormous size. One was killed not long before I arrived, nineteen feet long, but even this was eclipsed by Big Ben of the Fitzroy, who measured twenty-three feet six inches, and who, when last I saw him, was in the possession of Mr. Jamrach in London. These alligators do not seem to increase much in numbers, and the same ones hang about the same pools for years. From October to March, during the hot weather, they do not show themselves at all, but during the rest of the year, in the cool weather, they lie about on the sandbanks warming themselves all day.

The sun was getting low, so we climbed on to our horses again, and after a three-mile canter along a splendid level track winding through an endless forest of gums, under which the grass grew three feet high, our destination hove in sight.

“Sleepy Hollow,” or, as it is always called, “The Hollow,” the station at which we were going to camp that night, is about the prettiest place on the whole of the Pioneer. As we rode up we were greeted with a chorus of barking from a small army of cattle-dogs that were lying about the outbuildings, and Mr. Charles Rawson, the owner of the Hollow, came out to meet us. He gave a wild shout of delight when he saw who it was. He was an old friend of my brother, and, seizing me by the hand, he bade me welcome to Australia with a heartiness there was no mistaking.

“Hooray, boys!” he said, “this is just about the soundest day I’ve seen for a deuce of a time. If I’d known when your old dug-out was going to fetch the Mackay wharf, you bet I’d have been there to meet you. Here, George, take these horses and turn them into the big paddock.”

“Hold on,” said my brother. “Better put them in the small one, we want to get away early to-morrow.”

“To-morrow! to-morrow be blowed; you’ll stop here for a week any way. You’ll surely never be so beastly mean as to come here for only one night?”

To his great disappointment my brother declared he must be back at the station the next day, as there was a man coming up to pick fat cattle.

“Well, if it’s business,” he observed sadly, “I don’t so much mind; but any way, come on inside now, and have a drop of something short. I was just going to make it sundown when you boys rode up, and I was suffering to look at somebody through the bottom of a glass.”

We followed our host into a cool shady verandah, and he quickly produced the materials for a drink.

“Now, then,” said he, “just let me mix you a swizzle. What’s a swizzle! Oh! I forgot you’d only just landed. Well, I believe a swizzle is about the squarest drink that’s yet been invented, and there’s no one in the district can lay over me at mixing one. But hold on till you try it.”

Never having heard of a swizzle, which is a drink peculiar to Mackay, I believe, I watched his proceedings with interest. First of all he put two inches of Jamaica rum into the bottom of a tumbler, into which he shook a few drops of Angostura bitters from a bottle, with a small hole in the cork. Next he added a small teaspoonful of brown sugar, and a squeeze of a lemon, and filled the tumbler two-thirds full of water. He then took a small stick with three prongs growing the reverse way up at the end, and whirled it round in the tumbler between his hands, with a dexterity only to be acquired by constant practice, till the decoction was foaming to the top of the glass.

Handing it to me quickly, with directions to “drink it while fizzing,” he watched it going down, with one eye shut, and an expression of sympathetic interest on his face.

“How’s that for high?” he asked as I set down the glass with a sigh of satisfaction.

I acknowledged that he had not overrated the beauties of the drink, and asked him where he got the peculiar little stick with which he stirred it up.

“Ah!” he said, “that’s just it. That’s nothing short of a swizzle-stick, and it grows on a tree that’s peculiar to the Mackay district, and no doubt a bountiful Providence placed it there on purpose for the inhabitants to stir up their liquor with. I discovered it myself, and it hadn’t a name, so we christened it the _Swizzlestickia Rawsoniensis_. There’s two of them growing down there in the paddock, alongside the fence.”

The owner of the Hollow is probably one of the most popular men in the north of Queensland. He was one of the earliest settlers in the district, has been identified with its rise and progress, and has not an enemy in the place. There were wild times in the early days of Mackay, and most of his contemporaries have been stretched out for the undertaker, or, if they still live, are mere wrecks of their former selves. But sixteen years of hard work and hard living in the tropics have made never a mark on the iron constitution of our host. His head is marble, and perfectly proof against the influence of Mackay rum, forty-five over proof, as anyone who drinks alongside of him will find to their cost. Many a reveller, waking after a heavy night to repentance and a sick headache, has turned sicker still to see him enter his room at five the next morning, with a cheery smile on his face, a pipe of nigger-head between his lips, and an invitation to come down and bathe in the river. He is nearer fifty than forty now, and his hair is not quite so thick as it was, and getting gray in places. But, to use his own words, “he has still got as bully a set of works as there are in the island, and, bar accidents, is good for another ten years yet.” A kind heart and an inexhaustible fund of good spirits made him as pleasant a mate as a man could wish for, and if there’s any fun going, from an exploring expedition to a game of euchre, he is bound to be up to the neck in it. Having finished our drinks and lit our pipes, we sallied out to scatter a glance round the place.

The forest has been cleared for a little distance round, and the house and garden are surrounded by a paddock of short green turf. The house itself is a large one-storied building, with a fourteen-foot verandah all round covered with masses of every sort of creeper. It stands right on the river-bank, which rises to an elevation of a hundred feet above the bed, and the view up the river is magnificent. Right in front of the house the bed of the river is full of rocky islands and rapids; but above this there is a long stretch of still deep water up to the next bend, three quarters of a mile away. The opposite bank is covered with a most magnificent forest of enormous trees, called in Australia a “scrub,” to distinguish it from open timbered country.

Nothing can be more beautiful in the way of a forest than a Queensland scrub. Fig-trees, Leichardts, white cedar, red cedar, beech, and a hundred other trees whose names I never heard, are crowded together in wild confusion, their dense foliage mingled in masses of every conceivable shade of green. Here and there a group of feathery palms rear their heads above the surrounding forest, and giant creepers hang suspended in thick curtains from one huge tree to another.

In front of the house, just on the fall of the river-bank, is a gigantic bamboo, the father of all bamboos in the Mackay district, and round about the house are several smaller ones. But the garden running along the top of the bank is a sight worth going to Queensland to see. There is fifty feet of black soil here, and it must be a mean sort of plant that would not grow. Lemons, limes, guavas, custard-apples, grapes, mangoes, oranges, and grenadillas, all flourish in a state of perfection that speaks equally well for the care of their owner and the excellence of the climate. Mangoes and oranges seem to do especially well, and the trees of the latter were absolutely weighed down with fruit, and Bananas and passion fruit grow like weeds. In the middle of the garden, on a patch of smooth green turf, stands the most magnificent Poinciana tree I ever saw, about sixty feet high, with huge spreading boughs sweeping right down to the ground. The foliage is light green, and exactly resembles the leaf of a sensitive plant, and in summer it is literally covered with huge spiral flowers of the most brilliant crimson. The roof and side verandah of the house are overrun with masses of Boganvillea creepers, of every shade from pink to purple, and the flower-beds around are full of roses and geraniums. Gardenias grow all about, in bushes five feet high, and flower most beautifully. The back of the garden is sheltered all along by an impenetrable row of bamboos, Leichardts, and fig-trees, and in front, just along the edge of the river-bank, runs a low hedge of hybiscus, blazing with scarlet flowers. The front verandah of the house has been extended into a sort of conservatory, made of a lattice-work of battens split from palm-trees, inside which is a rockery covered with most beautiful ferns.

The mountains and creeks of Northern Queensland are full of every sort of fern, and in the fernery at the Hollow I counted over thirty varieties which Mr. Rawson had picked up in his wanderings about his own runs, and brought home and planted.

Chapter IV.

First Impressions Of The Bush

Next morning, my brother and I saddled up early, and started off through the Bush for Mount Spencer, directly after breakfast. There is something very bewildering about one’s first introduction to the Bush, especially in the coast country of Queensland, which is one vast stupendous forest of different sorts of trees. Mile after mile, day after day, you ride on through the forest, with a tree on an average every ten yards. If you keep in the valleys you see nothing but trees, and if you climb up a mountain you see nothing but more trees. Here and there you come upon a small open plain, a few hundred yards in extent; but until you get used to it the monotony of the endless timber is appalling, and it is easy to realise the terrible madness that so often comes over those who get lost in the Bush. The only change is from white gum-trees on the flats, to black iron-barks on the ridges, and one ridge and one flat is so like another, to an inexperienced eye, it seems incredible that anyone can ever find their way about, or know exactly where they are. Some people never can, and I have known natives of the country, who have lived for twenty years in the Bush, and who have still been helpless to get from one place to another without a guide, in country that they had ridden over for years. These are the exceptions, however, and, as a rule, a man with a moderate bump of locality soon learns the art of finding his way in the Bush. Very slight landmarks will serve to guide a good Bushman, for no two places are really exactly alike, and on the coast country there is generally some mountain or other to get a sight of, which will enable anyone who knows the country he is in to take his bearings. Away on the open rolling plains of the West, or, worse still, in country covered with endless brigalow scrub, the Bushman has often not a single mark to guide him for many miles, except the sun or stars. In such country, finding one’s way about is reduced to an instinct, which is a natural gift by no means to be acquired; and unless a man be endowed with it, he had better never attempt to wander far alone in the trackless wilds of the Australian Bush. Many a man who has tried it, under the delusion that he was born to be an explorer, has paid the penalty of his rashness with his life. Witness the fate of Burke and Wills, whose miserable end was due not nearly so much to the force of circumstances, as to their being by nature utterly unfitted to find their way about the Bush; for they perished within a few miles of their own plant of provisions, without having the slightest idea where they were.

The first thing that strikes one is the lifeless solitude of the Bush. The fierce searching light of a vertical sun prevents it from being gloomy, and, indeed, the trees in the open timbered country give a very scanty shade, but everywhere there is a weird solemn stillness that is most impressive. In the middle of the day, birds and beasts retire to the cool shade of the scrubs on the banks of the creeks, and there is not a sound to be heard, nor a living thing to be seen. The accumulated silence of a thousand years seems to brood over some of the mountains and valleys of this vast land, where, perhaps, the sound of man’s voice has never yet been heard. Now and then a light breeze rustles in the tops of the trees, which move softly, as if stirring in their sleep, but it quickly passes away, and sunshine and silence are everywhere again. But the sensation of loneliness very soon wears off, and in a little while even the endless trees come to look like friends in whose company it is no hardship to pass a day. There is a deep fascination about the freedom of the Bush, whose subtle influence very soon enslaves those who go to live there, and generally unsettles them for any other mode of living.

A “new chum,” as a new arrival in Australia is called, is never very long in the country without getting some sort of fall off a horse, and I got my first one a few miles from the Hollow. Like nine out of every ten station horses, the animal I was riding had a sore back, and was girth-galled as well, so I was riding with the girths very loose. Now there is one thing in riding through the Bush which the sooner a man learns the better, and that is, however fast he is going, and however thick the timber is, never to attempt to guide his horse clear of the trees. As long as he gives him his head and does not attempt to interfere with him, his horse will never run him against a tree; but he is certain only to have one side to his mouth, and any efforts to keep him clear of one tree will probably send him into another. The way in which an old stock-horse shaves the trees with just a couple of inches to spare, at racing pace, makes his rider’s hair stand on end, and gives him a cold feeling down the back at first, but he soon drops down to sitting back and leaving his horse to steer clear of the timber by himself. These sorts of little peculiarities are so well known to everyone who has been a little while in the country, that they always forget to tell anyone of them who has not. As I followed my brother at a hard canter along the track winding through the timber, an ill-judged attempt to induce my horse to give rather a wider berth to a gigantic gum-tree produced exactly the opposite effect, and a collision was the result. The girths being quite loose, the cant which we got from the gum-tree, turned me and my saddle half round, and, as my intelligent animal at once redoubled its speed, it was not long before we parted. I landed on my shoulder, and the pace at which we were going sent me head over heels, my farther advance being abruptly stopped by an iron-bark tree, against which I brought up with considerable violence. My horse tore past my brother, who immediately set off after it, and they both disappeared in the Bush. The first impulse of anyone under the circumstance would have been to have a smoke, and my temper was by no means improved by finding that my pipe had been smashed to pieces between myself and the iron-bark tree. However, I set off down the track, and after about half a mile, met my brother coming back, leading my horse. He had hunted it for about a mile, and fortunately bailed it up between two gullies, and caught it; for, as a rule, it takes at least three men to surround a loose horse in the Bush, and even then, unless it is a very quiet one, they will not catch it. After about fifteen miles of low ridges and flats, we came to the foot of the main coast range.

A zigzag road cut through the scrub took us over the pass, and the moment that we got to the top the change in the atmosphere was quite extraordinary. Though the sun was just as hot, there was a delightfully fresh light feeling in the air, the horses ceased to sweat, and one felt the same sensation as when one comes out of a greenhouse into the open air. The top of the range was covered with spotted or scented gum, the perfume of which is very strong, and rather like that of a lemon-scented verbena.

About sixteen miles of monotonous stony ridges covered with endless black iron-barks brought us to a dense clump of wattles, a sort of mimosa--tall, feathery, graceful trees, with leaves like a willow, and sweet-scented yellow flowers. Through this the road passed, and we emerged on to a piece of level country covered with white poplar-gums and grass-trees. The latter are most comical-looking objects. They have a black bare stem, from one to eight feet high, surmounted by a tuft of a sort of half rushes and half grass, out of which, again, grows a long thing exactly like a huge bulrush. A lot of them always grow together, and a little way off they are not unlike the illustrations of Red Indian chiefs in Fenimore Cooper’s novels. The tuft of grass at the top has a sort of core, white and soft, that tastes rather like a Spanish chestnut, and is good to eat, when there is nothing else to be had. About a mile along the flat brought us to the Mount Spencer horse-paddock fence, through which we passed, and got to the station just at sundown.

Somehow or other, in Australia, no matter how long or how short one’s journey is, one nearly always gets to the end of it about sundown, which seems to be the orthodox hour, especially for strangers, to arrive at a station. As we emerged from the timber in the paddock into the large open space in which the station lay, it struck me as one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. As a rule, on the coast country the timber is so thick that the look-out is necessarily very limited, and although here and there there are very pretty spots, it is very seldom that there is a panorama of any extent worth looking at. Of course on the downs you can see as far as the horizon in every direction, but the monotony of the rolling plains of grass is almost as bad as the Atlantic. The view, however, from Mount Spencer is magnificent, and certainly beats anything I ever saw in Australia. The station stands on a low broad ridge, which was originally timbered like the surrounding Bush; but the trees have all been cleared away, the stumps burned out, and the holes filled in, so that the ground is now a smooth expanse of short green turf, sloping gently down to the edge of a large lagoon, about 300 yards away. The lagoon itself is a mile and a half long, and about a mile across, the centre covered with water-lilies, and the edges fringed with a thick wide belt of rushes. On the far side from the station a forest of huge gum-trees follows the winding shores of the lagoon, its outline broken by one or two little promontories running out into the water; and above the forest, like an amphitheatre, rise the mountains of the coast, running back in broken rocky spurs to Blue Mountain, a vast densely-wooded range 3000 feet high and fourteen miles away.

The sun had just set when we arrived, and everything was deadly still. The shadow from the hills at the back of the station had fallen across the lagoon, in whose dark waters the forms of the white gum-trees around were perfectly reflected. The shades of evening had fallen upon the forest, but the mountain ranges beyond were still lit up with the rosy after-glow of sunset, and looked almost transparent against the deep pure blue of an autumn evening sky. Hundreds of water-fowl of every description were dotted over the expanse of the lagoon, the ducks now and then rising up in flights, and passing over the station to a swamp at the back. Rows of solemn-looking white egrets were sitting on the fences, running out into the water, or stalking about amongst the reeds; and high overhead a solitary pelican was wheeling round in circles, with wings outstretched and motionless. Now and again a flock of whistlers would rise up with a tremendous clatter and excitement out of the rushes, as if they were frightened out of their wits, and then, after going for a fly round, settle again close to where they started from. The shores of the lagoon, in front of the station, between the two fences of the small paddock, were always kept as a sanctuary for all the ducks and white fowl. Here they were never fired at. They knew it perfectly well, and, when inside the bounds, they were so tame that they would let anyone walk up to within twenty yards of them.

On the far side of the lagoon the smoke of a Black’s camp was rising up through the trees, and a mob of cattle were standing up to their knees in the water, taking their evening drink, and lazily nibbling at the rushes round them. The whole place looked wonderfully peaceful and quiet,--altogether the kind of place that it would be very easy to make a home of, and where it would be very difficult to keep up the feelings of an exile for very long.

The last feed on a station--dinner, tea, supper, or whatever it may be called--is always just after dark, and is the most solid meal in the day. Bushmen smoke so much and drink so much tea, that they are rather mean performers at breakfast, and in the middle of the day they are generally out on the run, but there must be something wrong if they cannot eat a square meal in the evening. After we had had supper, and a smoke, of course, I was shown my camp, which was a slab hut about a hundred yards away from the big house. The furniture consisted of a canvas stretcher for a bed, a fragment of looking-glass balanced on two nails driven into a post, a table with a tin basin, and a bucket. But there were heaps of blankets, and a fireplace, which is all that is wanted to make one perfectly comfortable. The slabs which formed the sides of the hut were put up vertically, and as I lay in bed the spaces between them afforded a fine view of the surrounding country. There was no door, and the roof was not as water-tight as it might have been, so that when it rained, five little streamlets of water descended on my bed; but I subsequently diverted them on to the floor by means of a couple of sheets of corrugated iron, which I secured overhead.

Besides the light of a wood fire, the inside of the hut was illuminated by a fat-lamp, a simple contrivance, in the form of a jam-tin full of fat, with a fragment of tweed trousers stuck through a hole in the top for a wick, which gives a very fair light. I was rather tired, and not sorry for the prospect of a camp; but when I dragged back the blankets to turn in, I discovered an enormous carpet-snake, about eleven feet long, comfortably coiled up in my bunk. It raised its head lazily, and after looking at me for a second or two with a want of interest that I was far from feeling myself, it coiled itself up again, and prepared for another sleep. My brother had just gone, but I shouted to him to bring a stick or something and help me kill it. He came back and looked in.

“What’s the matter? Snake? Oh, don’t kill that one. That’s a tame one, that belongs to Rice. He wouldn’t have it killed for anything, and, besides, it’s only a carpet-snake, and they are perfectly harmless.”

“H’m, it’s all very well to say it’s harmless,” I observed; “I suppose you mean it’s not poisonous. From the look of its head, it could bite a piece out of you about the size of a tea-cup, and anyhow it’s not going to sleep in my bed.”

“Oh no,” said my brother, “it has no business here. It lives in a tub. Here, I’ll take it away and put it to bed,” and seizing it by the neck, he dragged it off, and dropped it into a barrel outside the store, about fifty yards away, from which I devoutly hoped that it would not be able to get out again that night.

I turned in, in hopes of a good sleep, but I soon discovered that I was very unlikely to get it. The station seemed peaceful enough at sundown, but no sooner had night fairly settled down than a combination of noises arose that would have awakened Rip Van Winkle himself. In the first place my camp was not far from the calf-pen, in which the six or seven calves belonging to the milkers were shut up every night. These little brutes bellow incessantly all night, and their mothers come and look over the railings, and answer them. Then my partner Rice was a great poultry fancier, and had a vast army of chickens. Cocks in Australia always begin to crow about twelve o’clock at night, and leave off at sunrise, so about twelve of these pests added their voices to the general clamour, supported by a dozen or so of call-ducks, which were certainly pure-bred, if the noise that they make has anything to do with their pedigree. But the din reached its climax when a native dog howled somewhere away in the Bush. Instantly every dog on the station started up mad with excitement, and began barking with a fury that nothing but exhaustion could abate. Two Russian wolf-hounds, three Kangaroo-dogs, three cattle-dogs, four bull-dogs, and five fox-terriers, all started a volley of barking which was kept up incessantly for a quarter of an hour, and then slackened down to a sort of platoon-fire of yaps and howls which lasted the rest of the night. In time one gets perfectly used to this sort of nocturnal concert, and can sleep through any amount of it; but at first it is simply maddening, not one wink of sleep did I get the first night, and I was glad when daylight came, and it was time to turn out.

No words can describe the glory of a morning in the Australian Bush. There is a pure soft freshness about the air, full of the peculiar scent of the gum-trees, of which no one ever tires, and a sparkling brilliancy in the morning sunlight that no other climate can produce. Surely this is the time of all others for a smoke. There is sure to be something left in your pipe from the night before. If not, fill it again, and light it with a fire-stick from the hearth; and years after, if you are a true lover of the weed, you will own that no smoke in the world comes up to the one before breakfast on a summer’s morning in the Bush. There is something in the climate that brings out the flavour of tobacco, and a good deal in the way of living that encourages smoking; for Bushmen, as a race, are probably the heaviest smokers in existence. The tobacco they smoke is very good and very strong, mostly manufactured in America, and known as fig-tobacco. When once a man takes to smoking it, it ruins him for any other sort of tobacco, but as a general rule, about ten years is as long as a man can go on smoking it without finding that it is knocking his nerves to pieces. A fig a day, or just short of an ounce, is a common allowance, but a Bushman’s pipe is never out of his mouth. He is always lighting it to have a few whiffs, which is a most poisonous form of smoking. The last thing he puts away at night, and the first thing he looks for in the morning, is his pipe; and if he wakes in the night, he has a smoke then.

I was not long in falling into the ways of the country in this respect, and, lighting a pipe, I sallied out to have a look round. A soft white curtain of mist was rising off the lagoon and rolling away before the sun, to gather for a little while on the sides of the deep blue mountains around before it finally disappeared. The sun rose over the range in a blaze of heat, turning the dark waters of the lagoon into a sheet of gold, and streaming through the forest in long bands of glittering light. The water-fowl on the lagoon awoke, uttering a hundred different cries, the ducks standing up on the lily leaves and flapping the dew from their wings. Close to the station one or two butcher-birds were piping their morning song, a strange little melody with not many notes, which no one who has heard it will ever forget. On a dead iron-bark tree, just outside the horseyard, three or four black crows were sitting, talking to each other, and looking as wise as nothing but an Australian crow ever did. They are far the most interesting birds in the Bush, and the way in which they talk to each other is simply fascinating, for it really seems as if one could not help knowing exactly what they are saying.

Round the store-door a sound assortment of poultry were assembled waiting for their morning feed, most of them thoroughbred game, bred from imported birds, and on the roof were about a hundred pigeons of every conceivable breed. Rice was immensely fond of his chickens and pigeons, never went home to England without bringing back a fresh supply, and some of the birds which he raised on the station were very high-class specimens indeed. Besides all these he always had a menagerie of tame birds and beasts of all kinds. When I got there the collection contained an eagle-hawk, three crested falcons, seven wood-ducks, five whistlers, a magpie, three teal, a kangaroo, a wallaroo, a native bear, five flying squirrels, three spur-winged plovers, and a cageful of parrots and small birds, and last, but not least, the infernal carpet-snake which I found in my bed. They were all quite tame, and, except the flying squirrels and parrots, which lived in cages, and the eagle-hawk, which had a string to its leg, they all used to hang about the place on the loose.

The station itself was quite a small village of houses. The big house stood a little way apart, in a garden with a paling-fence round it, about eighty yards square. Unfortunately it was right on the top of a quartz ridge, where there was very little soil, so that it was difficult to get trees of any size to grow; but all sorts of creepers throve wonderfully. In front of the house were one or two Poincianas, and a very pretty bunya, a sort of fir-tree; and round every pile of the house grew masses of scarlet geraniums, which are supposed to possess the virtue of keeping away snakes. At the back there was a rockwork covered with beautiful ferns, and beyond that a small pond with dwarf bamboos round it, where the tame wild-ducks lived.

The house itself was a very comfortable building, two stories high, about sixty feet long and thirty-five feet wide, built upon round piles seven feet high, with an eight-foot verandah all round. Down below was the dining-room, with a huge brick fireplace, the pantry, a small store, an office and a bathroom. Over the dining-room was the sitting-room, also with a large fireplace, and with “French-lights” opening on to the verandah, and, on the same floor, four very comfortable bedrooms. The house, with the exception of the chimney, was built entirely of wood, the walls being made of iron-bark slabs, dressed very smooth, and laid horizontally; and the roof covered with shingles, which are small pieces of wood, eighteen inches long and about four inches wide, split out of iron-bark or stringy-bark wood. If properly laid on, with sufficient pitch, shingles make about the best roof possible for a hot climate; they are perfectly water tight, keep out the heat, and last for many years. But there is a good deal of art in laying them on, and unless it is done scientifically, they let the water through like a sieve. The sitting-room was very well furnished, with any amount of tables, pictures, bookshelves, armchairs, and above all an excellent piano. Rice and my brother had been there for some years, and had made the place very comfortable, and altogether hardly what one would expect to find in the Bush.

Near the house stood the kitchen, with a cook’s room adjoining, and a little covered way all overgrown with creepers, leading from it to the house.

[Illustration: MOUNT SPENCER: HEAD STATION.]

About a hundred yards away were the rest of the station buildings, consisting of two stocksmen’s houses, a store, a meathouse, the spare hut in which I camped, the men’s kitchen, the blacksmith’s forge, and the black boys’ hut, all slab buildings with shingle roofs; also a large dovecot and a row of fowlhouses, surrounded by wire-netting yards, and beyond these again the milking-yards, killing-yard, calf-pens, and horseyards.

Having completed my round of the station, I had just arrived at the rails of the horseyard, when I heard a sound like distant thunder away down the horse-paddock. In a few seconds a mob of about seventy horses came tearing down the track in a cloud of dust, with their tails in the air, and dashed into the big yard, of which the slip rails were down. Behind them came a black boy, cantering leisurely along, who proceeded to put up the rails, and then, taking the saddle off the horse he was riding, he turned him out in hobbles into the small paddock. All the station-horses in use are run up every morning into the yards, and then turned out again, when the stockmen have picked out those that they require for the day.

Anyone would think that with seventy or eighty horses in the yard, and only three or four men to ride, there would be plenty for everyone. But a nearer inspection generally shows that at least half of them are unavailable from sore backs or want of condition. No one ever yet saw a cattle station that was not in a chronic state of being short of horses, and it is easier for a stranger to squeeze blood out of a stone than to borrow a horse from the manager.

Sore backs and girth-galls are the curse of Australian Bush-riding, and are chiefly due to carelessness on the part of the riders. Of course a horse fed entirely upon grass is much more liable to a sore back than one which is fed upon corn. Then, again, they are never groomed, and, therefore, their coats are very dirty. The colonial saddle, too, is a shapeless cumbersome fabric, made of rough leather, with a high pommel and cantel, and huge knee-pads, weighing on an average 20 lbs. The greatest care is necessary to prevent such a diabolical machine from giving a horse a sore back, but still it can be done. The chief points to attend to are, always to brush a horse’s back before putting the saddle on, to wash it and rub it dry after taking the saddle off, and to keep the saddle-cloth scrupulously clean and soft. Few Bushmen ever take the trouble to use these precautions, and the consequence is that it is the rarest thing in the world to see a Bush horse over three years old that has not got either a sore back or the mark of an old sore. An English saddle seldom gives a horse a sore back; with decent care, and all the time I was in the Colony I always used one, unless I knew the horse I was going to ride was certain to buck, in which case it is perfectly hopeless to try and stick on in an English saddle. I have seen men ride very bad buck-jumpers barebacked, and I have often _heard_ of men who could ride them in an English saddle, but I never saw it done, and do not believe that it is possible. As long as a horse bucks straight ahead it is all right enough, being no worse than crossing a succession of high fences; but when he takes to bucking sideways, and turning round as he bucks, I never saw anyone that could stay on in an English saddle.

The performance of buck-jumping is a most extraordinary one to watch, and still more extraordinary to feel underneath one. When seated on a bucking horse the rider sees nothing whatever in front of him but the pommel of the saddle, and feels rather as if he was assisting at an earthquake or a railway accident. The performance is quite peculiar to Australian horses, and no one who has not seen them at it would believe the rapid contortions of which they are capable. In bucking, a horse tucks his head right between his forelegs, sometimes striking his jaw with his hind feet. The back, meantime, is arched like a boiled prawn’s; and in this position the animal makes a series of tremendous bounds, sometimes forwards, sometimes sideways and backwards, keeping it up for several minutes with intervals of a few seconds, and occasionally falling flat down and rolling over his rider if he fails to get rid of him in any other way. Of course a “new chum” succumbs at once to the movements of a buck-jumper, but, after a little practice, anyone who keeps his nerve and sits back can easily learn to stick on in a colonial saddle with big knee-pads to help him. With practice some men become extraordinary hands at sitting rough horses, and a favourite piece of “flashness” is to stick half-a-crown between each thigh and the saddle, and keep it there while the horse is bucking.

The great art consists in getting cleverly on to a rowdy horse; for it is before a man is fairly seated, just as he is swinging himself on, that a horse is likely to get the best of him. An old hand draws the reins tightly through his fingers, and takes hold of a piece of the mane with the same hand to keep his horse’s head well in to his neck, and then, with his face to the horse’s tail, he sneaks one foot into the stirrup, and swings himself into his seat with the rapidity of lightning. A great deal of practice is required to do this neatly, and to avoid touching the horse with either foot during the act of mounting, which would almost certainly start it bucking if it were that way inclined.

The ordinary run of Bush horses show a great deal of breeding, but they are generally deficient in bone, and the worst point about them is the shoulder. You often come across a well-shaped one in every other point, but the whole time that I was in the Bush I never saw a really pretty pair of shoulders on a horse. They run about fifteen two in height, and are very low in the wither, which accounts for the extraordinary feat which I have several times witnessed, of a horse bucking its rider and saddle over its head, without breaking the girths. But whatever they may be to look at, horses raised in the Bush have generally a good heart inside them, and the amount of work that they will do upon nothing but grass is almost incredible.

A ride of a hundred miles from sunrise to sundown is no uncommon performance, and there is a well-authenticated instance of a man who, for a large bet, rode a pony a hundred miles in that time, and then carried it a hundred yards. The unfortunate animal died, and the man ought to have been knocked on the head for his cruelty, but the feat stands recorded as showing what an Australian horse can do.

A still more remarkable performance was that of a son of Panic, bred in Victoria, who carried his rider, Mr. Lord, 263 miles in three days, 88 miles on the first, 83 on the second, and 92 on the third. Mr. Lord rode 14 st. 3 lb., and the journey was accomplished without any bad effects upon the horse.

Considering the treatment that Bush horses get, it is wonderful how they live at all. After a long hard day they are turned out, dripping with sweat, into a cold winter’s night, where, perhaps, in a few hours the temperature will be down to freezing point. They are ridden hard after cattle, over stony ridges and black-soil bogs, and yet filled legs and curbed hocks are unknown; and the whole time that I was in Australia I never saw a broken-winded horse, or even a whistler. It is very rare indeed to find a really pleasant horse to ride in the Bush. They are all very badly broken in, and have nearly always had their tempers spoiled when quite young, so that they generally have some disagreeable tricks, and it is never safe to go near the heels of one of them. There are men who make a living by breaking in young horses, going round the stations and contracting to break in a mob at thirty shillings a head. Considering the way in which it is done, it is no wonder that Australian horses buck, and are generally vicious.

A lot of young ones are run into a yard, most of which have probably never seen a man within a quarter of a mile since they were foals, and have certainly never been in a yard more than once in their lives. The horsebreaker picks out one, and with the help of another man runs it into a small yard by itself. If the animal is not very nervous, with a little patience he will be able to go up and handle it, and get a bridle over its head. If all other ways fail, he has to lasso it. The next thing is to sneak a saddle on to it, the wretched animal standing shaking and shivering with fright the whole time. The horsebreaker is most likely a man that no living horse can throw by any means short of rolling on him; so he blindfolds the horse, and gets straight on to its back. His mate removes the bandage from its eyes, and the rider sticks the spurs into the horse, and makes it buck, till it cannot buck any more. He then leaves it for a few hours with the saddle on, and having repeated the process on two subsequent days, he hands it over to the owner as broken in, and it is probably turned out for six months into the Bush. It is real rough work breaking in young horses in this way, and very few men stick at it for more than a year or two. Undoubtedly the very worst man in the world to give a young horse to, to break in, is a “flash” rider. He is not the least afraid of its bucking, and will probably make it do so on purpose, in order to display his powers of riding, or rather sticking on.

Bucking is a regular habit; and when once a horse acquires it he never altogether loses it. The surest way to get a horse quietly and well broken in is to give it to the most nervous and arrant funk you can find, if he will undertake it. He will spend days in getting the horse used to the vicinity of a man, and sit for hours on the top of a rail alongside of it, to accustom it to seeing him above it, before ever he attempts to get on its back, and the odds are that he will have it so quiet by the time that he dares mount it, that it will never think of bucking, except under extraordinary provocation, for the rest of its life.

The proceedings of a “new chum,” as a recent arrival in the Colony is called, are always a source of amusement to all old residents, and nothing is more entertaining than his early struggles to catch his horse in the yard. Having cornered it off, with the help of a black boy, he advances towards it, in a hesitating, doubtful sort of way, addressing it in soothing terms which are entirely thrown away upon a Bush horse. The animal detects him instantly as a novice, and prepares to take advantage of him by every trick that it knows. Jammed up against the rails, in a corner of the yard, it stands, looking at him as he approaches, with an expression in its eye and a droop of its quarters that no one could mistake. When he gets up to it he probably discovers that he has got the bridle over the wrong arm, and while he is changing it the brute gives a frightful snort, rushes past him, rolling him over in the dust, and gallops round and round the yard, with its tail in the air. Once more he pins it up in a corner, and has nearly got the bridle over its head when it gently turns its head away and sticks it over the rails, where he cannot possibly reach it, at the same time turning its quarters round, and lifting a hind foot, in a way that causes its future rider to get out of focus as quickly as possible.

After a few more vain attempts the “new chum” looks imploringly round, and one of the old hands gets down from the rails, where he has been sitting enjoying the fun. Hanging the bridle over his left arm, he walks straight up to the animal and addresses it with, “Stand up, you crowbait!” in a tone that knocks all the folly out of it for the rest of the morning. Bush horses are as cunning as foxes, and, unless they are really rowdy, they never attempt to play the fool with men who are used to handling them, so it caves in at once, and allows him to put the bridle on without any further trouble.

Chapter V.

Life In The Bush

Mount Spencer country consisted of three runs adjoining each other, known respectively as Mount Spencer, Haslewood, and Blue Mountain. The whole area was nearly 400 square miles, capable of carrying over 20,000 head of cattle in any season; but when I first went there, there were not above 12,000. Though some parts of the run were very rough riding, it was all very good cattle country, and wonderfully well watered. Numbers of large creeks ran in every direction, and large water-holes were scattered all over the run, so that it hardly suffered at all in the severest drought. The cattle were a very well-bred herd, and the grass was first-rate, so they fattened splendidly. The head station was at Mount Spencer, and the adjoining run was kept principally for a breeding station. At Haslewood there was another station, with yards and paddocks, and the run was fenced off from Mount Spencer by a line of fence twelve miles long, and was used with Blue Mountain run for a fattening station for bullocks. At Blue Mountain there was a small hut, a horse paddock, and stockyard, and at the far end of Mount Spencer run was another small hut, used for camping out, and a sapling yard for yarding cattle at night, when it was too late to take them to the head station.

[Illustration: THE FARM--MOUNT SPENCER.]

At Mount Spencer there were two stockmen, Frank Boyle and Timothy Harris, and a couple of black boys. At Haslewood was another stockman, Billy Burgess, with a couple of boys, one white and the other black; and at Blue Mountain a half-caste named Yellow Pat lived by himself, and looked after a mob of draught mares. Of course Rice and my brother worked amongst the cattle themselves just like the other stockmen, but this was all the “permanent staff” on the place, and quite sufficient to work the cattle.

In mustering, more hands are required, but at such times neighbouring stations always help each other, and send up a spare hand or two to help muster and brand, and to bring back their own cattle, of which there are sure to be some that have strayed on to their neighbours’ country. The ordinary work of a stockman is rather monotonous. Every morning he gets on his horse, and goes out on the run, jogging along about five miles an hour the whole day, and returning in the afternoon. His business is to be constantly amongst the cattle, riding the boundaries to put his own cattle back, and his neighbour’s away, hunting up stray calves and bringing them home and branding them.

It is impossible to do too much of this work. The more cattle are worked, and accustomed to the sight of men when they are young, the better they will fatten when they grow up; and, of course, it is of the greatest importance to get all the male calves branded before a certain age. In rough country where there are few fences, numbers of calves escape the general muster, and the more the stockmen scour the run, and hunt them up, the better the station will pay. Sometimes the stockman takes a black boy with him, but more frequently he is quite alone. Occasionally he goes and camps out for a few days, to work some outlying end of the run, rolling up sufficient beef and damper in his blanket strapped across his saddle, to last him until he returns. In rough country, such as the coast of Queensland, no one ought ever to ride about the run alone. While riding hard after cattle through the long grass, it is impossible to avoid a nasty fall occasionally; and if a man were to be crippled away in the Bush, and unable to ride or walk home, it is a thousand to one if he would ever be found before a miserable death had overtaken him. Considering the number of men who every day of their lives make a practice of riding about the Bush quite alone, it is astonishing that more of them do not come to grief. But the annals of the country contain ghastly records of the horrible death of solitary riders who have met with an accident, and been rendered helpless, and many an unfortunate being has disappeared entirely, without leaving a trace of his fate. Years afterwards, perhaps, a skeleton is found somewhere near where he was supposed to have been lost, and the few who have not forgotten all about him connect the discovery with the unknown end of the missing man. Not far from Mount Spencer run, a man came to his end a few years ago, in a manner that is almost unique in horror. He was away riding by himself in the Bush, and his horse threw him, injuring his spine in the fall, so that he was quite powerless to move. Close to where he fell was an enormous ants’ nest, and when he was found three days afterwards he was half eaten by millions of ants. He was still conscious, but unable to speak, and died very shortly afterwards. It is impossible to imagine a more terrible death than to lie paralysed and helpless, to the agony of intolerable thirst being added the torture of being eaten alive by crawling insects.

If any parallel could be found for the awfulness of such a fate, it would be in the case of a man who was burned to death by a tree which fell on him. He was working by himself, several miles away from anywhere, and a burning tree fell on him, pinning him to the ground, without doing him any serious injury. The tree was alight at the butt end, some thirty feet away from where he lay; but it is a peculiarity of some sorts of Australian trees that when once they are set on fire they will smoulder entirely away, leaving nothing but a track of white ashes in the grass. No efforts of the unfortunate man could extricate him from his awful position, and after a time he appears to have abandoned himself to his fate, for he amused himself by scratching a record of his sensations with a knife upon the bottom of a tin dish that lay within reach. It took a day and a half before the fire reached him, and it is shocking to think of what his sufferings must have been. When he was found he was nothing but a charred and blackened mass, which no one would have taken to have been a man, had his fate not been recorded on the tin dish that was found near him.

In the north of Queensland very few of the cattle-runs have boundary fences. There are large paddocks, of course, but the cattle roam at large over the greater portion of the run. All about the run, at intervals of five or six miles, are cattle-camps, and the cattle that belong to the surrounding districts are mustered on their respective camps.

The camp is generally a level place, as free from stones as possible, where there is water handy, and where the timber is not too thick. It is the stockman’s business to ride round constantly, and put the cattle on to the different camps, so as to accustom them to running there. The same mobs of cattle frequent the same districts, and if they are properly broken in they will run right into the camp by themselves, when started with a few cracks of the stock-whip, and stay there till the middle of the day. In mustering, of course, it is essential that a stockman should know the country thoroughly, and be perfectly acquainted with the run of all the gullies and creeks, or he will never get all his cattle on to the camp.

Two mornings after I arrived at Mount Spencer, we all started out to muster the Water-hole camp, at the lower end of the run, twelve miles away. Frank and Billy had gone on the night before, and camped out, to work the country on the far side of the camp. Having had breakfast about five, Rice, my brother, Timothy, and I, started off, soon after sunrise, with the man who had come up to buy cattle. He had been butchering on the Palmer diggings, and made a rise, and was hunting up a big mob of fat cattle to take back with him. He had a huge nugget of gold hanging on to his watch-chain, and always wore a waistcoat and no coat, a get-up which in the Bush somehow or other imparts an air of blackguardism to a man which it is impossible to describe.

After going a few miles through the forest of endless gum-trees and blood-wood, we crossed a big creek, and came to a succession of low iron-bark ridges. Everywhere the country was heavily timbered, and it was impossible to see more than half a mile through the trees in any direction. Here we separated, Rice and the cattle-dealer going in one direction, and Timothy, my brother, and I, in another. Presently a mob of about seventy cattle appeared ahead of us in the long grass. We rode up to them at a canter, shouting, and cracking our whips; and they set off at a gallop, apparently in the right direction, for my brother and Timothy pulled up and did not attempt to follow them.

A little farther on we came upon another small mob, which turned as soon as they saw us, and trotted off towards a creek on our left. Off went my brother after them, full gallop, through the grass, which was up to his knees as he rode, shouting out that “he knew that old devil of a white cow was off to the Island camp again.” He disappeared after them over the creek, and we did not see him again until he turned up on the camp an hour later, driving the refractory mob in front of him. Timothy and I jogged along for some distance, and fell in with some more cattle, that looked lazily at us as we rode up. Timothy scared them up with a shout and a crack of his whip; but they did not seem in any great hurry, and rather inclined to stop, so he turned to me, and told me that “if I would keep behind them, that old yellow cow with a down-horn would take me right into the camp, a couple of miles away, while he went and tried the ridges away to the right.” I had not the least idea where the camp was, and only very vague ideas of where I was myself, and the idea of being shown the way about the Bush by a yellow cow with a down-horn seemed rather novel; but Timothy had already started, so I thought I had better do as I was told.

There was not a vestige of a track to be seen anywhere, and, as I jogged along behind the mob, I could not help thinking to myself, “Supposing this flaming old cow takes it into her head to go to the wrong camp, like the other one did, or lies down, or gets sick, where the deuce will I be?” The sun was just about square overhead, so it was difficult to tell where the points of the compass lay, and I was by no means sure that if the cow did not take me to the camp I could find my way home again. However, she trotted along with a business kind of an air that was very encouraging, always keeping in the lead of the mob, while I brought up the rear. After crossing two more deep-running creeks, and struggling down several awful gullies and up the other side, clinging on to my horse’s mane with rather a weak feeling about the inside during the final struggle that landed us on the top, I came on to a long black-soil flat, covered with big box-trees, at the far end of which I could see a big mob of cattle standing on a low ridge. My pilot had led me as straight as a die, and when I got up I found Frank and Billy were already on the camp with about 600 head of cattle. There are few sights more picturesque than an Australian cattle-camp, and it is one that anyone who takes an interest in stock will never grow weary of.

The Water-hole camp lay on a broad low ridge, running down to a big creek full of flooded gums and dark green she-oaks, about 300 yards away. Close to the camp was a round water-hole, covered with lilac water-lilies, from which the camp took its name. The cattle were moving restlessly about on the camp, the cows bellowing in search of their lost calves, their red, roan, and white colours looking wonderfully bright in the sunlight, among the trunks of the black iron-bark trees. The two stockmen, and a couple of black boys, were riding incessantly round the edges of the camp to keep the cattle together, and prevent them from straying away; so my brother and I lit our pipes, and rode in amongst the cattle to have a look at them. The first thing that struck me was what a very well-bred lot they were. Here and there was an old crow-bait of a cow, a miserable relic of old times, crawling about to save itself the annoyance of a funeral, but most of the cattle showed a great deal of quality. Among the young ones there was scarcely a hard skin to be seen, and some of the heifers were perfect pictures. There were not many bullocks on the camp, as most of them had been cleared off Mount Spencer and put on to Haslewood, but what there were left were very healthy sights. It is astonishing to anyone who has been used to cramming bullocks with oil-cake, hay, and mangolds, before they are fit for the market, to see animals raised entirely on grass, with the fat laid on level all over them wherever there is room for it. A mob of seventy bullocks once left Mount Spencer that averaged over 1000 lbs. when they were killed, one of them weighing 1430 lbs. They were four and five year olds, and the weight was taken as they hung up clean in the butcher’s shop.

“Well, Sam,” said my brother as we finished a round of the camp, “what do you think of them? Not a bad lot, are they?”

“Very sound,” said I. “What are those bullocks worth now?”

“Six pound ten delivered at the yard, and heaven send they may stick at it. They’ve never been up to that before, around these edges. Look there, at that white one; he’ll go over a thousand; and isn’t he a plum to look at?”

The animal referred to was a four-year-old bullock, with the head of a heifer on him, and a soft white skin, very deep in the girth, with a broad, level back, on which the fat was laid on to admiration. It struck me that I had seen many worse animals in the show-yards of the old country, and there were several quite as good as him on the camp.

Climbing off our horses, we sat down on a log, and waited for the others to come up to camp with the rest of the cattle. Our horses were standing lazily brushing away the flies with their tails, with their heads down, and their eyes half shut; but presently they pricked up their ears and looked up. Following the direction in which they were looking, we saw a long string of cattle in the distance, winding along like a snake through the forest towards the camp. Timothy had fallen in with Rice and the cattle-dealer, and they all three appeared, bringing about 400 head of cattle with them. There were now about 1000 head on the camp, and Frank and Billy declared it was pretty full--that is to say, that all the cattle belonging to the district in which it lay were there.

Nothing is more extraordinary than the knowledge of cattle that those who work constantly among them acquire. A good stockman will go on to a camp where there are 1000 head of cattle, and in ten minutes’ time will tell you if there are any missing that should be there. Very likely he has half-a-dozen similar camps in other parts of the run; but if he has been a year or two on the place, he knows most of the cattle by sight perfectly well. Although a great deal may be done by practice, no one who is not born in the country ever possesses this power to the same extent as a native, with some of whom it is really a remarkable gift. Billy Burgess was a native of Australia, and was generally allowed to be one of the best hands at working cattle in the north. His faculty for remembering cattle was simply astounding. I have seen him come on to a camp where he had not been for two years, and on which there were about 1200 head of cattle at the time. After riding round the camp amongst the cattle for a little while, he began inquiring from the stockman who was working that part of the run at the time, why such and such a cow or steer was not there, and in every instance he was right. Animals that must have been almost calves when he was last there, he instantly recognised; in fact, if once he saw a beast, it seemed as if no alteration in its appearance could ever prevent him from identifying it afterwards.

Having scattered a glance round the Water-hole camp, he said all the bullocks were there that ought to be, and, as it was roasting hot, we left the black boys to mind the camp, and went down to the creek to have a feed, and to give the cattle a spell before we started drafting. Dinner did not take long, none of us having brought more than a piece of beef and a bit of damper, and most of us had forgotten to bring any at all, and had an extra smoke instead. When we had finished we went back to the camp, and Frank and my brother started drafting out the bullocks, the cattle-dealer riding through the camp and picking the ones that he wanted. Drafting on the camp, or “cutting out” as it is generally called, is a very pretty performance to watch, if it is well done. First of all a small mob is cut off from the main body of the cattle, and driven gently away for a little distance, and then allowed to stand. This is the nucleus of the draft-mob; for no beast will stand still a moment by itself, and one of the hands is told off to watch them. One or two men then ride in among the cattle, and draft out the ones they want, one at a time, while the rest of the hands ride round the camp and keep the cattle from breaking away. Both my brother and Frank were very sound hands at cutting out, and they were both riding first-rate camp-horses, so I watched them at work with the greatest interest. A “camp-horse” is one used for cutting out cattle on a camp, and very few horses are good at it; but the performance of a really first-class one is a sight worth seeing. Each man picks his beast, and edges him gently to the outside of the mob, on the side of the camp nearest the draft-mob. The instant the animal finds itself cut off from the camp it makes the most desperate efforts to rejoin the herd, and the speed at which a bullock can travel, and the activity with which he turns, are marvellous.

The timber was pretty thick round the camp, and as I watched my brother it seemed as if he must inevitably come to grief; but a good camp-horse is wonderfully smart upon his legs, and goes through the trees like an eel. Away went the bullock round the edge of the camp, my brother, with his reins loose, and his hat on the back of his head, going after it through the timber as if there was no futurity. As he ranges up alongside, the bullock wheels sharp round and gallops back again the way that he came. Toby, the camp-horse, stops dead short, with a violence that would have sent an inexperienced rider ten yards over its head, and is off after the beast again like lightning, following every twist and turn as if he was tied to the bullock’s tail with a string. Toby’s heart and soul are in the work, and without a word or a touch from his rider he hits out all he knows, to keep the animal from getting back into the camp. This time as he comes up alongside, the bullock lowers his head and charges; but Toby has had a horn in his ribs before now, and avoids the sweep of the bullock’s head with marvellous dexterity. For a while the tables are turned, and for a hundred yards or so the bullock hunts Toby; and though the horse is as quick on his legs as a rabbit, a pair of sharp horns are kept quite as near his quarters as is pleasant. Finding that Toby is too quick for him, the bullock turns and gallops back towards the camp. Once more the horse is after him, and turns him back into the Bush; and this time the bullock gives in, and trots sulkily off to join the draft-mob.

The cattle-dealer knew his business, and picked out about forty grand-looking bullocks, which pretty well cleaned out the Water-hole camp. On a camp of mixed cattle, of course, it is not very difficult to pick the best bullocks; but when there are nothing but bullocks, and perhaps eight or nine hundred of them, it takes a consummate judge to go in and pick the cream of the camp, as he rides through them on his horse. It was past three o’clock when we finished drafting, and, as we had twelve miles to drive the cattle home, it looked liked taking us all our time to get them in the yard before dark. Fat bullocks are the worst kind of cattle to drive, as they are always inclined to break away, and, of course, have to be driven dreadfully slow, in order to take as little out of them as possible. A long drive home is very tedious after a hard day’s ride, and it takes a great deal of patience to prevent a man from hurrying the cattle. The great thing is never to push them too fast at first. If cattle are allowed to start very steady, they will walk quietly along, and by and by get over the ground at a very fair pace; but if they are hustled when they first leave the camp they will not settle down, and are certain to be troublesome all the way home. On the whole, about two or two and a half miles an hour is quite fast enough to drive cattle, and, of course, if they are going to be on the road for some days or weeks, they must not be driven nearly so fast. Droving, however--that is to say, taking a mob of cattle on a journey extending, perhaps, over three or four months--is a science of itself, and is a very different thing from merely driving a mob home from the camp to the yards.

Some of the bullocks had come a long distance to camp in the morning; so we took them home very slowly, and it was dark before we got within two miles of the station. In a little while, however, the moon got up; not the sickly, dissipated-looking object that makes night hideous in northern latitudes, but a good, useful, healthy sort of moon that rose suddenly in a circle of ruddy gold, and threw a powerful light over the whole country.

We looked a very weird sort of procession, as we wound along through the thick, long grass. The huge gums rose up on all sides, giants of the forest, their towering tops meeting high overhead, and their stems, white and ghostly, throwing deep, clear shadows across the brilliant moonlight. Ahead of the cattle, to prevent them from going too fast, rode one of the black boys, perched on an old white horse, and looking as utterly disreputable as only a black boy can. Behind the mob rode the rest of the men, wild-looking objects begrimed with dust and sweat, their arms bare to the elbow, and each with the battered remains of a broad-brimmed felt hat jammed on the back of his head. Every now and then one of them would drop behind for a hundred yards, and the ruddy light that shortly afterwards illuminated the end of his nose proclaimed him to have stopped to light his pipe, which he dare not do in the vicinity of the cattle. No one spoke. The men rode silently behind the mob, checking instantly the slightest evidence of a wish to break on the part of any of the cattle. They were getting very nervous, and disinclined to go on, as they drew near the yard, and any mistake on the part of the men would have been disastrous. The yard stood on a slight rise about a quarter of a mile from the station, and on the side from which we were approaching them the fences of two paddocks ran out from the gates like wings.

Suddenly, as the cattle were going up the rise to the yard, three or four ducks got up with a loud clatter out of a small water-hole in one of the paddocks. With a sudden rush the bullocks turned and dashed down the hill, breaking through the line of horsemen, and tearing off into the Bush as if all the fiends were after them. Fortunately the country below the yard was a pretty level plain; but the timber was thick, and the grass three feet long, and full of fallen trees. To ride full gallop by moonlight over such country seems little short of madness; but his neck is the last thing that a stockman ever thinks of, and away we all went after them, as hard as ever our horses could go. A “new chum” on occasions like this is never of the slightest use, and generally very much in the way; but this time I was saved from doing any mischief by my horse going head over heels into the head of a dead tree in the long grass, before I had gone 300 yards, and sending me flying. Luckily I was able to catch him before he got clear of the fallen timber. We were neither of us hurt, and in the distance I could hear the men shouting at the cattle, so I cleared out of the way as quickly as I could, to let them come up to the yard again. Fortunately the cattle kept together pretty well, and the men were able to round them up on the flat, about half a mile away, and brought them back to the yard with the loss of only three, which got clear away over the creek, where it was useless to follow them. This time they went into the yard without any trouble, and with a sigh of relief we secured the gates, and went down to the station and turned our horses out. Having forgotten to take out with me anything to eat, I was beginning to get hungry, as it was now about nine o’clock, and I had breakfasted at five in the morning.

During the next few days we were out again every day, and collected about a hundred fats; and some men belonging to the cattle-dealer having come up in the meantime, he started off on the road to Cooktown, over 500 miles away to the north. We heard afterwards that he got the bullocks up all right, and made a big profit on them.

In Australia large mobs of mixed cattle are continually being moved about from one station to another, or to stock outlying country, and fat cattle are often obliged to travel an enormous distance to market. For the Barcoo, and central districts of Queensland and South Australia, the best markets are Melbourne and Adelaide, each of them distant about 1000 miles. Droving, in consequence, becomes a regular profession, and there are numbers of men who make a living, and a very good one too, by nothing else but taking charge of cattle that are travelling from one place to another. To take a mob of a thousand fat bullocks over a thousand miles of all sorts of country, and bring them into market in prime condition, is a business involving a great deal of responsibility and care, for, although cattle are generally travelled at the owner’s risks, of course the drover’s reputation depends upon the order in which his cattle reach the end of the journey. A good drover is always in requisition, and the wages of the head man in charge of a mob are generally about £4 a week. It is a dog’s life, too, a drover’s. From daylight to dark he is on horseback, exposed to all kinds of weather, crawling along behind his cattle at the slowest possible rate that is consistent with moving at all. If he averages between four and five miles a day, on a long journey, it is quite as fast as his cattle ought to travel. Every day the man in charge rides on ahead of the mob, to pick a place for them to camp at night. Water, of course, is a _sine qua non_, and he must have reliable information as to the state of road for a hundred miles ahead of him, or he will get his cattle in a terrible fix. Every night the cattle have to be rounded up, and watched on the camp the whole night long. A drover never gets more than four hours’ sleep at a stretch, and he is lucky if he can get that for the first month his cattle are on the road.

There is nothing better for a new arrival in the country, who wishes to get colonial experience, than to be sent on the road with a mob of cattle. He will get an insight into the country and its ways, become acquainted with the habits of cattle, get nothing but the plainest possible food, and altogether he will have such a disgustingly bad time, that he will afterwards accept any other sort of work with cheerfulness.

[Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF A STOCK YARD.]

Chapter VI.

Life On The Station

Three times a year all the cattle on the run are mustered, and passed through the drafting-yards, that the young calves may be branded, and the older ones weaned.

The cattle belonging to each camp are brought in separately, drafted and turned out again to make room for the next lot, as the yards will only hold about a thousand head comfortably at a time. Mustering is pretty hard work, for, when once you start, you have to stick at it from daylight to dark, Sundays very often included, until it is finished. A general muster at Mount Spencer used to take us a month, and a fortnight after to “clean up.” One or two hands from the neighbouring stations used generally to come up and help, and look after their own cattle, a good number of which were pretty certain to pass through the yards.

Drafting cattle in the yards is very good fun, especially if they are at all rowdy, but it is work that requires a good deal of nerve to start with, and long practice before a man becomes a good hand at it. The yards are very strong enclosures of posts and rails, the posts from a foot to sixteen inches thick, set in eight feet apart, and the rails not less than four inches thick and ten inches wide, the top rail being about six feet from the ground. For the purpose of drafting the various classes of cattle, the yards are subdivided according to the accompanying plan. The whole mob are first of all run into one of the big “receiving yards,” an enclosure about seventy yards long and forty yards broad. The gate leading into “the lane” is then thrown open, and five or six men, each armed with a sapling about six feet long, and a couple of inches thick, go into the receiving yard, and jam the cattle up into the corner against the gate of “the lane,” until seventy or eighty have gone through, when the gate is shut. This is called “yarding up,” and is about the most dangerous part of the work; for if a beast charges a man in the middle of a big yard, he has a very poor chance of getting out of its way. An old hand knows in a moment, from the look of a beast that charges him, whether it is safe for him to stand his ground and turn it with a blow on the nose from his stick, or whether he ought to clear out for the rails. But the instant the cattle begin to move in the yard, the dust becomes something awful. It rises in dense clouds, sometimes entirely hiding the cattle from view, getting into one’s eyes, nose, and mouth, and mixing with the sweat into a thick black paste, which makes white men and niggers all pretty much the same colour for the time being. I have often seen the dust so bad that we have had to knock off for half an hour to let it settle, as it was perfectly impossible to see to work the cattle. Under cover of the dust it is often hard to see a beast charging, until it is too late to attempt to get out of the way, and then the best thing to do is to lie flat down in front of it, and in nine cases out of ten it will jump over you and pass on, unless it is a cow, when most likely it will stop, turn round, and horn you as you lie on the ground. When a beast comes tearing out of the mob in an awful hurry, its head down, its tail in the air, and its eye rolling, it is quite safe to stand still. It will pass you with a frightful snort, that gives a new chum rather a queer sensation under the ribs, but hardly makes an old hand smile. But when it comes out rather slowly, with its head in the air, its brisket shaking, and its eye fixed straight upon you, it is time to clear out. The animal means business, and, be it a cow or a bullock, you might as well hope to stop the charge of an express train. It will hunt you for your life, and if you are not up the rails before it can catch you, it will have its horns into you as sure as fate.

[Illustration: THE BRANDING BAIL.]

A man running for his life, pursued by an infuriated animal with horns two feet long and as sharp as needles, does not at first sight seem to be a particularly mirthful spectacle. Familiarity, however, breeds contempt, and a charge in the yard is always greeted with shouts of laughter from the lookers-on, especially if the man who is hunted has a narrow escape. Provided he is not actually hurt, the nearer he is to being horned the funnier everyone thinks it, including the individual himself, who is always ready to join in the laugh the instant that he has got up the rails out of harm’s way. Occasionally the best and most experienced hands get caught, and very few men have worked for any length of time amongst Bush cattle without getting a horn into them once or twice. The wound from a beast’s horn is always a nasty one, and very bad to heal, and I have known several cases where it has ended fatally.

The “lane” leads into a small square enclosure called “the pound,” from which gates open into five different yards. Behind each gate a man stands, ready to open it when a beast intended for his special yard comes into the pound. Two men work the cattle in the lane, running them into the pound according to their respective classes, calling out “stranger,” “weaner,” or “calf,” as the case may be. The proper gate is open ready for it, before it gets into the pound, and a man stands ready to hurry it through, so that no time is lost.

In drafting cattle, everything of course depends upon the men working in the lane, and there are very few prettier sights than to see a good hand amongst cattle that are inclined to be rowdy. The least nervousness or flurry on the part of the man communicates itself in a marvellous way to the cattle, and makes them perfectly unmanageable; while, on the other hand, a man who keeps quite cool and collected has an extraordinary influence over the animals which he is working.

One of our stockmen, Billy Burgess, was reckoned to be about the best hand in the yards in the north of Queensland, and, certainly, the whole time I was in the country, I never saw anyone who could hold a candle to him. No one ever saw him in a hurry, but he would draft more cattle in an hour than most men would in two. While other men were shouting, and swearing, and running for their lives, he would stand perfectly still, watching the cattle with an amused smile on his face, and seeming to know by instinct exactly how far he could trust them. To an outsider, the power he possessed over cattle seemed little short of mesmerism; but in reality it was only the result of years of experience and work amongst them, combined with an excellent temper and iron nerves.

In or out of the yards he knew every beast on the run by sight, and was never at a loss for a moment when he was drafting. A furious charge from an animal that would send most men flying up the rails, seldom elicited more than a gentle remonstrance of, “Steady, old man! where are you coming to now?” from Billy, and perhaps a tap on the nose from his stick if its horns went rather nearer to him than he considered good manners. But if a beast meant mischief, no one knew it sooner, and he took care to put himself out of harm’s way. If the animal was more than usually vicious he would wait his opportunity, and give it a blow just behind the horns with infinite precision, which would bring it blundering on to its knees, and, without killing it, leave it sick and stupid for the rest of the day.

It does not require at all a heavy blow to stun a beast, if laid on in the right place, just on the “pith” of the neck, behind the horns. I have seen a full-grown bullock drop in its tracks, as dead as a herring, from a blow with a stick no thicker than a man’s finger.

The rowdiest cattle, as a rule, are bullocks, and the quietest of all, in or out of the yards, are bulls; but a cow, if she is rowdy, is the worst of all. It is a curious thing, however, that the quietest of bullocks will become absolutely infuriated, and charge anything and everything he can see, if he is shut up alone in a yard for a little while. A bullock bred and raised in the Bush, though he may be as fat as a pig, is a very different animal to the sleepy creatures that one meets on their way to an English market, driven by a couple of small boys and a dog. He is as quick on his legs as a rabbit, and for a few furlongs it takes a good horse to get away from him, and, moreover, as a rule, he can jump like a deer.

One day my brother was drafting in “the lane,” and I was working “the pound.” I had just turned a beast back into the lane, and was going back through the gate, when my brother sang out, “Stranger! clear out, or he’ll have you!” Looking round, I saw a great hard-skinned white bullock belonging to the next station, with horns about a yard long, just behind me. He was charging up the lane full gallop, and as I sprang through the gateway and turned aside, he made a sweep at me which just grazed my ribs, but, fortunately, did no damage beyond tearing my shirt. Without the least hesitation, the brute went straight at the opposite fence of the pound, six feet high, and got over without a fall, though he hit the top rail hard with every leg he had. The performance was the more astonishing as he had not a very long run, and what there was of it up the lane was slightly uphill. We ran him round again, and into the lane, as he had jumped into the wrong yard. The next time he came up we all let him alone to see what he would do. He came full tilt up the lane as usual, looking for someone to kill, and when he got into the pound, he turned sharp to the right, pulled himself together, and going straight for the gate at the far end of the pound, five feet six high, he cleared it without a mistake. After this performance we concluded to leave him alone until we had finished drafting.

In some yards it is the fashion to leave a big post, or the stump of a tree about four feet high, in the middle of the big yard, so as to afford a shelter for anyone who is charged and has no time to get to the rails at the side. We had nothing of the kind at Mount Spencer; but I remember a most ludicrous scene at Gracemere, a station near Rockhampton, where there was one of these harbours of refuge in the middle of the yard. Seven or eight men were yarding up a mob of cattle, when suddenly an old cow came out and charged in a most business-like manner. Five men all ran for their lives for the post. The first who got there, of course, was all right; but there was only room for one, so the next man had to hang on to the belt of the man in front, and so on, till the whole five were extended in a row. The cow charged, and, of course, no one could tell which side of the post she would pass, so it was not until she was within a few feet that the human tail swung round out of her way, a yell of terror escaping from the last two men, as the brute’s horns passed within an inch of them. Quick as lightning the cow turned and charged again, and again the end of the tail had a narrow escape. Four times the cow charged, four times the tail swept round, their howls of anguish mingling with shouts of laughter from the men on the rails who were looking on. Anything more ridiculous than the whole scene cannot possibly be imagined. The last man at the end was very fat, and very nervous, and had no business in a yard at all. He was evidently getting weak with terror and exhaustion, so a diversion was made by those on the rails, and, the cow having been induced to charge someone else, the men in the middle of the yard were enabled to leave their post and make for the rails.

When the cattle are run through the yards in a general muster, all the calves that are old enough to wean are picked out. They are then “tailed,” as it is called, for several weeks; that is to say, they are let out in a mob in the daytime to feed, and carefully watched by one or two hands, to see that none get away, and that no strange cattle mix with them, and shut up in a small paddock every night. Of course, the object of everyone in working a cattle-station is to get all the cattle as quiet as possible, and nothing has such an excellent effect in quieting a whole herd as tailing the weaners when they are young. But of all occupations that fall to the Bushman’s lot, it is probably the most irksome.

Shepherding sheep is bad enough, and the asylums are three parts full of idiot shepherds, whose reason has succumbed to the dreariness of their lives; but for a short time it is infinitely preferable to tailing a mob of weaners. A man who is looking after sheep can, at all events, enjoy long intervals of perfect repose, during which, if he likes, he can lie on his back and read a book. But a mob of weaners will never give him an instant’s peace. Without being at all interesting, their habits are extremely irritating. They never know exactly where they want to go, or what they want to do, but the one thing they will not do is to keep still and feed sensibly. Out of a thousand weaners you may possibly induce nine hundred and ninety-nine to lie down round a water-hole for an hour in the middle of the day. But the remaining one is certain to keep on the move the whole time, walking off into the Bush, first one way and then another, so that you never have a spell. If you get off your horse for a drink, the whole mob will probably pretend they never saw a man on foot before in their lives, and make a wild stampede. Fortunately, it is an occupation that does not last long; for a continuance of it at the best of times would drive the most sane man out of his mind, and in wet, cold weather it is simply deadly. However, it is very necessary and very useful work, though everyone shirks it who can, and a “new chum,” if one can be found, is invariably selected for the duty.

A great many young men who go out to the colony with the view of following stock-growing as a profession, make a grave error in not making themselves fully acquainted with all the details connected with the working of a station. Of course, before starting on their own account to work a station, they go into the Bush to gain colonial experience, during which process they are known in the colony as “Jackaroos.” Especially on a cattle-station, the Jackaroo very soon discovers that a great deal of the work is very pleasant. He goes into the yard every morning and catches his horse, rides round the run with the stockman, camps out when required, and lends a hand to draft and brand at the general muster, and generally has a very good time. The consequence is, at the end of a couple of years he knows very little more about the management of a cattle-station than he did when he started, and probably labours under the additional disadvantage of imagining that he knows a great deal.

[Illustration: A BUSHMAN’S CAMP.]

The efficiency of the manager of a cattle-station depends largely upon his being a good judge of other men’s work; and it is impossible for him to be this, unless he has actually performed the work himself. It is not enough to sit on a rail and watch another man breaking in a horse or a milking-cow. However good a hand he may be, you will learn much more by helping him than by watching him. One of the largest items of expenditure on every station is always fencing, and the manager should be thoroughly able to form an estimate of how much it ought to cost. It is nearly always done by contract, and, of course, the price at which a contractor will put up fencing varies enormously according to the nature of the country. An old hand riding through the forest with a tomahawk, and cutting a chip out of a tree here and there to try if it will work freely, can tell to a nicety at what price it will pay him to split posts and rails and any other class of timber that may be required. But this experience is only gained by practical work, by felling trees and splitting them up with a maul and wedges oneself. The manager of a station ought always to be a thorough judge of timber-getting in all its branches, for it is a part of his yearly expenditure where experience and judgment will enable him to save largely. It is pretty hard work to pull a cross-cut saw and swing a heavy maul all day, with a vertical sun and the thermometer up to 110° in the shade, and it requires a good constitution to stand it. But if a man is thoroughly sound, the harder he works in Australia the better health he will have, and it is odd if he does not look back to the time when he was splitting rails for ten hours a day as one of the happiest in his life. It is not a very intellectual employment, certainly. Still, it must be an unfortunate nature to which perfect health does not bring the keenest pleasure, in a climate like that of Australia.

It is pleasant to set out to work in the morning, after eight hours of such sleep as none but men who work hard ever enjoy. The sun is just rising, and there is not a breath of wind, but the air feels as cool and fresh as iced champagne. The tools have been “planted” under a sheet of bark by the big tree which you felled overnight; so you have nothing to carry but a pipe, and as the blue smoke curls round your lips, mingled with the fragrant scent of the gum-trees and blood-wood flowers, you decide that certainly the first pipe after breakfast is the most thoroughly enjoyable of any. By the time that you have got to your work you are wet through up to the knees, and it is just cold enough to make you very glad to roll up your sleeves and start in with a will to work yourself dry. This does not take long, and as the sun rises and makes himself felt, it does not take long to work yourself damp again. If you are wise you will not drink much in the morning, for if you once start you will be thirsty all day. With a cheery mate, and an occasional spell of five minutes for a smoke, the morning does not seem very long, and the sun fair overhead, combined with certain internal sensations, warns you that it is time to knock off and boil the “billy” for dinner. Every meal in the Bush is, if possible, accompanied by a brew of tea; and, though it may seem strange, when you have worked yourself up to boiling point under a grilling sun, there is nothing in the world so refreshing as a pannikin of very hot tea, not too strong, with not too much sugar and without any milk. Refreshed with a square meal of salt beef and damper, which is of all forms of bread the sweetest and most easily digested if it is properly made, you start in again, with a firm determination to raise a good “tally” by the end of the day. As the sun gets low, a hundred sound rails, nine feet long, bear witness that your day’s work has been an honest one. A pleasant feeling of languor, which cannot be called fatigue, makes you very glad to get home, and a wash in the creek brings a sensation of perfect strength and soundness into every fibre and muscle of your body, unknown to those who have not worked hard in the healthiest climate in the world. Supper ended, you pitch a fresh log on the fire to make a blaze, and, stretching your limbs full length on a ’possum-rug, prepare to devour the last number of the _Australasian_, a paper which, for general interest and information, was never surpassed. A fresh pipe lighted with a fire-stick, just as the stars are coming out, makes you forget the sweetness of the morning air; and for the hundredth time you tell yourself that tobacco never tastes so nice as in the cool of the evening, after a real sound day’s work splitting rails.

Chapter VII.

Plagues And Pleasures Of The Bush

Emus are still plentiful in the downs country, and occasionally we used to come across a straggler that had wandered on to the timbered country of our run. Quite a young one appeared once, in a little open plain on the opposite side of the lagoon from the house. With the help of several blacks, after a tremendous chase, we ran it down, and brought it home intending to tame it.

It was only about two feet high, and could not have been more than six weeks old; but the way it ran before we caught it made us think it must be tired, so we shut it up in a stable about twenty feet square. The instant that we put it down it began to run round and round the stable as hard as it could go. My brother suggested that this might be nervousness, and that perhaps it did not like strangers looking at it. So we left it for an hour quite alone. When we came back it was running round harder than ever, with its mouth open and its wings hanging down. Frank declared that young emus always acted like that when they were having a good time, but its appearance was anything but joyful. Three hours after it was still running round, and it never stopped till it fell down dead four hours and a half after we first shut it up, during which time I am certain it must have travelled over forty miles.

The speed and the endurance possessed by a full-grown emu are perfectly incredible to anyone who has not tried the experiment of running one down. The only way is to make a dash at them, and try and come up with them in the first spurt, for if they once get their second wind, very few horses will ever catch them. They straggle along in the most ungainly fashion, looking all the time as if they were dead-beat, and were going to drop with exhaustion, but the way in which they get over the ground is quite astonishing. I once rode a very good horse five miles on end across the downs after an emu as hard as we could go, but no efforts could diminish the distance between us. The bird kept about ten yards in front of me the whole way, and finally escaped into a patch of scrub. Their bones contain the celebrated oil very much in favour among the blacks for curing swollen joints and sprained sinews. None but full-grown men, whose frames are thoroughly set, ever use it, for they declare that it has the effect of softening anyone’s bones who has not arrived at maturity. The penetrating qualities of the oil are certainly very remarkable, for if it is placed in a glass bottle a portion of it will always sweat through the glass and escape.

The birds themselves are easily tamed if they are caught quite young. In their wild state they are mischievous where there is much fencing about, as they seem to take a delight in breaking down the wires.

Many people, whose ideas of Australia are chiefly gathered from representations of the traditional Bush-ranger in the illustrated periodicals, imagine that the inhabitants of the country are invariably arrayed in enormous long boots half way up their thighs, to protect them from the attacks of snakes and other deadly reptiles. There never was a greater delusion. The whole time that I was in the Bush I never in my life saw a man with long boots on, unless he was a very recent arrival in the country. The fact is that long boots in a country where you have often to camp out are the greatest mistake. In cold weather you cannot pull them off, and in wet weather if you pull them off you can never get them on again. As for taking the slightest precaution to guard against being bitten by a snake, I never knew anyone who did it after the first week in the Bush. It is impossible to live in a state of chronic apprehension. The feeling is bound to wear off, and, after riding about the Bush for some time, the most nervous man discovers that snakes, as a rule, are quite as anxious to avoid a _rencontre_ as he is himself, and very soon he ceases to trouble his head about them until he happens to see one.

In some localities, as, for instance, the canefields of Mackay, or the reedbeds on the Murray River, snakes are so plentiful that it is necessary to be extremely cautious. But generally, all over the Bush, especially in Queensland, it is curious how seldom one stumbles upon one. In Queensland there are five deadly kinds, the black snake, the brown snake, the tiger snake, the diamond snake, and the death-adder. Of these the black and the brown are the commonest; the latter sometimes reaching a length of eight or nine feet. The bite of any of these varieties is sufficient to cause death within a few hours, unless the proper remedies are applied at once, but by far the worst is the death-adder. It has this peculiarity, that, unlike all other snakes, it does not attempt to move out of anyone’s way, but lies quite still until it is touched, when it fastens with a spring upon its victim. Its bite is by far the most deadly of all Australian snakes, and, with the exception of Underwood’s celebrated performance, I never knew a well-authenticated instance of recovery from it.

Deaths from snake-bite are not uncommon, especially among the Kanakas who work in the canefields. The best known remedies are injection of ammonia, and large quantities of brandy taken internally.

Undoubtedly the man Underwood, above alluded to, was the possessor of a perfectly efficacious antidote to the bite of any Australian snake. He gave a series of performances, in which he used to allow the most deadly snakes to bite him, afterwards applying some remedy, the nature of which was known only to himself. There can be no sort of doubt that the reptiles which he employed were perfectly healthy, and in full possession of their poisonous faculties.

The second bite of any snake is always less poisonous than the first, as some time is required to secrete a full supply of t