EFFECTING IMPROVEMENTS.
After the satisfactory interview with the storekeeper I tramped out home
with a light heart. I wouldn't starve for a month or two, anyhow, and
now the first thing to be done was to erect a house. I had fourteen
ten-foot sheets of iron, and though some of them were a bit battered
owing to an irresponsible bloke thrashing out seed on them while I was
away, still they were good enough for an eighteen-by-twelve humpy. The
building was to be of rough-split bush timber. I chose red oak for the
purpose, mainly because I didn't know of any of the other good
splitters, like silky oak, young maple, or ash. With a crosscut I cut
the tree up into three-foot lengths; then, with a maul, wedges and axe,
split these up into a species of short weatherboards.
My two mates being now away on holiday, there was nobody to show me how
to start right, so of course I met endless difficulties, which made the
work back-breaking. An experienced "bushey" would have had all the
required timber split in about four days. It took me exactly three
weeks.
Then came the erection. Four corner posts, which I would have three feet
in the ground, and going right up to the roof, for stability in case of
cyclones, of the hardest timber I could find, which was also the
heaviest, as I thought it would be the most likely to last in the
ground. As a matter of fact, these rot quickest. The four posts weighed
about five hundredweight each, and I had to "fleet jig" them with block
and tackle over the log-strewn paddock up to the site, and then erect a
derrick to get them into their places. It was interesting enough, but
Lord! how slow.
Then wall plates and ground plates--the former one end at a time with
the tackle; then lash that end while I tackled the other end up and
nailed it. "Dinkum yakker" all right, and about three-parts of it not
necessary, if I'd only known. I think "Senex's house" was the topic of
amused conversation all over the district for months after.
The studs were saplings on which I left the bark, thus making a fine
harbourage for all sorts of biting, stinging and stinking vermin. On to
these went the slabs, weatherboard fashion. Then the roof, with a nail
in every corrugation, in the concaves instead of the convexes, and the
mansion wanted but a floor. I got a bloke to buy me some second-class
boards from a mill on the line, and bring them out to me. The cartage
came to ten shillings more than the price of the timber, but, as he had
to wait nine months for me to pay him, he deserved it.
Next, I put in a fireplace with the roof of it at the wrong angle, so
that the smoke came pouring into the main room all the time the fire was
going. Finally, I set the guinea stamp of aristocracy on the mansion by
inserting a cracked glass window. It was raining nearly all the time I
was building. I had spilt a gallon billy of boiling water over my feet
through the handle coming adrift, and, to add to the difficulties, I had
to hump the floor boards about a mile through the mud, fallen timber
preventing the cart getting right out. Anyhow, it was finished at last.
I felt so proud the first night I camped in it that I couldn't sleep,
and got up several times to walk round and admire the shanty in the
moonlight. On one of these peregrinations (I clad in an airy costume of
a single shirt), I suddenly felt something cold and wriggley under my
foot. I must have jumped about fifteen feet. Turning round, I saw a
black snake squirming about. I must have stepped on his neck. Otherwise,
I don't know how I escaped a bite. I got a stick and finished the little
devil. Nobody seems to pay much attention to black snakes up here. They
always whip out of the way, and don't attack unless actually interfered
with, and they're easily killed with a light stick.
About this time I got a small brushing job from a mean person who gave
me ten shillings an acre to cut four acres thickly grown with the
accursed stinging tree. I found afterwards that thirty shillings an acre
is little enough for tackling this dreadful stuff. However, I got it
done, and was laid up for a week in consequence. No sleep through the
pain, and blood coming from nose and ears while working in it. There
must be a frightfully deadly poison in the plant. The bare inhalation of
the smell of the fresh-cut stalks makes you vomit, and brings blood from
the nose in a few minutes, while the least touch on any part by the bush
causes agonising pain, which lasts for weeks sometimes. There is no
palliative.
I then got a job from a neighbouring selector to brush twenty acres, so
I shouldered "Matilda" and went to camp with him. It's the devil's own
job "Matilda-ing" in the Rainy Season. The tracks are knee deep in mud,
and the paddocks, what with logs and interlaced seed stems on the grass,
are nearly impassable. I don't know of anything so tiring as trying to
wade through a paspalum paddock in seed. I anticipated being a month or
so with this chap, Barker. He was a bachelor, young, fair-haired, rather
shifty blue-grey eyes, a quick and uncertain temper, and as sarcastic as
the devil. Although twenty-four, he was practically illiterate, owing to
having had to milk cows from about six years of age, there being
therefore no time for schooling. As is always the case, this misfortune
had bred in him a suspicion of anyone educated, and a disposition to try
and take him down a peg, to show that he was as smart as the other, in
spite of lack of education. This sort of thing is inevitable.
I must give him his due though--he had "made good." He cleared out from
the cow-slavery when he was fifteen years old and started for himself;
told a fib about his age, got a selection, and felled most of the scrub
himself. When twenty-one he sold out for L800, and took a partly
improved place further out, going in for fattening "beefers." A dry
spell nearly ruined the game youngster, so, sickening of the South, he
sold out, came up with a wad, got a block here, and started in to fall
all the scrub as before. He had about a fifteen-acre paddock with a
house on it when I made his acquaintance. His place is worth L1000
easily now.
His mate was an Irish-Tasmanian named Paddy (of course); middle-aged,
tall, lank and dark, with a long melancholy face like a cow, and very
weather-beaten. Quite uneducated, but an absolute glutton for work, and
with a very decided weakness for beer--lots of it for choice. He was an
artist with the axe, putting a scarf in a tree as neat as a saw cut.
Good-tempered, he had a quiet humour that floored Snappy Barker every
time, as thus:--
Barker: "Hey, Paddy! I was down at Blogg's yes'day, and they was runnin'
yer down summat crool."
Paddy: "Was they? Well, why dinyer stop 'em? Yer could, easy."
Barker: "'Ow could I?"
Paddy: "Oh! Don't you start runnin' me down to 'em. Then they won't git
startit."
The three of us were to tucker together, and as they had ordered a big
stock, which had been left at a house three miles off, the first job we
did was to hump the stuff out. It was raining hard--as it did almost
every day of the six weeks I was with them. We had an old pack-horse. My
road was bad enough, Lord knows; but Barker's was literally waist deep
in mud in places, covered with a repulsive green slime and bubbling with
foul-smelling gas when disturbed. There was a whole cask of salt beef
among other things, and this was the first thing we tackled. We emptied
the meat into corn sacks, and loaded the old horse and Paddy with that,
while Barker and I slung the cask, with about five gallons of salt
pickle in it, on a pole between us, and started out home. We struggled
up the first slippery hill.
"Blow this," said Barker. "We'll lighten up."
We emptied out part of the pickle, and proceeded. After we had ploughed
along a mile or so, I said "Blast the stuff!" so we emptied out some
more. A little further, and we mutually damned it, and jettisoned the
whole cargo, finding even the empty cask all too heavy on that dreadful
road. It took us the next two days to get the balance of the stuff out.
We got sick of unloading the old nag, hauling him out of the bog, and
loading him up again.
It would have been an enlightening sight for the city
"go-on-the-land-young-man" person to have seen us slowly crawling along
between the gloomy walls of scrub, squash! squelch! splash! covered
with mud and sweating with the heat, Paddy ahead with two bags of
tinned stuff, Barker next with two fifties of flour slung by straps
over his shoulders, I last with two dozen of jam in my shirt, and a
seventy of sugar across my neck, with sacking round it to keep it a bit
dry. By cripes! It made us appreciate Barker's dry snug little crib,
really beautifully built of split-out stuff, roof and all. It was quite
waterproof.
I would have quite enjoyed living there, if only it hadn't been for
Barker's infernal tongue. He soon found I didn't take very much rousing
up, so of course it was a great joke to "gittim wild." With this end in
view, he assumed a particularly galling habit of patronisingly referring
to me as "Me good mahn," or more often "Me good little mahn." I
think he must have spent his hours devising ridiculous names, and
springing them on us at night. Paddy suffered in silence under "Me
little gohanna;" his dog, with a sort of Zulu touch, was dubbed
"Little-snake-with-the-teeth-so-sharp-and-big;" while I was driven to a
state bordering on homicidal mania by a week of "Me little axe-handle
breaker," because I fractured the handle of the doddery firewood
axe--already badly sprung and wobbling--which he had sworn should last
the year out.
The more we expostulated, the worse he got. He had a pair of cats
("Curse-guts" and "Stinker"), of whom he was so fond that he took them
to bed with him at night, and then blamed me for bringing fleas to the
camp, after a night spent in scratching himself. With as much sense of
music as a cow, he used to drone out all day the one song he knew in a
dismal monotone. It was a doleful ditty; something about "Why did they
sell Killarney?"
He was very superstitious, and I'm ashamed to say that I once or twice
got my own back on him through this weakness--but only when very wild.
I made him lose a night's sleep once through suddenly jumping out of
bunk, opening the door, slamming it to again, and then turning wild-eyed
to Barker, whispering: "It's there again, Jack!" He was keen on his
garden, and he and Paddy had about a dozen different kinds of vegetables
growing, with bananas and pineapples to beat the band. When the latter
were ripening we had to light big fires to keep the flying foxes off,
and it gave one a creepy feeling to lie round one of the fires before
turning in, swapping yarns, and watching the countless myriads of bat
things stream steadily across the sky in an unbroken cloud by the hour
together. (Note for orchardists: These pests don't alight anywhere near
a decent blaze.)
I finished my contract with Barker by the end of May, and got enough out
of it to renew my credit with the storekeeper, and pay the L3 inspection
fee for survey of improvements, prior to borrowing from the Agricultural
Bank, so that I could go on falling on my own place. I applied for L120,
to fall sixty acres; the loan was granted. Payment by instalments as
work proceeded, and terms twenty-one years at five per cent. interest.
Getting my old friend Len Vincent to help me, I re-started on my own
place early in June.