For over four months we had wrestled with luck for a house, only to find
we had very little use for it for the time being, that is, until next
Wet. It couldn’t be carried out-bush from camp to camp, and finding us
at a loss for an answer, Dan suggested one himself.
“Of course!” he said, as he eyed the furnishings with interest, “it ’ud
come in handy to pack the chain away in while the dog was out enjoying
itself”; and we left it at that. It came in handy to pack the chain
away in while the dog was enjoying itself, for within twenty-four hours
we were camped at the Bitter Springs, and two weeks passed before the
homestead saw us again.
After our experience of “getting hold of Johnny,” Dan called it
foolishness to wait for an expert, and the Dandy being away for the
remainder of the stores, and the Quiet Stockman having his hands full to
overflowing, the Maluka and Dan with that adaptability peculiar to
bushmen, set to work themselves at the yard, with fifteen or twenty boys
as apprentices.
As most of the boys had their lubras with them, it was an immense camp,
but exceedingly pretty. One small tent “fly” for a dressing-room for the
missus, and the remainder of the accommodation—open-air and shady bough
gundies; tiny, fresh, cool, green shade-houses here, there, and
everywhere for the blacks; one set apart from the camp for a larder, and
an immense one—all green waving boughs—for the missus to rest in during
the heat of the day. “The Cottage,” Dan called it.
Of course, Sool’em and Brown were with us, Little Tiddle’ums being in at
the homestead on the sick list with a broken leg; and in addition to
Sool’em and Brown an innumerable band of nigger dogs, Billy Muck being
the adoring possessor of fourteen, including pups, which fanned out
behind him as he moved hither and thither like the tail of a comet.
Our camp being a stationary one, was, by comparison with our ordinary
camps, a campe-de-luxe; for, apart from the tent-fly, in it were books,
pillows, and a canvas lounge, as well as some of the flesh-pots of
Egypt, in the shape of eggs, cakes, and vegetables sent out every few
days by Cheon, to say nothing of scrub turkeys, fish, and such things.
Dan had no objection to the eggs, cakes, or vegetables, but the pillows
and canvas lounge tried him sorely. “Thought the chain was to be left
behind in the kennel,” he said, and decided that the “next worst thing
to being chained up was” for a dog to have to drag a chain round when it
was out for a run. “Look at me!” he said, “never been chained up all me
life, just because I never had enough permanent property to make a
chain—never more than I could carry in one hand: a bluey, a change of
duds, a mosquito net, and a box of Cockle’s pills.”
We suggested that Cockle’s pills were hardly permanent property, but Dan
showed that they were, with him.
“More permanent than you’d think,” he said. “When I’ve got ’em in me
swag, I never need ’em, and when I’ve left ’em somewhere else I can’t
get ’em: so you see the same box does for always.”
Yard-building lacking in interest, lubras and piccaninnies provided
entertainment, until Dan failing to see that “niggers could teach her
anything,” decided on a course of camp cookery.
Roast scrub turkey was the first lesson cooked in the most correct
style: a forked stick, with the fork uppermost, was driven into the
ground near the glowing heap of wood ashes; then a long sapling was
leant through the fork, with one end well over the coals; a doubled
string, with the turkey hanging from it, looped over this end; the
turkey turned round and round until the string was twisted to its
utmost, and finally string and turkey were left to themselves, to wind
and unwind slowly, an occasional winding-up being all that was
necessary.
The turkey was served at supper, and with it an enormous boiled
cabbage—one of Cheon’s successes. Dan was in clover, boiled cabbage
being considered nectar fit for the gods, and after supper he put the
remnants of the feast away for his breakfast. “Cold cabbage goes all
right,” he said, as he stowed it carefully away—“particularly for
breakfast.”
Then the daily damper was to be made, and I took the dish without a
misgiving. I felt at home there, for bushmen have long since discarded
the old-fashioned damper, and use soda and cream-of-tartar in the
mixture. But ours was an immense camp, and I had reckoned without any
thought. An immense camp requires an immense damper; and, the dish
containing pounds and pounds of flour, when the mixture was ready for
kneading the kneading was beyond a woman’s hands—a fact that provided
much amusement to the bushmen.
“Hit him again, little ’un,” the Maluka cried encouragingly, as I
punched and pummelled at the unwieldy mass.
“Give it to him, missus,” Dan chuckled. “That’s the style! Now you’ve
got him down.”
Kneeling in front of the dish, I pounded obediently at the mixture; and
as they alternately cheered and advised and I wrestled with
circumstances, digging my fists vigorously into the spongy, doughy
depths of the damper, a traveller rode right into the camp.
“Good evening, mates,” he said, dismounting. “Saw your fires, and
thought I’d camp near for company.” Then discovering that one of the
“mates” was a woman, backed a few steps, dazed and open-mouthed—a woman,
dough to the elbows, pounding blithely at a huge damper, being an
unusual sight in a night camp in the heart of one of the cattle runs in
the Never-Never.
“We’re conducting a cooking class,” the Maluka explained, amused at the
man’s consternation.
The traveller grinned a sickly grin, and “begging pardon, ma’am, for
intruding,” said something about seeing to his camp, and backed to a
more comfortable distance; and the damper-making proceeded.
“There’s a billy just thinking of boiling here you can have, mate,
seeing it’s late,” Dan called, when he heard the man rattling tinware,
as he prepared to go for water; and once more “begging pardon, ma’am,
for intruding,” the traveller came into our camp circle, and busied
himself with the making of tea.
The tea made to his satisfaction, he asked diffidently if there was a
“bit of meat to spare,” as his was a “bit off”; and Dan went to the
larder with a hospitable “stacks!”
“How would boiled cabbage and roast turkey go?” Dan called, finding
himself confronted with the great slabs of cabbage; and the traveller,
thinking it was supposed to be a joke, favoured us with another nervous
grin and a terse “Thanks!” Then Dan reappeared, laden, and the man’s
eyes glistened as he forgot his first surprise in his second. “Real
cabbage!” he cried. “Gosh! ain’t tasted cabbage for five years”; and the
Maluka telling him to “sit right down then and begin, just where you
are”—beside our camp fire—with a less nervous “begging your pardon,
ma’am,” he dropped down on one knee, and began.
“Don’t be shy of the turkey,” the Maluka said presently, noticing that
he had only taken a tiny piece, and the man looked sheepishly up.
“’Tain’t exactly that I’m shy of it,” he said, “but I’m scared to fill
up any space that might hold cabbage. That is,” he added, again
apologetic, “if it’s not wanted, ma’am.”
It wasn’t wanted; and as the man found room for it, the Maluka and Dan
offered further suggestions for the construction of the damper and its
conveyance to the fire.
The conveyance required judgment and watchful diplomacy, as the damper
preferred to dip in a rolling valley between my extended arms, or hang
over them like a tablecloth, rather than keep its desired form. But with
patience, and the loan of one of Dan’s huge palms, it finally fell with
an unctuous, dusty “whouf” into the opened-out bed of ashes.
By the time it was hidden away, buried in the heart of the fire, a
woman’s presence in a camp had proved less disturbing than might be
imagined, and we learned that our traveller had “come from Beyanst,”
with a backward nod towards the Queensland border, and was going west;
and by the time the cabbage and tea were finished he had become quite
talkative.
“Ain’t seen cabbage, ma’am, for more’n five years,” he said, leaning
back on to a fallen tree trunk, with a satisfied sigh (cabbage and tea
being inflating), adding when I sympathised, “nor a woman neither, for
that matter.”
Neither a cabbage nor a woman for five years! Think of it, townsfolk!
Neither a cabbage nor a woman—with the cabbage placed first. I wonder
which will be longest remembered.
“Came on this, though, in me last camp, east there,” he went on,
producing a hairpin, with another nod eastwards. “Wondered how it got
there.” “Your’n, I s’pose”; then, sheepish once more, he returned it to
his pocket, saying he “s’posed he might as well keep it for luck.”
It being a new experience to one of the plain sisterhood to feel a man
was cherishing one of her hairpins, if only “for luck,” I warmed towards
the “man from Beyanst,” and grew hopeful of rivalling even that cabbage
in his memory. “You didn’t expect to find hairpins, and a woman, in a
camp in the back blocks,” I said, feeling he was a character, and
longing for him to open up. But he was even more of a character than I
guessed.
“Back blocks!” he said in scorn. “There ain’t no back blocks left. Can’t
travel a hundred miles nowadays without running into somebody! You don’t
know what back blocks is, begging your pardon, ma’am.”
But Dan did; and the camp chat that night was worth travelling several
hundred miles to hear: tales dug out of the beginning of things; tales
of drought, and flood, and privation; cattle-duffing yarns, and long
tales of the droving days; two years’ reminiscences of getting through
with a mob—reminiscences that finally brought ourselves and the mob to
Oodnadatta.
“That’s the place if you want to see drunks, ma’am,” the traveller said,
forgetting in his warmth his “begging your pardon, ma’am,” just when it
would have been most opportune, seeing I had little hankering to see
“drunks.”
“It’s the desert does it, missus, after the overland trip,” Dan
explained. “It ’ud give anybody a ‘drouth.’ Got a bit merry meself there
once and had to clear out to camp,” he went on. “Felt it getting a bit
too warm for me to stand. You see, it was when the news came through
that the old Queen was dead, and being something historical that had
happened, the chaps felt it ought to be celebrated properly.”
Poor old Queen! And yet, perhaps, her grand, noble heart would have
understood these, her subjects, and known them for the men they were—as
loyal-hearted and true to her as the highest in the land.
“They were lying two-deep about the place next morning,” Dan added,
continuing his tale; but the Maluka, fearing the turn the conversation
had taken, suggested turning in.
Then Dan having found a kindred spirit in the traveller, laid a
favourite trap for one of his favourite jokes: shaking out a worn old
bluey, he examined it carefully in the firelight.
“Blanket’s a bit thin, mate,” said the man from Beyanst, unconsciously
playing his part. “Surely it can’t keep you warm”; and Dan’s eyes danced
in anticipation of his joke.
“Oh well!” he said, solemn-looking as an owl, as he tucked it under one
arm, “if it can’t keep a chap warm after ten years’ experience it’ll
never do it,” and turned in at once, with his usual lack of ceremony.
We had boiled eggs for breakfast, and once more the traveller joined us.
Cheon had sent the eggs out with the cabbage, and I had hidden them
away, intending to spring a surprise on the men-folk at breakfast.
“How many eggs shall I boil for you, Dan?” I said airily, springing my
surprise in this way on all the camp. But Dan, wheeling with an
exclamation of pleasure, sprung a surprise of his own on the missus.
“Eggs!” he said. “Good enough! How many? Oh, a dozen’ll do, seeing we’ve
got steak”; and I limply showed all I had—fifteen.
Dan scratched his head trying to solve the problem. “Never reckon it’s
worth beginning under a dozen,” he said; but finally suggested tossing
for ’em after they were cooked.
“Not the first time I’ve tossed for eggs either,” he said, busy grilling
steak on a gridiron made from bent-up fencing wire. “Out on the Victoria
once they got scarce, and the cook used to boil all he had and serve the
dice-box with ’em, the chap who threw the highest taking the lot.”
“Ever try to boil an emu’s egg in a quart-pot?” the man from Beyanst
asked, “lending a hand” with another piece of fencing wire, using it as
a fork to turn the steak on the impromptu gridiron. “It goes in all
right, but when it’s cooked it won’t come out, and you have to use the
quart-pot for an egg-cup and make tea later on.”
“A course dinner,” Dan called that; and then nothing being forthcoming
to toss with—dice or money not being among our permanent property—the
eggs were distributed according to the “holding capacity” of the
company: one for the missus, two for the Maluka, and half a dozen each
for the other two.
The traveller had no objection to beginning under a dozen, but Dan used
his allowance as a “relish” with his steak. “One egg!” he chuckled as he
shelled his relish and I enjoyed my breakfast. “Often wonder how ever
she keeps alive.”
The damper proved “just a bit boggy” in the middle, so we ate the crisp
outside slices and gave the boggy parts to the boys. They appeared to
enjoy it, and seeing this, after breakfast the Maluka asked them what
they thought of the missus as a cook. “Good damper, eh?” he said, and
Billy Muck rubbing his middle, full of damper and satisfaction,
answered: “My word! That one damper good fellow. Him sit down long
time”, and all the camp, rubbing middles, echoed his sentiments. The
stodgy damper had made them feel full and uncomfortable; and to be full
and uncomfortable after a meal spells happiness to a black fellow.
“Hope it won’t sit too heavy on my chest,” chuckled the man from
Beyanst, then, remembering that barely twelve hours before he had ridden
into the camp a stranger, began “begging pardon, ma’am,” most profusely
again, and hoped we’d excuse him “making so free with a lady.”
“It’s your being so friendly like, ma’am,” he explained. “Most of the
others I’ve struck seemed too good for rough chaps like us. Of course,”
he added hastily, “that’s not saying that you’re not as good as ’em. You
ain’t a Freezer on a pedestal, that’s all.”
“Thank Heaven,” the Maluka murmured and the man from Beyanst sympathised
with him. “Must be a bit off for their husbands,” he said; and his
apologies were forgotten in the absorbing topic of “Freezers.”
“A Freezer on a pedestal,” he had said. “Goddess,” the world prefers to
call it; and tradition depicts the bushman worshipping afar off.
But a “Freezer” is what he calls it to himself, and contrary to all
tradition, goes on his way unmoved. And why shouldn’t he? He may be, and
generally is, sadly in need of a woman friend, “some one to share his
joys and sorrows with”, but because he knows few women is no reason why
he should stand afar off and adore the unknowable. “Friendly like” is
what appeals to us all; and the bush-folk are only men, not
monstrosities—rough, untutored men for the most part. The difficult part
to understand is how any woman can choose to stand aloof and freeze,
with warm-hearted men all around her willing to take her into their
lives.
As the men exchanged opinions, “Freezers” appeared solitary
creatures—isolated monuments of awe-inspiring goodness and purity, and I
felt thankful that circumstances had made me only the Little Missus—a
woman, down with the bushmen at the foot of all pedestals, needing all
the love and fellowship she could get, and with no more goodness than
she could do with—just enough to make her worthy of the friendship of
“rough chaps like us.”
“Oh well,” said the traveller, when he was ready to start, after finding
room in his swag for a couple of books, “I’m not sorry I struck this
camp;” but whether because of the cabbage, or the woman, or the books,
he did not say. Let us hope it was because of the woman, and the books,
and the cabbage, with the cabbage placed last.
Then with a pull at his hat, and a “good-bye, ma’am, good luck,” the man
from Beyanst rode out of the gundy camp, and out of our lives, to become
one of its pleasant memories.
The man from Beyanst was our only visitor for the first week, in that
camp, and then after that we had some one every day.
Dan went into the homestead for stores, and set the ball rolling by
returning at sundown in triumph with a great find: a lady traveller, the
wife of one of the Inland Telegraph masters. Her husband and little son
were with her, but—well, they were only men. It was five months since I
had seen a white woman, and all I saw at the time was a woman riding
towards our camp. I wonder what she saw as I came to meet her through
the leafy bough gundies. It was nearly two years since she had seen a
woman.
It was a merry camp that night—merry and beautiful and picturesque. The
night was very cold and brilliantly starry, as nights usually are in the
Never-Never during the Dry; the camp fires were all around us: dozens of
them, grouped in and out among the gundies, and among the
fires—chatting, gossiping groups of happy-hearted human beings.
Around one central fire sat the lubras, with an outer circle of smaller
fires behind them: one central fire and one fire behind each lubra, for
such is the wisdom of the black folk; they warm themselves both back and
front. Within another circle of fires chirruped and gossiped the “boys,”
while around an immense glowing heap of logs sat the white folk—the “big
fellow fools” of the party, with scorching faces and freezing backs, too
conservative to learn wisdom from their humbler neighbours.
At our fireside we women did most of the talking, and as we sat chatting
on every subject under the sun, our husbands looked on in indulgent
amusement. Dan soon wearied of the fleeting conversation and turned in,
and the little lad slipped away to the black folk; but late into the
night we talked: late into the night, and all the next day and evening
and following morning—shaded from the brilliant sunshine all day in the
leafy “Cottage,” and scorching around the camp fire during the evenings.
And then these travellers, too, passed out of our camp to become, with
the man from Beyanst, just pleasant memories.
“She’ll find mere men unsatisfying after this,” the Maluka said in
farewell, and a mere man coming in from the north-west before sundown,
greeted the Maluka with: “Thought you married a towny,” as he pointed
with eloquent forefinger at our supper circle.
“So I did,” the Maluka laughed back. “But before I had time to dazzle
the bushies with her the Wizard of the Never-Never charmed her into a
bush-whacker.”
“Into a CHARMING bush-whacker, he MEANS!” the traveller said, bowing
before his introduction; and I wondered how the Maluka could have
thought for one moment that “mere men” would prove unsatisfying. But as
I acknowledged the gallantry Dan looked on dubiously, not sure whether
pretty speeches were a help or a hindrance to education.
But no one could call the Fizzer a “mere man”; and half-past eleven four
weeks being already past, the Fizzer was even then at the homestead, and
before another midday, came shouting into our camp, and, settling down
to dinner, kept the conversational ball rolling.
“Going to be a record Dry,” he assured us—“all surface water gone along
the line already”; and then he hurled various items of news at us: “the
horse teams were managing to do a good trip; and Mac? Oh, Mac’s getting
along,” he shouted; “struck him on a dry stage; seemed a bit light-
headed; said dry stages weren’t all beer and skittles—queer idea. Beer
and skittles! He won’t find much beer on dry stages, and I reckon the
man’s dilly that ’ud play a game of skittles on any one of ’em.”
Every one was all right down the line! But the Fizzer was always a bird
of passage, and by the time dinner was over, and a few postscripts added
to the mail, he was ready to start, and rode off, promising the best
mail the “Territory could produce in a fortnight.”
Other travellers followed the Fizzer, and the cooking lessons proceeded
until the fine art of making “puff de looneys,” sinkers, and doughboys
had been mastered, and then, before the camp had time to grow
monotonous, the staff appeared with a few of the station pups. “Might it
missus like puppy dog,” it said to explain its presence hinting also
that the missus might require a little clothes-washing done.
Lately, washing-days at the homestead had lost all their vim, for the
creek having stopped running, washing had to be conducted in tubs, so as
to keep the billabong clear for drinking purposes. But at the Springs
there was no necessity to think of anything but running water; and after
a happy day, Bertie’s Nellie, Rosy, and Biddy returned to the
homestead—the goats had to be seen to, Nellie said, thinking nothing of
a twenty-seven-mile walk in a day, with a few hours’ washing for
recreation in between whiles.
Part of the staff, a shadow or two, and the puppy dogs, filled in all
time until the yard was pronounced finished then a mob of cattle was
brought in and put through to test its strength; and just as we were
preparing to return to the homestead the Dandy’s waggon lumbered into
camp with its loading of stores.
A box of new books kept us busy all afternoon, and then, before sundown,
the Maluka suggested a farewell stroll among the pools.
The Bitter Springs—a chain of clear, crystal pools, a long winding
chain, doubling back on itself in loops and curves—form the source of
the permanent flow of the Roper; pools only a few feet deep, irregular
and wide-spreading, with mossy-green, deeply undermined, overhanging
banks, and lime-stone bottoms washed into terraces that gleam azure-blue
through the transparent water.
There is little rank grass along their borders, no sign of water-lilies,
and few weeds within them; clumps of palms dotted here and there among
the light timber, and everywhere sun-flecked, warm, dry shade. Nowhere is
there a hint of that sinister suggestion of the Reach. Clear, beautiful,
limpid, wide-spreading, irregular pools, set in an undulating field of
emerald-green mossy surf, shaded with graceful foliage and gleaming in
the sunlight with exquisite opal tints—a giant necklace of opals, set in
links of emerald green, and thrown down at hazard to fall in loops and
curves within a forest grove.
It is in appearance only the pools are isolated; for although many feet
apart in some instances, they are linked together throughout by a
shallow underground river, that runs over a rocky bed; while the turf,
that looks so solid in many places, is barely a two-foot crust arched
over five or six feet of space and water—a deathtrap for heavy cattle;
but a place of interest to white folk.
The Maluka and I wandered aimlessly in and out among the pools for a
while, and, then coming out unexpectedly from a piece of bush, found
ourselves face to face with a sight that froze all movement out of us
for a moment—the living, moving head of a horse, standing upright from
the turf on a few inches of neck: a grey, uncanny, bodyless head,
nickering piteously at us as it stood on the turf at our feet. I have
never seen a ghost, but I know exactly how I will feel if ever I do.
For a moment we stood spellbound with horror, and the next, realising
what had happened, were kneeling down beside the piteous head. The thin
crust of earth had given way beneath the animal’s hindquarters as it
grazed over the turf, and before it could recover itself it had slipped
bodily through the hole thus formed, and was standing on the rocky bed
of the underground river, with its head only in the upper air.
The poor brute was perishing for want of food and water. All around the
hole, as far as the head could reach, the turf was eaten, bare, and
although it was standing in a couple of feet of water it could not get
at it. While the Maluka went for help I brought handfuls of grass, and
his hat full of water, again and again, and was haunted for days with
the remembrance of those pleading eyes and piteous, nickering lips.
The whole camp, black and white, came to the rescue but it was an awful
work getting the exhausted creature out of its death-trap. The hole had
to be cut back to a solid ridge of rocky soil, saplings cut to form a
solid slope from the bed of the river to the ground above, and the poor
brute roped and literally hauled up the slope by sheer force and
strength of numbers. After an hour’s digging, dragging, and rope-
pulling, the horse was standing on solid turf, a new pool had been added
to the Springs, and none of us had much hankering for riding over
springy country.
The hour’s work among the pools awakened the latent geologist in all of
us, excepting Dan, and set us rooting at the bottom of one of the pools
for a piece of the terraced limestone.
It was difficult to dislodge, and our efforts reminded Dan of a night
spent in the camp of a geologist—a man with many letters after his name.
“Had the chaps heaving rocks round for him half his time,” he said.
“Couldn’t see much sense in it meself.” Dan spoke of the geologist as
“one of them old Alphabets.” “Never met a chap with so many letters in
his brand,” he explained. “He was one of them taxydermy blokes, you
know, that’s always messing round with stones and things.”
Out of the water, the opal tints died out of the limestone, and the
geologist in us went to sleep again when we found that all we had for
our trouble was a piece of dirty-looking rock. Like Dan, we saw little
sense in “heaving rocks round,” and went back to the camp and the
business of packing up for the homestead.
About next midday we rode into the homestead thoroughfare, where Cheon
and Tiddle’ums welcomed us with enthusiasm, but Cheon’s enthusiasm
turned to indignation when he found we were only in for a day or two.
“What’s ’er matter?” he ejaculated. “Missus no more stockrider”; but a
letter waiting for us at the homestead made “bush” more than ever
imperative: a letter, from the foreman of the telegraphic repairing line
party, asking for a mob of killers, and fixing a date for its delivery
to one “Happy Dick.”
“Spoke just in the nick of time,” Dan said; but as we discussed plans
Cheon hinted darkly that the Maluka was not a fit and proper person to
be entrusted with the care of a woman, and suggested that he should
undertake to treat the missus as she should be treated, while the Maluka
attended to the cattle.
Fate, however, interfered to keep the missus at the homestead, to
persuade Cheon that, after all, the Maluka was a fit and proper person
to have the care of a woman, and to find a very present use for the
house; an influenza sore-throat breaking out in the camp, the missus
developed it, and Dan went out alone to find the Quiet Stockman and the
“killers” for Happy Dick.