BULLOCK CREEK.
After walking about a mile, I came upon a sheep station at Bullock creek,
and got engaged to assist in sheep shearing. The station being only
about ten miles from Bendigo where I had been digging, it was plain I
had not come as the crow flies, nor by the beaten road. A portion of
the building was in use as a tavern called “The Albert,” appropriately
fronting which, at a distance of two or three hundred yards, was a small
police station, where the few who would not suffer the many to get drunk
quietly were taken care of—a great convenience to the landlord. The few
shearers who had been collected meeting with old friends in one another,
and in certain of the general company, seemed fast making themselves
eligible for the lock-up, when I first made their acquaintance. Till they
sobered, I was employed in a generally useful way in the garden and the
horse paddock. The first of my service, however, was with a wheelbarrow,
in the removal of broken bottles from the open space in front of the tap
room door, thrown there by the frequenters of the place, in brick-bat
practice at the trees, the skill thus learnt to be exercised when
occasion came upon the constables. Before I left, a mounted trooper in
attempting to lay hold of a suspected horse-stealer, had his head cut
open by a heavy champaign bottle thrown by the thief, who was enabled
thereby to remount the stolen animal and get away. The circumstance for a
time put me off the notion of becoming a policeman, having an impression,
the result of certain small casualties, that my skull was rather
delicate, and hardly round enough for maximum resistance to flying bodies.
The shearers being quartered in a hut by the side of the creek, about a
stone throw from the main buildings, I took up my abode there with them.
The hut was roomy; the walls were formed of hard-wood slabs, split like
huge laths from logs, and having been framed together when yet green,
they had shrunk so much that the hand might have been passed edge-ways
between any two of them. The roof was composed of great sheets of bark,
and happily was rain-proof; there was no need of a window, and no
shutting of the door could keep the draught out. Along the walls was a
sparred bench of rude construction, on which the first comers had made
their beds, the later arrivals having to be content with sheep skins on
the floor. The fire-place was big enough to accommodate a sitter on each
side within when the fire was low. There was a man to cook, and to attend
to the house wants of the company.
Being among strange people, whose manner of living I had yet to get
acquainted with, I sat up later than was agreeable to me waiting and
wearying for my fellow-lodgers to come home, that I might see how they
did about the sleeping. About midnight they came—a noisy multitude,
full of brandy and “Old Tom.” Their coming freed me from a tedious and
apparently endless recital of rheumatic and other ailments, under which
the old cook—toothless, and bald, and bowed, was suffering: the poor
man’s eyes watery and dim with age, seemed to brighten at the sympathy
that notwithstanding a certain dulness in the subject, I could not help
feeling for him. He had no home, and had wandered here like a thing
driven by the wind, to die some day, and be reproached for the trouble he
would give to those in whose hands he left his wasted body. About an hour
or so after their arrival, the men prepared their beds, and I did mine
on a bare place near the door, but was kept long awake on account of a
few who restlessly kept staggering out and in, their heavy-booted limbs
not always careful about where my legs were. I was too tired however to
keep awake until the danger was quite past, and awakened in the morning
with a great beef bone lying across my neck, thrown there by him who had
been last gnawing it. These were the grosser inconveniences, there was
another that I did not quite understand at the time I was first feeling
it; however, on spreading my blankets in the morning on the fence, I got
to know the secret—fleas. There was no use trying to catch them, even had
I been inclined, so I contented myself with quietly looking on as they
scoured away through the woolly fibres on being exposed to the light and
the cool air, and I wondered whether instinct would guide them back to
their kindred inside among the sheepskins and the dust.
On the morning of the third day the sheep shearing commenced, and the
packing of the wool in bales became my work. The press consisted of a
large box set on end, and without either top or bottom; the sides were
detachable, and were merely clamped together when the pressing was being
done. A strong coarse canvas bag, exactly fitting the inside of the box,
was placed in it; the flaps that were to enclose the top end of the bale
were turned over the sides and secured there, so that the bottom barely
rested on the ground within. Throwing a few fleeces in and armed with a
spade, I kept stuffing the wool that lay along the sides down between the
bagging and the mass I stood on, until I made it somewhat solid, then
more fleeces, and more stuffing, till I reached the top, which, on the
flaps being sewn together, was packed by means of a short staff. I did
feel proud when I managed to turn out a bale that had no soft spots in
it, but my specimens on this first day were few, the shearers were out of
condition, their wrists grew feeble, and their backs grew sore, and they
adjourned to the tap-room for “a stiffener,” and I saw them no more till
late at night, when they came down in a body to the hut bringing disorder
and two strangers with them, also some liquor, which however, lasting but
a short time, and their fierce humour inclining them to make “a night
of it,” a select few were despatched to procure, if at all possible, no
matter by what means, a five gallon keg of rum, as they could no longer
satisfy themselves with drops in bottles; but the proprietor having an
eye to his flocks, which before the public-house was started, had been
his main stay, gave them instead a certain warning of police proceedings
were the shearing any longer delayed on their account. Shearers were
scarce, and consequently were disposed to stand upon their dignity, but
these having been made debtors for “slop” goods, and for liquor supplied
to them at the rate of twenty shillings a bottle, felt themselves on the
wrong side of the law for showing airs, having no money to pay off the
score, besides present thirst making them like very Esaus, they gladly
for the sake of two bottles more agreed to the terms he now imposed on
them. These bottles were soon drained dry as the others, on which the
yet unsatisfied began to quarrel among themselves. One sang while the
dispute was going on, and another, too drunk to stand, sat on the floor
reciting doggrel verse, which he appeared to make as he went on, every
now and again stopping to say that he was Fraser of Kilbarchan, and that
everybody knew him.
I sat for about an hour by the side of the singer, his hands clasping
mine, and his drunken breath blowing full in my face. I was delivered
from him ultimately by a commotion taking place in the far end of the
hut. During my distress, I had observed one of the shearers paying much
attention to the elder of the two strangers, who were both becoming
stupid with the liquor that had been given them, and had noticed him
lead the man into a little place partitioned off from the main room, and
containing bed benches. In a few minutes the shearer came gliding out,
and passed through the open doorway into the outer darkness. The other
followed with only his shirt on, and loudly muttering to himself, but in
a few minutes returned, and, apparently more sober than before, commenced
to gather his boots and clothes together. While so engaged he said
something that appeared to touch the honour of the company, and raised a
clamour of indignation at himself, an Edinburgh man called Jack, being so
much overcome by it that he staggered out, and made his way to the police
to complain of unjust accusation. I had gone outside, and stood leaning
against the fence gratefully enjoying the cool night air, and the solemn
quiet of the forest scene, when I heard a rustling of feet among the dry
grass of the enclosure, and saw two figures stealthily approaching. I
moved away, they came on then at a run, and leaped the fence, and were up
with me before I reached the door—two constables. Shoving me roughly to
one side, they entered with pistols cocked and ready in their hands, and
asked for the man who had the complaint to make. The wrangling din was
on the instant hushed to a dead stillness; the man was sitting by the
fire with his face hidden in his hands. Some one pointed to him on the
question being repeated, but as all he could be got to say, was simply
“he knew,” the constables angrily turned him out of doors and left us.
I then gathered from the hints that were dropped that his pocket had
been picked of £40. The ill-looking rascal who had shown him so much
attention, and who went by the name of “Brummie,” had returned during my
absence at the fence, and was now standing with his back to the fire,
but with his outer blue shirt off, no doubt with a view to prevent his
victim recognising him. From the talk that followed I learnt that nearly
all the company had been “Government men,” as convicts style themselves,
and that the stranger in declining to inform the police of his loss, had
but shown himself to be a good man and true, according to the notions of
trueness held in common by his class—to regard the police as the common
enemy, and to settle all private differences to the unwritten law of
the fraternity. Jack was blamed for having brought the enemy upon them,
but Brummie afforded him an opportunity of redeeming his character in
this respect some few weeks after, by eloping with £5 belonging to him.
He was very angry, called Brummie a mean sneak, declared he would never
speak to him again, and then let the matter rest. Jack being a fellow
countryman of mine, I made free to speak to him about what I had observed
of Brummie, but got for reply a discreet hint to see as little as I could
of what happened, and to keep my own counsel when I did see, as being a
“square head,” that is one outside of their community, I would readily be
suspected were tales told out of school.
During one of their drinking days I had found one of them, a Yorkshire
man, asleep on the banks of the creek, close to the water’s edge, and
had gathered him up, and taken him home to bed, and in the act of doing
so I seemed to have roused him sufficiently to recognise me, and know
what I was doing with him. After that, to the end of my stay among them,
he never got warm with liquor but he retold the story to his mates, and
hugged me in his arms, with vows that he would make a man of me after
shearing was done, by taking me with him to the diggings; but “Philip
drunk and Philip sober” appearing each to forget what the other had been
doing, I formed my own plans for the future, and left him out. Philip
drunk said that his wife Nancy—an old “government lady” I had every
reason to believe—would be as good as a mother to me. I felt quite safe
in agreeing to become her son, for I knew that Philip sober would put the
matter right for me again next morning.
When I had been about three weeks at the shed, the men learnt from some
passing travellers that shearers were in great demand at neighbouring
stations—stations that had no public house attached to them—and that
the rates of pay offered were far beyond what they were now receiving.
Making application and being refused a rise on present rates, they left
off working and adjourned to the tap-room, there to enjoy themselves and
await the consequences. They were paid at so much the hundred fleeces,
whereas my pay was fixed, thirty shillings a week with rations, much
work or little. I did not think myself directly interested in the strike
till Jack on coming down in the evening to the hut, rather unsteady on
his legs, began to question me about what I meant to do. Recollecting
I was a square head, I replied “Nothing.” He rose, called me a cur and
nob, and said it was me and the like of me who were ruining the country,
by playing into the hands of the masters; then seizing an empty bottle
by the neck, he raised it and advanced a step to strike. A pang of fear
shot through me, my heart beat quick, for I had seen the effects of a
blow made with such a weapon, and I had just nerve enough and no more
to retain my hands behind me, my back being to the fire, and fix my eye
steadily on his. For a few moments we stood thus balanced. I could not
have borne the suspense long, but held to it when I observed his arm
relax a little. He could not hit me thus, the arm dropped by his side,
and throwing the bottle from him with a muttered curse he staggered out
of doors, and I heard no more of it. It was the only instance of personal
violence offered to me, during the whole of my mixed wanderings in the
colony, and the sorry impressions left upon my mind, became lost in
gratitude some few months later, when seeking shelter from a storm, at an
out station where the same man happened to be cook and hutkeeper.
Changes were frequently occurring in the working party. The high wages
earned by the better classes induced many who had never shorn a sheep to
offer their services, hoping that their unskilfulness would be winked
at in the dearth of high-class hands. A hundred and twenty fleeces a
day was reckoned good work for one pair of shears. We had several who
shore sixty, a few eighty, and one or two a hundred, but the latter were
often brought to task for “tomahawking,” or leaving ridge-and-furrow
shear-marks. The learners—old government men like the others—seldom
reached higher in the count than from fifteen to twenty, and let the poor
animals go spotted sometimes from neck to tail with shear wounds. The
superintendent was a humane man, but the flocks were sorely afflicted
with the scab, and humanity had to choose between allowing the animals to
linger with disease, or letting them smart for a short time with tarred
holes in their pelts. The accidents of unskilfulness were overlooked,
but when the bad workers, vexed with their own unhandiness, and the
jeers of their abler comrades, began to let loose their passion on the
wretched, restless animals by furtively digging the shear-points into
their sides, and knocking their horns loose, it was thought high time
to part with them. Thus dismissed, they might go no farther than the
next station, get a little more practice there, and perhaps have learnt
sufficiently before the season ended to make a fair start in the next.
The talk in the shed and hut ran much in boasting about what each had
been able to do in shearing before the diggings put their hands out of
practice. It was good to see their pride honestly interested in this
direction, but I fear there were many great lies told. After the shearing
had been fairly commenced, I was much attracted by the appearance of two
new-comers, who, during the rudely animated discussion in the hut, sat
quietly smoking their pipes, seldom joining in with more than a chance
comment, or a brief reply when asked to verify any assertion, more than
usually extraordinary. The undisguised and avowed rascality of many of
the others required but little study to understand, but those silent
ones—hard-featured, sullen, with eyes ever stealing searching glances at
the speakers—seemed undefinable. In the others, a kindly trait would now
and again flash out in their outspoken lawlessness, but in these there
seemed ever a dark spirit of evil brooding, all the more terrible because
unknown.
Of the tales of old-hand doings that they told, I may briefly mention
two. One was related as a piece of confidence from an absent comrade,
the circumstance happening on “the Sydney side.” He had been for a year
serving as shepherd at an out-station in the interior, and as such, was
held responsible for the full number of sheep committed to his care.
When the pay-day at the year’s end came, his employer deducted the value
of two or three sheep he could give no account of except that they must
have been killed and eaten by wild dogs. Muttering vengeance, he took
his leave and stole by night to a fold in a distant station, where the
sheep were under treatment for catarrh, killed one, cut its head off,
and, under cover of darkness, returned to his late master’s, and threw
it into the midst of the flock he had recently been tending. The sheep,
after their first alarm was over, gathered about it with down-stretched
necks to sniff and feel it with their noses. The disease was contagious,
and the savage design took full effect, but before the discovery was
made, the miscreant had taken himself out of reach. I could not detect
any particular impression the story made upon the hearers, except in the
case of one who appeared to have some old grudge festering in his heart,
and who jerked out that “it would serve them bloody right if a lot more
could have sheep’s heads thrown at them.” The other story, however, was
the occasion of much laughter, being given by one of the actors in it.
He was travelling with a comrade from Bendigo to Tarrangower. They were
beginning to be foot-sore, when they overtook a “new chum” with a cart
laden with stores for Bendigo. He had missed his way, and was going
in the wrong direction. O’Brien, for so the man who told the tale was
named, seeing his advantage at once on the youth making inquiries about
the road, informed him that he also was bound for Bendigo, and would
guide him there to the very spot he wanted, if he would give himself and
comrade a lift for a few miles inside the cart. The offer was readily
accepted. O’Brien had a bottle of strong brandy with him, and the young
man was plied with it so well that when three hams that formed part of
the lading were pitched out one by one down a bushy bank he neither saw
nor heard. The two got out when about a mile from Tarrangower, pointed to
some tents at a distance as his destination, then struck off through the
bush, and towards dark, with the hams wrapped in the blankets at their
backs, arrived among their comrades at the other end of the diggings from
that the cart would reach. The story was well and circumstantially told.
The youth’s simplicity, and the art used in ensnaring his attention when
the hams were being thrown out, were declared by the company to be “as
good as a play.” The transaction was looked upon not as a robbery, but
as a first-rate practical joke, marred only by the two jokers having to
absent themselves from the locality for a few weeks, on account of “the
noise” the victim had made about it to the police.