I met him in a sixpenny restaurant--“All meals, 6d.--Good beds, 1s.”
That was before sixpenny restaurants rose to a third-class position,
and became possibly respectable places to live in, through the
establishment, beneath them, of fourpenny hash-houses (good beds, 6d.),
and, beneath THEM again, of THREE-penny “dining-rooms--CLEAN beds, 4d.”
There were five beds in our apartment, the head of one against the foot
of the next, and so on round the room, with a space where the door and
washstand were. I chose the bed the head of which was near the foot of
his, because he looked like a man who took his bath regularly. I
should like, in the interests of sentiment, to describe the place as a
miserable, filthy, evil-smelling garret; but I can't--because it wasn't.
The room was large and airy; the floor was scrubbed and the windows
cleaned at least once a week, and the beds kept fresh and neat, which
is more--a good deal more--than can be said of many genteel private
boarding-houses. The lodgers were mostly respectable unemployed, and
one or two--fortunate men!--in work; it was the casual boozer,
the professional loafer, and the occasional spieler--the
one-shilling-bed-men--who made the place objectionable, not the
hard-working people who paid ten pounds a week for the house; and, but
for the one-night lodgers and the big gilt black-and-red bordered and
“shaded” “6d.” in the window--which made me glance guiltily up and down
the street, like a burglar about to do a job, before I went in--I was
pretty comfortable there.
They called him “Mr. Smellingscheck”, and treated him with a peculiar
kind of deference, the reason for which they themselves were doubtless
unable to explain or even understand. The haggard woman who made the
beds called him “Mr. Smell-'is-check”. Poor fellow! I didn't think, by
the look of him, that he'd smelt his cheque, or anyone else's, or that
anyone else had smelt his, for many a long day. He was a fat man, slow
and placid. He looked like a typical monopolist who had unaccountably
got into a suit of clothes belonging to a Domain unemployed, and hadn't
noticed, or had entirely forgotten, the circumstance in his business
cares--if such a word as care could be connected with such a calm,
self-contained nature. He wore a suit of cheap slops of some kind of
shoddy “tweed”. The coat was too small and the trousers too short, and
they were drawn up to meet the waistcoat--which they did with painful
difficulty, now and then showing, by way of protest, two pairs of brass
buttons and the ends of the brace-straps; and they seemed to blame the
irresponsive waistcoat or the wearer for it all. Yet he never gave way
to assist them. A pair of burst elastic-sides were in full evidence, and
a rim of cloudy sock, with a hole in it, showed at every step.
But he put on his clothes and wore them like--like a gentleman. He had
two white shirts, and they were both dirty. He'd lay them out on
the bed, turn them over, regard them thoughtfully, choose that which
appeared to his calm understanding to be the cleaner, and put it on, and
wear it until it was unmistakably dirtier than the other; then he'd
wear the other till it was dirtier than the first. He managed his three
collars the same way. His handkerchiefs were washed in the bathroom, and
dried, without the slightest disguise, in the bedroom. He never hurried
in anything. The way he cleaned his teeth, shaved, and made his toilet
almost transformed the place, in my imagination, into a gentleman's
dressing-room.
He talked politics and such things in the abstract--always in the
abstract--calmly in the abstract. He was an old-fashioned Conservative
of the Sir Leicester Deadlock style. When he was moved by an extra
shower of aggressive democratic cant--which was seldom--he defended
Capital, but only as if it needed no defence, and as if its opponents
were merely thoughtless, ignorant children whom he condescended to set
right because of their inexperience and for their own good. He stuck
calmly to his own order--the order which had dropped him like a foul
thing when the bottom dropped out of his boom, whatever that was. He
never talked of his misfortunes.
He took his meals at the little greasy table in the dark corner
downstairs, just as if he were dining at the Exchange. He had a
chop--rather well-done--and a sheet of the 'Herald' for breakfast. He
carried two handkerchiefs; he used one for a handkerchief and the other
for a table-napkin, and sometimes folded it absently and laid it on the
table. He rose slowly, putting his chair back, took down his battered
old green hat, and regarded it thoughtfully--as though it had just
occurred to him in a calm, casual way that he'd drop into his hatter's,
if he had time, on his way down town, and get it blocked, or else send
the messenger round with it during business hours. He'd draw his stick
out from behind the next chair, plant it, and, if you hadn't quite
finished your side of the conversation, stand politely waiting until you
were done. Then he'd look for a suitable reply into his hat, put it
on, give it a twitch to settle it on his head--as gentlemen do a
“chimney-pot”--step out into the gangway, turn his face to the door, and
walk slowly out on to the middle of the pavement--looking more placidly
well-to-do than ever. The saying is that clothes make a man, but HE
made his almost respectable just by wearing them. Then he'd consult his
watch--(he stuck to the watch all through, and it seemed a good one--I
often wondered why he didn't pawn it); then he'd turn slowly, right
turn, and look down the street. Then slowly back, left-about turn, and
take a cool survey in that direction, as if calmly undecided whether to
take a cab and drive to the Exchange, or (as it was a very fine morning,
and he had half an hour to spare) walk there and drop in at his club
on the way. He'd conclude to walk. I never saw him go anywhere in
particular, but he walked and stood as if he could.
Coming quietly into the room one day, I surprised him sitting at the
table with his arms lying on it and his face resting on them. I heard
something like a sob. He rose hastily, and gathered up some papers which
were on the table; then he turned round, rubbing his forehead and
eyes with his forefinger and thumb, and told me that he suffered
from--something, I forget the name of it, but it was a well-to-do
ailment. His manner seemed a bit jolted and hurried for a minute or so,
and then he was himself again. He told me he was leaving for Melbourne
next day. He left while I was out, and left an envelope downstairs for
me. There was nothing in it except a pound note.
I saw him in Brisbane afterwards, well-dressed, getting out of a cab at
the entrance of one of the leading hotels. But his manner was no more
self-contained and well-to-do than it had been in the old sixpenny
days--because it couldn't be. We had a well-to-do whisky together, and
he talked of things in the abstract. He seemed just as if he'd met me in
the Australia.
“A Rough Shed”
A hot, breathless, blinding sunrise--the sun having appeared suddenly
above the ragged edge of the barren scrub like a great disc of molten
steel. No hint of a morning breeze before it, no sign on earth or sky to
show that it is morning--save the position of the sun.
A clearing in the scrub--bare as though the surface of the earth were
ploughed and harrowed, and dusty as the road. Two oblong huts--one for
the shearers and one for the rouseabouts--in about the centre of the
clearing (as if even the mongrel scrub had shrunk away from them) built
end-to-end, of weatherboards, and roofed with galvanised iron. Little
ventilation; no verandah; no attempt to create, artificially, a breath
of air through the buildings. Unpainted, sordid--hideous. Outside, heaps
of ashes still hot and smoking. Close at hand, “butcher's shop”--a bush
and bag breakwind in the dust, under a couple of sheets of iron, with
offal, grease and clotted blood blackening the surface of the
ground about it. Greasy, stinking sheepskins hanging everywhere with
blood-blotched sides out. Grease inches deep in great black patches
about the fireplace ends of the huts, where wash-up and “boiling” water
is thrown.
Inside, a rough table on supports driven into the black, greasy ground
floor, and formed of flooring boards, running on uneven lines the length
of the hut from within about 6ft. of the fire-place. Lengths of single
six-inch boards or slabs on each side, supported by the projecting ends
of short pieces of timber nailed across the legs of the table to serve
as seats.
On each side of the hut runs a rough framework, like the partitions in a
stable; each compartment battened off to about the size of a manger, and
containing four bunks, one above the other, on each side--their ends,
of course, to the table. Scarcely breathing space anywhere between.
Fireplace, the full width of the hut in one end, where all the cooking
and baking for forty or fifty men is done, and where flour, sugar, etc.,
are kept in open bags. Fire, like a very furnace. Buckets of tea and
coffee on roasting beds of coals and ashes on the hearth. Pile of
“brownie” on the bare black boards at the end of the table. Unspeakable
aroma of forty or fifty men who have little inclination and less
opportunity to wash their skins, and who soak some of the grease out
of their clothes--in buckets of hot water--on Saturday afternoons or
Sundays. And clinging to all, and over all, the smell of the dried,
stale yolk of wool--the stink of rams!
. . . . .
“I am a rouseabout of the rouseabouts. I have fallen so far that it
is beneath me to try to climb to the proud position of 'ringer' of the
shed. I had that ambition once, when I was the softest of green hands;
but then I thought I could work out my salvation and go home. I've got
used to hell since then. I only get twenty-five shillings a week (less
station store charges) and tucker here. I have been seven years west of
the Darling and never shore a sheep. Why don't I learn to shear, and
so make money? What should I do with more money? Get out of this and go
home? I would never go home unless I had enough money to keep me for
the rest of my life, and I'll never make that Out Back. Otherwise, what
should I do at home? And how should I account for the seven years, if
I were to go home? Could I describe shed life to them and explain how
I lived. They think shearing only takes a few days of the year--at the
beginning of summer. They'd want to know how I lived the rest of the
year. Could I explain that I 'jabbed trotters' and was a 'tea-and-sugar
burglar' between sheds. They'd think I'd been a tramp and a beggar all
the time. Could I explain ANYTHING so that they'd understand? I'd have
to be lying all the time and would soon be tripped up and found out.
For, whatever else I have been I was never much of a liar. No, I'll
never go home.
“I become momentarily conscious about daylight. The flies on the track
got me into that habit, I think; they start at day-break--when the
mosquitoes give over.
“The cook rings a bullock bell.
“The cook is fire-proof. He is as a fiend from the nethermost sheol
and needs to be. No man sees him sleep, for he makes bread--or worse,
brownie--at night, and he rings a bullock bell loudly at half-past
five in the morning to rouse us from our animal torpors. Others, the
sheep-ho's or the engine-drivers at the shed or wool-wash, call him, if
he does sleep. They manage it in shifts, somehow, and sleep somewhere,
sometime. We haven't time to know. The cook rings the bullock bell and
yells the time. It was the same time five minutes ago--or a year ago.
No time to decide which. I dash water over my head and face and slap
handfuls on my eyelids--gummed over aching eyes--still blighted by the
yolk o' wool--grey, greasy-feeling water from a cut-down kerosene
tin which I sneaked from the cook and hid under my bunk and had the
foresight to refill from the cask last night, under cover of warm,
still, suffocating darkness. Or was it the night before last? Anyhow, it
will be sneaked from me to-day, and from the crawler who will collar it
to-morrow, and 'touched' and 'lifted' and 'collared' and recovered by
the cook, and sneaked back again, and cause foul language, and fights,
maybe, till we 'cut-out'.
“No; we didn't have sweet dreams of home and mother, gentle poet--nor
yet of babbling brooks and sweethearts, and love's young dream. We are
too dirty and dog-tired when we tumble down, and have too little time to
sleep it off. We don't want to dream those dreams out here--they'd only
be nightmares for us, and we'd wake to remember. We MUSTN'T remember
here.
“At the edge of the timber a great galvanised-iron shed, nearly all
roof, coming down to within 6ft. 6in. of the 'board' over the 'shoots'.
Cloud of red dust in the dead timber behind, going up--noon-day dust.
Fence covered with skins; carcases being burned; blue smoke going
straight up as in noonday. Great glossy (greasy-glossy) black crows
'flopping' around.
“The first syren has gone. We hurry in single files from opposite ends
of rouseabouts' and shearers' huts (as the paths happen to run to the
shed) gulping hot tea or coffee from a pint-pot in one hand and biting
at a junk of brownie in the other.
“Shed of forty hands. Shearers rush the pens and yank out sheep and
throw them like demons; grip them with their knees, take up machines,
jerk the strings; and with a rattling whirring roar the great
machine-shed starts for the day.
“'Go it, you----tigers!' yells a tar-boy. 'Wool away!' 'Tar!' 'Sheep
Ho!' We rush through with a whirring roar till breakfast time.
“We seize our tin plate from the pile, knife and fork from the
candle-box, and crowd round the camp-oven to jab out lean chops, dry as
chips, boiled in fat. Chops or curry-and-rice. There is some growling
and cursing. We slip into our places without removing our hats. There's
no time to hunt for mislaid hats when the whistle goes. Row of hat
brims, level, drawn over eyes, or thrust back--according to characters
or temperaments. Thrust back denotes a lucky absence of brains, I fancy.
Row of forks going up, or jabbing, or poised, loaded, waiting for last
mouthful to be bolted.
“We pick up, sweep, tar, sew wounds, catch sheep that break from the
pens, jump down and pick up those that can't rise at the bottom of
the shoots, 'bring-my-combs-from-the-grinder-will-yer,' laugh at dirty
jokes, and swear--and, in short, are the 'will-yer' slaves, body and
soul, of seven, six, five, or four shearers, according to the distance
from the rolling tables.
“The shearer on the board at the shed is a demon. He gets so much a
hundred; we, 25s. a week. He is not supposed, by the rules of the shed,
the Union, and humanity, to take a sheep out of the pen AFTER the bell
goes (smoke-ho, meals, or knock-off), but his watch is hanging on the
post, and he times himself to get so many sheep out of the pen BEFORE
the bell goes, and ONE MORE--the 'bell-sheep'--as it is ringing. We have
to take the last fleece to the table and leave our board clean. We go
through the day of eight hours in runs of about an hour and 20 minutes
between smoke-ho's--from 6 to 6. If the shearers shore 200 instead of
100, they'd get 2 Pounds a day instead of 1 Pound, and we'd have twice
as much work to do for our 25s. per week. But the shearers are racing
each other for tallies. And it's no use kicking. There is no God here
and no Unionism (though we all have tickets). But what am I growling
about? I've worked from 6 to 6 with no smoke-ho's for half the wages,
and food we wouldn't give the sheep-ho dog. It's the bush growl, born of
heat, flies, and dust. I'd growl now if I had a thousand a year. We MUST
growl, swear, and some of us drink to d.t.'s, or go mad sober.
“Pants and shirts stiff with grease as though a couple of pounds of soft
black putty were spread on with a painter's knife.
“No, gentle bard!--we don't sing at our work. Over the whirr and roar
and hum all day long, and with iteration that is childish and irritating
to the intelligent greenhand, float unthinkable adjectives and adverbs,
addressed to jumbucks, jackaroos, and mates indiscriminately. And worse
words for the boss over the board--behind his back.
“I came of a Good Christian Family--perhaps that's why I went to the
Devil. When I came out here I'd shrink from the man who used foul
language. In a short time I used it with the worst. I couldn't help it.
“That's the way of it. If I went back to a woman's country again I
wouldn't swear. I'd forget this as I would a nightmare. That's the
way of it. There's something of the larrikin about us. We don't exist
individually. Off the board, away from the shed (and each other) we are
quiet--even gentle.
“A great-horned ram, in poor condition, but shorn of a heavy fleece,
picks himself up at the foot of the 'shoot', and hesitates, as if
ashamed to go down to the other end where the ewes are. The most
ridiculous object under Heaven.
“A tar-boy of fifteen, of the bush, with a mouth so vile that
a street-boy, same age (up with a shearing uncle), kicks him
behind--having proved his superiority with his fists before the shed
started. Of which unspeakable little fiend the roughest shearer of a
rough shed was heard to say, in effect, that if he thought there was
the slightest possibility of his becoming the father of such a boy
he'd----take drastic measures to prevent the possibility of his becoming
a proud parent at all.
“Twice a day the cooks and their familiars carry buckets of
oatmeal-water and tea to the shed, two each on a yoke. We cry, 'Where
are you coming to, my pretty maids?'
“In ten minutes the surfaces of the buckets are black with flies. We
have given over trying to keep them clear. We stir the living cream
aside with the bottoms of the pints, and guzzle gallons, and sweat it
out again. Occasionally a shearer pauses and throws the perspiration
from his forehead in a rain.
“Shearers live in such a greedy rush of excitement that often a strong
man will, at a prick of the shears, fall in a death-like faint on the
board.
“We hate the Boss-of-the-Board as the shearers' 'slushy' hates the
shearers' cook. I don't know why. He's a very fair boss.
“He refused to put on a traveller yesterday, and the traveller knocked
him down. He walked into the shed this morning with his hat back and
thumbs in waistcoat--a tribute to man's weakness. He threatened to
dismiss the traveller's mate, a bigger man, for rough shearing--a
tribute to man's strength. The shearer said nothing. We hate the boss
because he IS boss, but we respect him because he is a strong man. He is
as hard up as any of us, I hear, and has a sick wife and a large, small
family in Melbourne. God judge us all!
“There is a gambling-school here, headed by the shearers' cook. After
tea they head-'em, and advance cheques are passed from hand to hand, and
thrown in the dust until they are black. When it's too dark to see with
nose to the ground, they go inside and gamble with cards. Sometimes
they start on Saturday afternoon, heading 'em till dark, play cards all
night, start again heading 'em Sunday afternoon, play cards all Sunday
night, and sleep themselves sane on Monday, or go to work ghastly--like
dead men.
“Cry of 'Fight'; we all rush out. But there isn't much fighting. Afraid
of murdering each other. I'm beginning to think that most bush crime is
due to irritation born of dust, heat, and flies.
“The smothering atmosphere shudders when the sun goes down. We call it
the sunset breeze.
“Saturday night or Sunday we're invited into the shearers' hut. There
are songs that are not hymns and recitations and speeches that are not
prayers.
“Last Sunday night: Slush lamps at long intervals on table. Men playing
cards, sewing on patches--(nearly all smoking)--some writing, and
the rest reading Deadwood Dick. At one end of the table a Christian
Endeavourer endeavouring; at the other a cockney Jew, from the hawker's
boat, trying to sell rotten clothes. In response to complaints, direct
and not chosen generally for Sunday, the shearers' rep. requests both
apostles to shut up or leave.
“He couldn't be expected to take the Christian and leave the Jew, any
more than he could take the Jew and leave the Christian. We are just
amongst ourselves in our hell.
. . . . .
“Fiddle at the end of rouseabouts' hut. Voice of Jackeroo, from upper
bunk with apologetic oaths: 'For God's sake chuck that up; it makes a
man think of blanky old things!'
“A lost soul laughs (mine) and dreadful night smothers us.”