He commenced his next day’s journey at an early hour, in full vigour
of mind and body and in charity with all men. He had fed and rested
with keen relish, and all slight fatigue consequent on unaccustomed
exercise had disappeared. The morning air was fresh and cool. The
indescribable charm of the unworn day rested upon the rural landscape,
where farmhouses, maize fields, orangeries, and orchards alternated
with primeval woodlands and wide-stretching pastures. The houses were
often old, the farming indifferent, the fences decayed; but with
all faults it was the country—the blessed country—and the heart of
Ernest Neuchamp, a born and bred land worshipper, went out to the
dew-bespangled champaign.
He halted no more until the great valley of the Hawkesbury lay before
him, with again comparatively ancient settlement, composed of massively
constructed houses, and even boasting—wonder of wonders—in this
strange new land, of—ruins! Yes; memorials of the past were there! of
an epoch when the easily acquired fortunes of the military, or other
notables of the day, had been devoted to the erection of mansions
more in accordance with their British recollections than with the
circumstances of the colony, or indeed with their regular incomes.
Studding the wide fertile meadows were farmhouses of all grades of
architecture and pretension. Enormous fields of maize, in spite of the
untoward rainless season, told of the unsurpassed richness of a region
which, after more than half a century’s ceaseless cropping, maintained
its fertility.
It so happened that the first two or three individuals who encountered
Mr. Neuchamp as he pursued his way along the uniform high road, which
led through the flat, somewhat Flemish-looking district, were men of
unusual height, breadth, and solidity. Beyond the quick but observant
glance habitual to him, our traveller exhibited no surprise at what he
took to be exceptional individuals accidentally met. But after several
miles’ travelling and a repetition of inhabitants of the same vast
stature, he commenced to realise the fact that he had come upon a human
family of near relationship to the Anakim.
He then remembered some jesting remarks of Mr. Frankston, in which, for
the purpose of pointing to some anecdote of entertaining, if not wholly
instructive tendency, he had said ‘as big and as slow as a Hawkesbury
man,’ or words to that effect.
‘Here, then,’ mused Ernest, after finally possessing himself of the
fact, ‘you have the result of an agricultural population, located upon
rich level country, with ample means of subsistence and an absence of
anxiety about the morrow almost absolute. Nearly eighty years have
passed since the parent-farmers of this community were settled upon
these levels. In their descendants you have the true New Hollander,
like his prototype, large, phlegmatic, slow-moving, unenterprising, but
bearing within him the germs of valiant resistance to tyranny at need,
of steadfast labour, of mighty engineering, of deathless struggles for
political freedom!’
Having traversed this land of Goshen—evergreen and fertile oasis of
the eucalyptus wilderness, not excepting its Platt Deutsch habit of
periodical total immersion, Ernest halted upon an eminence which
bore traces of having been artificially cleared. He gazed upon the
broad winding river at his feet, the wide expanse of river, sharply
contrasted with the savage heights and rugged ravines of the great
mountain-chain which apparently barred all onward path.
He moved a short distance forward, attracted by the appearance of the
remains of an edifice placed exactly upon the brow of the hill, and
found himself among the ruins of a mansion of far more than ordinary
pretensions.
Fire had destroyed much of the main building, but neglect and
abandonment were visible in the dislodged pillars, broken steps,
grass-grown courtyard, and roofless hall.
‘This has been no ordinary home-wreck,’ thought he; ‘it needs but
little imagination to picture to oneself the overflowing hospitality,
the wild revelry, the old-world courtesy, that these crumbling walls
have witnessed. Mark the great range of stabling! For no ordinary
carriage and pair, with couple of hacks only, were they needed, I trow.
There you can still trace the shape and sweep of the avenue leading
from the outer gate to the front entrance, and see where the broken
bridge spanned the little brook! A few glorious irregular orange-trees
mark the place “where once a garden smiled.” This was doubtless one of
the great houses in the period which corresponded with the palmy days
of the West Indian planters, with the old slave-holding times of the
Sunny South, when money was plentiful and (compulsory) labour cheap;
when the magnates of the land held high festival, not periodically but
as the rule of their daily life, and drank and danced and drove and
diced and fought and feasted, all heedless of the morrow, whether in
South Carolina, Jamaica, or in Sydney. The morrow _had_ come during
the lives of some proprietors. In other cases, not until their heirs
were fitted to realise the misery of a lost inheritance. And was this
the end, the moral, of that _bon vieux temps_? The broken arch, the
down-trodden shrubberies, the ghostly portals?’
By the time Mr. Neuchamp had brought his musings to a reluctant
conclusion, the sun lay goldenly in the clear autumn eve, athwart
the dark blue many-shadowed mountain-chain which rose with abrupt
sternness from the broad green fertile levels. A wondrous clearness of
atmosphere was manifest to the wayfarer from the misty mother-lands,
now irradiated with the glories of a southern sunset. Tints of all hues
and gradations of colour, clear unflecked amber, burning gold, purple,
and orange, cast themselves in softly blending masses upon the fast
darkening, solemn, unrelieved mountain-chain.
He was aware, from guide-book lore, that at this point the early
progress of civilisation and prosperity of the struggling colony of
New South Wales had come to an abrupt conclusion. All things which he
saw around explained so much. Careful cultivation of land now disused
and restored to grazing. A multiplication of small well-improved
farms. Expensive and thorough clearing of timber from great tracts of
indifferent soil, only explicable on the hypothesis of cheap labour and
artificially heightened prices for all kinds of farm produce.
Then the end had come. The pent-up flocks and herds, the fall of the
protection prices, dearth of employment for labour, the vigorous
manhood of the colony native to the soil clamouring for remuneration
and adventurous employment—all the causes, in fact, which lead to the
decay of a weak or the development of a strong race.
One people, one ‘happy breed of men,’ in such straits and urgency,
has ever found chiefs of its own blood capable of guiding it to
death or victory. The time was come—the men were at hand—Wentworth,
Lawson, and Blaxland, hereditary leaders, as belonging to the military
aristocracy, and to the squirearchy of the land, stood forward and
fronted the supreme crisis. Taking with them a scant equipment, they
cast themselves into the interminable wilderness of barren rock and
mountain, frowning precipice and barren heath, endlessly alternating
with ‘horrible hopeless sultry dells’ for leagues, which no white man
had hitherto measured or traversed.
The problem, upon the favourable solution of which hung the life of
the infant settlement, was, whether a region lay beyond this pathless
natural barrier, which in pasture alone should prove sufficiently
extensive to sustain the flocks and herds so rapidly increasing in
numbers and value.
It was a task difficult and dangerous beyond what, in this day of
feather-bed travel, the imagination can easily reach. But the reward
was splendid; and they, with hunger-sharpened features, barefooted
and almost naked from contact with bush and brier, with the unshaken
courage and dogged obstinacy to the death, proper to their race,
reached forth the strong right hand, seized, and held it fast.
For, after untold weary wanderings, with loss of burdened beasts,
famine, doubt, and every hardship but that of divided counsels, they
stood one day upon a mountain-top and saw stretched out before them
the glory of the great unknown, untrodden, Austral interior, fated to
be the pasture ground of millions of sheep and beeves and horses, the
home of millions of Anglo-Saxons. A portion of this they saw when they
sighted the first tract of richly grassed park-like forest, the first
rippling river, the first prairie-like meadow.
The yet unfolded treasures of the boundless waste were doubtless seen
in the spirit by the poet soul, the statesmanlike intellect, the
patriotic heart of William Charles Wentworth.
Thus far the guide-book narrative, which perhaps Mr. Neuchamp partially
recalled and revolved as he betook himself to the last of the older
country towns of the land, which lay amid gardens and church spires on
the nether side of the broad river, under the shadow of the ancient
mountain superstition, now with ‘hull riddled’ by broadsides of
steam, like other fallacies exploded by modern determination and the
remorseless logic of the age.
On the morrow the pilgrim girded himself for the long ascent which
plainly lay before him when he should cross the bridge and leave the
cleared fertile vale.
Rising at an earlier hour than usual, he quitted the village inn before
the sun had more than cleared the eastern horizon.
Ernest enjoyed in silent ecstasy the calm fresh beauty of the morn, as
following the old road,—now winding round the spur of a mountain; now
scarped from the hillside with a sheer fall of a thousand feet ere the
tops of the trees could be beheld, which looked like brierbushes at
the bottom of the glen; now running with comparatively level measure
along the plateau from which an endless vision of mountain, valley, and
woodland was visible,—he gradually ascended to an elevation from which
he was able to take a last glance at the rich lowlands through which
the course of the river gleamed in long bright curves.
Mr. Neuchamp was a tolerable botanist, a rather more advanced
geologist. He therefore possessed the unfading interest which he can
ever ensure who reads with heaven-cleared eyes the book of nature.
He was able to gratify both tastes without departing from the beaten
track. Around, before, above him he beheld shrubs, forest trees,
flowers, grasses, utterly unknown previously, but which from early
reading he was enabled to recognise and classify. Every step along the
sandstone slopes or heath-covered mountain-top was to him a joy, a
surprise, an overflowing feast of new and pleasurable sensations.
Descending again from an elevation where the mountain wind blew keenly,
and the eagle soared from thunder-blasted giant eucalyptus adown the
stupendous glen, at the sunless base of which lay an ever-gurgling
rivulet of purest spring-fed water, he shouted aloud at the rare ferns
which grew in unnoticed tender beauty where ‘rivulets dance their
wayward round.’ He saw the deserted and rude appliances where the
wandering miner had essayed to ‘wash out’ a modest deposit of the great
conqueror, gold!
Then would he happen upon some long-disused, half-forgotten ‘camp,’ a
half military station, where a subaltern had been stationed with some
hundred convicts, whose forced labour made the road upon which he now
so peaceably travelled.
There were the huts, here the great blocks of stone which they had
hewn and raised from the quarry; there had been the triangles where,
pah! the contumacious or luckless convict had the flesh cut from his
back or much bemarked at least by that high official the government
flogger. How wondrous grand the view, at morn and eve, before the eye
of hopeless God-forsaken men, who in deliberate wrath and unendurable
misery, cursed therefrom the day and the night, the moon and stars,
the country, and every official from the gaoler to the governor. He
gazed at the glorious cataract where the lonely water gathers its
stray threads to fall like the lace tracery of a veil over the sullen
spur. He saw the rock battlements and pinnacles, bright in the morning
sun, against the rifted water-washed bases of which in long past
ages the billows of an ancient sea had rolled and dashed. He saw the
huge promontories which frowningly reared themselves on the verge of
measureless abysses or obtruded their vast proportions and dizzy height
into the boundless ocean of pale foliage which stretched, alternating
but with sandstone peaks and masses, to the farthest horizon. From time
to time he encountered men in charge of droves of horses and of cattle.
These of necessity pursued the old and rugged road, not caring to use
the swifter, costlier trainage. At first Mr. Neuchamp used to stand
in the middle of the road, until he was warned by the fierce eyes and
glancing horns of the cattle, and the extremely unreserved language
of the accompanying stockmen, that he was violating etiquette and
incurring danger.
Ever and anon he would halt as the warning steam-whistle heralded the
approach of a locomotive, and marvel and muse as he saw the long train
wind swiftly and securely adown or up the graded mountain side. He saw
the half-advancing, half-receding series of approaches which at length
land the travellers and the merchandise of the coast upon the pinnacles
of the Australian Mont Cenis, and he thanked God, who had made him of
one kindred with the men who had conquered nature, both in the land of
his fathers which he had left and in the new land, a void and voiceless
primeval forest but yesterday.
Much reflecting upon the overflowing _pabulum mentis_ which had been
spread before him on that day, Ernest was as grateful as a philosopher
could be when he saw at the rather chilly approach of eve the outline
of a building, faulty as a work of primitive art, as a specimen of any
known order of architecture beneath contempt. It was the humble abode
of one of the innkeepers of a former _régime_, who had retained his
lodgment upon the keen mountain plateau, and still smoked his pipe
beside the roaring log fire in frosty winter nights. He now gathered
russet pippins in his orchard, with an increasing sense of solvency,
long after the last of the coaches had rattled away from his door to
face the awful grades of the midnight mountain stage.
When, therefore, after a glorious day of intellectual exercise and
frank bodily toil this most praiseworthy hostelry was reached, Mr.
Neuchamp felt that fate had but small chance of doing him an injury
on that particular night, had her intention been ever so unkind. He
walked briskly up to the house, and was then and there taken in charge
by a fresh-coloured, broad-shouldered, cheery individual, evidently
the landlord, or a gross personal forgery of that functionary. He was
promptly relieved of his knapsack, and lodged in the cleanest of
bedrooms, with spoken and definite assurance of dinner.
‘I see you a-comin’ up the hill, with my glass, a good two miles
off,‘ said Boniface. ‘You see, sir, there ain’t no other place but
mine for twenty mile good. So I made the old woman have everything
handy for a spatchcock. _He_ always liked a spatchcock. Many a time
he’s been a furragin’ and a rummagin’ over every nook and cranny
of these here mountains till he must have walked them blessed iron
legs of his very near off. Ha, ha, ha! You’ll excuse me, sir; but
when I see the knapsack, I took you for the Rev. Mr. Marke, the
heminent-geehol-holler.’
‘Geologist, I suppose you mean,’ asserted Ernest. ‘Well, I hope you
are not deeply disappointed; I am glad to find that there’s a man in
Australia besides myself who is fond of using his legs.’
‘Bless your heart, sir, you’ll find when you’ve a been in the country
a few years more’ (here Ernest contracted his brow) ‘that there’s a
many gentlemen likes a goodish long walk when they can get a bit of a
holiday. There’s Counsellor Burley, he thinks nothing of a twenty-mile
walk out and in, nor his brother neither. They all comes up to me when
they want to stretch their legs a bit. But I must see to your tea, sir.’
Mr. Neuchamp was partly interested in this record of pedestrianism
other than his own. Nevertheless, he experienced a shade of
disappointment at finding that he was not in such a glorious monopoly
of tourist life as he had imagined. However, as he stretched his
slipper-encased feet on either side of the great fireplace, in which
burned a fire, which the keen, almost frosty mountain air made pleasant
and necessary, he came to the conclusion that ‘none but the brave,’
etc.; or, in other words, that no man who has not done a fair day’s
journey, upon his own legs, if possible, can thoroughly, intensely,
comprehensively enjoy a well-cooked, well-served evening meal, like
unto the spatchcock which immediately followed, and put a period to
these reflections.