Bob Bentley, general hawker, was camping under some rocks by the main
road, near the foot of Long Gully. His mate was fast asleep under the
tilted trap. Bob stood with his back to the fire, his pipe in his mouth,
and his hands clasped behind him. The fire lit up the undersides of the
branches above; a native bear sat in a fork blinking down at it, while
the moon above him showed every hair on his ears. From among the trees
came the pleasant jingle of hobble-chains, the slow tread of hoofs, and
the “crunch, crunch” at the grass, as the horses moved about and grazed,
now in moonlight, now in the soft shadows. “Old Thunder”, a big black
dog of no particular breed, gave a meaning look at his master, and
started up the ridge, followed by several smaller dogs. Soon Bob heard
from the hillside the “hy-yi-hi, whomp, whomp, whomp!” of old Thunder,
and the yop-yop-yopping of the smaller fry--they had tree'd a 'possum.
Bob threw himself on the grass, and pretended to be asleep. There was
a sound as of a sizeable boulder rolling down the hill, and presently
Thunder trotted round the fire to see if his master would come. Bob
snored. The dog looked suspiciously at him, trotted round once or twice,
and as a last resource gave him two great slobbery licks across the
face. Bob got up with a good-natured oath.
“Well, old party,” he said to Thunder, “you're a thundering old
nuisance; but I s'pose you won't be satisfied till I come.” He got a gun
from the waggonette, loaded it, and started up the ridge; old Thunder
rushing to and fro to show the way--as if the row the other dogs were
making wasn't enough to guide his master.
When Bob returned with the 'possums he was startled to see a woman in
the camp. She was sitting on a log by the fire, with her elbows on her
knees and her face in her hands.
“Why--what the dev--who are you?”
The girl raised a white desperate face to him. It was Mary Wylie.
“My father and--and the woman--they're drinking--they turned me out!
they turned me out.”
“Did they now? I'm sorry for that. What can I do for you?... She's mad
sure enough,” he thought to himself; “I thought it was a ghost.”
“I don't know,” she wailed, “I don't know. You're a man, and I'm a
helpless girl. They turned me out! My mother's dead, and my brothers
gone away. Look! Look here!” pointing to a bruise on her forehead. “The
woman did that. My own father stood by and saw it done--said it served
me right! Oh, my God!”
“What woman? Tell me all about it.”
“The woman father brought home!... I want to go away from the bush! Oh!
for God's sake take me away from the bush!... Anything! anything!--you
know!--only take me away from the bush!”
Bob and his mate--who had been roused--did their best to soothe her;
but suddenly, without a moment's warning, she sprang to her feet and
scrambled to the top of the rock overhanging the camp. She stood for a
moment in the bright moonlight, gazing intently down the vacant road.
“Here they come!” she cried, pointing down the road. “Here they
come--the troopers! I can see their cap-peaks glistening in
the moonlight!... I'm going away! Mother's gone. I'm going
now!--Good-bye!--Good-bye! I'm going away from the bush!”
Then she ran through the trees towards the foot of Long Gully. Bob and
his mate followed; but, being unacquainted with the locality, they lost
her.
She ran to the edge of a granite cliff on the higher side of the deepest
of the rocky waterholes. There was a heavy splash, and three startled
kangaroos, who had been drinking, leapt back and sped away, like three
grey ghosts, up the ridge towards the moonlit peak.
Mitchell on the “Sex” and Other “Problems”
“I agree with 'T' in last week's 'Bulletin',” said Mitchell, after
cogitating some time over the last drop of tea in his pannikin, held
at various angles, “about what they call the 'Sex Problem'. There's no
problem, really, except Creation, and that's not our affair; we can't
solve it, and we've no right to make a problem out of it for ourselves
to puzzle over, and waste the little time that is given us about. It's
we that make the problems, not Creation. We make 'em, and they only
smother us; they'll smother the world in the end if we don't look
out. Anything that can be argued, for and against, from half a dozen
different points of view--and most things that men argue over can
be--and anything that has been argued about for thousands of years (as
most things have) is worse than profitless; it wastes the world's time
and ours, and often wrecks old mateships. Seems to me the deeper you
read, think, talk, or write about things that end in ism, the less
satisfactory the result; the more likely you are to get bushed and
dissatisfied with the world. And the more you keep on the surface of
plain things, the plainer the sailing--the more comfortable for you and
everybody else. We've always got to come to the surface to breathe, in
the end, in any case; we're meant to live on the surface, and we might
as well stay there and look after it and ourselves for all the good we
do diving down after fish that aren't there, except in our imagination.
And some of 'em are very dead fish, too--the 'Sex Problem', for
instance. When we fall off the surface of the earth it will be time
enough to make a problem out of the fact that we couldn't stick on. I'm
a Federal Pro-trader in this country; I'm a Federalist because I think
Federation is the plain and natural course for Australia, and I'm a
Free-tectionist because I'm in favour of sinking any question, or any
two things, that enlightened people can argue and fight over, and try,
one after the other, for fifty years without being able to come to a
decision about, or prove which is best for the welfare of the country.
It only wastes a young country's time, and keeps it off the right track.
Federation isn't a problem--it's a plain fact--but they make a problem
out of every panel they have to push down in the rotten old boundary
fences.”
“Personal interests,” suggested Joe.
“Of course. It's personal interest of the wrong sort that makes all the
problems. You can trace the sex problem to people who trade in unhealthy
personal interests. I believe in personal interests of the right
sort--true individualism. If we all looked after ourselves, and our
wives and families--if we have any--in the proper way, the world would
be all right. We waste too much time looking after each other.
“Now, supposing we're travelling and have to get a shed and make a
cheque so's to be able to send a few quid home, as soon as we can, to
the missus, or the old folks, and the next water is twenty miles ahead.
If we sat down and argued over a social problem till doomsday, we
wouldn't get to the tank; we'd die of thirst, and the missus and kids,
or the old folks, would be sold up and turned out into the streets,
and have to fall back on a 'home of hope', or wait their turn at the
Benevolent Asylum with bags for broken victuals. I've seen that, and I
don't want anybody belonging to me to have to do it.
“Reminds me that when a poor, deserted girl goes to a 'home' they don't
make a problem of her--they do their best for her and try to get her
righted. And the priests, too: if there's anything in the sex or any
other problem--anything that hasn't been threshed out--they're the men
that'll know it. I'm not a Catholic, but I know this: that if a girl
that's been left by one--no matter what Church she belongs to--goes to
the priest, they'll work all the points they know (and they know 'em
all) to get her righted, and, if the chap, or his people, won't come up
to the scratch, Father Ryan'll frighten hell out of 'em. I can't say as
much for our own Churches.”
“But you're in favour of socialism and democracy?” asked Joe.
“Of course I am. But the world won't do any good arguing over it.
The people will have to get up and walk, and, what's more, stick
together--and I don't think they'll ever do that--it ain't in human
nature. Socialism, or democracy, was all right in this country till
it got fashionable and was made a fad or a problem of. Then it got
smothered pretty quick. And a fad or a problem always breeds a host of
parasites or hangers-on. Why, as soon as I saw the advanced idealist
fools--they're generally the middle-class, shabby-genteel families that
catch Spiritualism and Theosophy and those sort of complaints, at the
end of the epidemic--that catch on at the tail-end of things and think
they've caught something brand, shining, new;--as soon as I saw them,
and the problem spielers and notoriety-hunters of both sexes, beginning
to hang round Australian Unionism, I knew it was doomed. And so it was.
The straight men were disgusted, or driven out. There are women who hang
on for the same reason that a girl will sometimes go into the dock and
swear an innocent man's life away. But as soon as they see that the
cause is dying, they drop it at once, and wait for another. They come
like bloody dingoes round a calf, and only leave the bones. They're
about as democratic as the crows. And the rotten 'sex-problem' sort of
thing is the cause of it all; it poisons weak minds--and strong ones too
sometimes.
“Why, you could make a problem out of Epsom salts. You might argue as to
why human beings want Epsom salts, and try to trace the causes that
led up to it. I don't like the taste of Epsom salts--it's nasty in
the mouth--but when I feel that way I take 'em, and I feel better
afterwards; and that's good enough for me. We might argue that black is
white, and white is black, and neither of 'em is anything, and nothing
is everything; and a woman's a man and a man's a woman, and it's really
the man that has the youngsters, only we imagine it's the woman because
she imagines that she has all the pain and trouble, and the doctor is
under the impression that he's attending to her, not the man, and the
man thinks so too because he imagines he's walking up and down outside,
and slipping into the corner pub now and then for a nip to keep his
courage up, waiting, when it's his wife that's doing that all the time;
we might argue that it's all force of imagination, and that imagination
is an unknown force, and that the unknown is nothing. But, when we've
settled all that to our own satisfaction, how much further ahead are we?
In the end we'll come to the conclusion that we ain't alive, and never
existed, and then we'll leave off bothering, and the world will go on
just the same.”
“What about science?” asked Joe.
“Science ain't 'sex problems'; it's facts.... Now, I don't mind
Spiritualism and those sort of things; they might help to break the
monotony, and can't do much harm. But the 'sex problem', as it's written
about to-day, does; it's dangerous and dirty, and it's time to settle it
with a club. Science and education, if left alone, will look after sex
facts.
“You can't get anything out of the 'sex problem', no matter how you
argue. In the old Bible times they had half a dozen wives each, but we
don't know for certain how THEY got on. The Mormons tried it again, and
seemed to get on all right till we interfered. We don't seem to be able
to get on with one wife now--at least, according to the 'sex problem'.
The 'sex problem' troubled the Turks so much that they tried three. Lots
of us try to settle it by knocking round promiscuously, and that leads
to actions for maintenance and breach of promise cases, and all sorts of
trouble. Our blacks settle the 'sex problem' with a club, and so far I
haven't heard any complaints from them.
. . . . .
“Take hereditary causes and surrounding circumstances, for instance. In
order to understand or judge a man right, you would need to live under
the same roof with him from childhood, and under the same roofs, or
tents, with his parents, right back to Adam, and then you'd be blocked
for want of more ancestors through which to trace the causes that led
to Abel--I mean Cain--going on as he did. What's the use or sense of it?
You might argue away in any direction for a million miles and a million
years back into the past, but you've got to come back to where you are
if you wish to do any good for yourself, or anyone else.
“Sometimes it takes you a long while to get back to where you
are--sometimes you never do it. Why, when those controversies were
started in the 'Bulletin' about the kangaroos and other things, I
thought I knew something about the bush. Now I'm damned if I'm sure I
could tell a kangaroo from a wombat.
“Trying to find out things is the cause of all the work and trouble in
this world. It was Eve's fault in the first place--or Adam's, rather,
because it might be argued that he should have been master. Some men are
too lazy to be masters in their own homes, and run the show properly;
some are too careless, and some too drunk most of their time, and some
too weak. If Adam and Eve hadn't tried to find out things there'd have
been no toil and trouble in the world to-day; there'd have been no
bloated capitalists, and no horny-handed working men, and no politics,
no freetrade and protection--and no clothes. The woman next door
wouldn't be able to pick holes in your wife's washing on the line. We'd
have been all running about in a big Garden of Eden with nothing on, and
nothing to do except loaf, and make love, and lark, and laugh, and play
practical jokes on each other.”
Joe grinned.
“That would have been glorious. Wouldn't it, Joe? There'd have been no
'sex problem' then.”