You can dive into this story head first as it were. Do not fear
encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and
whisperings of wind. We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in
sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the
morrow or the contrary, so we will leave such vain and foolish
imagining to those poets and painters—poor fools! Let us rejoice that
we are not of their temperament!
Better be born a slave than a poet, better be born a black, better be
born a cripple! For a poet must be companionless—alone! _fearfully_
alone in the midst of his fellows whom he loves. Alone because his soul
is as far above common mortals as common mortals are above monkeys.
There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life
or in any other life which has come under my notice. I am one of a
class, the individuals of which have not time for plots in their life,
but have all they can do to get their work done without indulging in
such a luxury.
MILES FRANKLIN
Australia
CHAPTER ONE
I Remember, I Remember
“Boo, hoo! Ow, ow; Oh! oh! Me’ll die. Boo, hoo. The pain, the pain!
Boo, hoo!”
“Come, come, now. Daddy’s little mate isn’t going to turn Turk like
that, is she? I’ll put some fat out of the dinner-bag on it, and tie it
up in my hanky. Don’t cry any more now. Hush, you must not cry! You’ll
make old Dart buck if you kick up a row like that.”
That is my first recollection of life. I was barely three. I can
remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on
their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked
stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It
was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant
part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left
home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front of him on a little
brown pillow which my mother had made for the purpose. We had put the
lumps of rock-salt in the troughs on the other side of the creek. The
stringybark roof of the salt-shed which protected the troughs from rain
peeped out picturesquely from the musk and peppercorn shrubs by which
it was densely surrounded, and was visible from where we lunched. I
refilled the quart-pot in which we had boiled our tea with water from
the creek, father doused our fire out with it, and then tied the quart
to the D of his saddle with a piece of green hide. The green-hide bags
in which the salt had been carried were hanging on the hooks of the
pack-saddle which encumbered the bay pack-horse. Father’s saddle and
the brown pillow were on Dart, the big grey horse on which he generally
carried me, and we were on the point of making tracks for home.
Preparatory to starting, father was muzzling the dogs which had just
finished what lunch we had left. This process, to which the dogs
strongly objected, was rendered necessary by a cogent reason. Father
had brought his strychnine flask with him that day, and in hopes of
causing the death of a few dingoes, had put strong doses of its
contents in several dead beasts which we had come across.
Whilst the dogs were being muzzled, I busied myself in plucking ferns
and flowers. This disturbed a big black snake which was curled at the
butt of a tree fern.
“Bitey! bitey!” I yelled, and father came to my rescue, despatching the
reptile with his stock-whip. He had been smoking, and dropped his pipe
on the ferns. I picked it up, and the glowing embers which fell from it
burnt my dirty little fat fists. Hence the noise with which my story
commences.
In all probability it was the burning of my fingers which so indelibly
impressed the incident on my infantile mind. My father was accustomed
to take me with him, but that is the only jaunt at that date which I
remember, and that is all I remember of it. We were twelve miles from
home, but how we reached there I do not know.
My father was a swell in those days—held Bruggabrong, Bin Bin East, and
Bin Bin West, which three stations totalled close on 200,000 acres.
Father was admitted into swelldom merely by right of his position. His
pedigree included nothing beyond a grandfather. My mother, however, was
a full-fledged aristocrat. She was one of the Bossiers of Caddagat, who
numbered among their ancestry one of the depraved old pirates who
pillaged England with William the Conqueror.
“Dick” Melvyn was as renowned for hospitality as joviality, and our
comfortable, wide-veranda’ed, irregularly built, slab house in its
sheltered nook amid the Timlinbilly Ranges was ever full to
overflowing. Doctors, lawyers, squatters, commercial travellers,
bankers, journalists, tourists, and men of all kinds and classes
crowded our well-spread board; but seldom a female face, except
mother’s, was to be seen there, Bruggabrong being a very out-of-the-way
place.
I was both the terror and the amusement of the station. Old
boundary-riders and drovers inquire after me with interest to this day.
I knew everyone’s business, and was ever in danger of publishing it at
an inopportune moment.
In flowery language, selected from slang used by the station hands, and
long words picked up from our visitors, I propounded unanswerable
questions which brought blushes to the cheeks of even tough old
wine-bibbers.
Nothing would induce me to show more respect to an appraiser of the
runs than to a boundary-rider, or to a clergyman than a drover. I am
the same to this day. My organ of veneration must be flatter than a
pancake, because to venerate a person simply for his position I never
did or will. To me the Prince of Wales will be no more than a shearer,
unless when I meet him he displays some personality apart from his
princeship—otherwise he can go hang.
Authentic record of the date when first I had a horse to myself has not
been kept, but it must have been early, as at eight I was fit to ride
anything on the place. Side-saddle, man-saddle, no-saddle, or astride
were all the same to me. I rode among the musterers as gamely as any of
the big sunburnt bushmen.
My mother remonstrated, opined I would be a great unwomanly tomboy. My
father poohed the idea.
“Let her alone, Lucy,” he said, “let her alone. The rubbishing
conventionalities which are the curse of her sex will bother her soon
enough. Let her alone!”
So, smiling and saying, “She should have been a boy,” my mother let me
alone, and I rode, and in comparison to my size made as much noise with
my stock-whip as any one. Accidents had no power over me, I came
unscathed out of droves of them.
Fear I knew not. Did a drunken tramp happen to kick up a row, I was
always the first to confront him, and, from my majestic and roly-poly
height of two feet six inches, demand what he wanted.
A digging started near us and was worked by a score of two dark-browed
sons of Italy. They made mother nervous, and she averred they were not
to be trusted, but I liked and trusted them. They carried me on their
broad shoulders, stuffed me with lollies and made a general pet of me.
Without the quiver of a nerve I swung down their deepest shafts in the
big bucket on the end of a rope attached to a rough windlass, which
brought up the miners and the mullock.
My brothers and sisters contracted mumps, measles, scarlatina, and
whooping-cough. I rolled in the bed with them yet came off scot-free. I
romped with dogs, climbed trees after birds’ nests, drove the bullocks
in the dray, under the instructions of Ben, our bullocky, and always
accompanied my father when he went swimming in the clear, mountain,
shrub-lined stream which ran deep and lone among the weird gullies,
thickly carpeted with maidenhair and numberless other species of ferns.
My mother shook her head over me and trembled for my future, but father
seemed to consider me nothing unusual. He was my hero, confidant,
encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion till I was ten. Since then I
have been religionless.
Richard Melvyn, you were a fine fellow in those days! A kind and
indulgent parent, a chivalrous husband, a capital host, a man full of
ambition and gentlemanliness.
Amid these scenes, and the refinements and pleasures of Caddagat, which
lies a hundred miles or so farther Riverinawards, I spent the first
years of my childhood.
CHAPTER TWO
An Introduction to Possum Gully
I was nearly nine summers old when my father conceived the idea that he
was wasting his talents by keeping them rolled up in the small napkin
of an out-of-the-way place like Bruggabrong and the Bin Bin stations.
Therefore he determined to take up his residence in a locality where he
would have more scope for his ability.
When giving his reason for moving to my mother, he put the matter
before her thus: The price of cattle and horses had fallen so of late
years that it was impossible to make much of a living by breeding them.
Sheep were the only profitable article to have nowadays, and it would
be impossible to run them on Bruggabrong or either of the Bin Bins. The
dingoes would work havoc among them in no time, and what they left the
duffers would soon dispose of. As for bringing police into the matter,
it would be worse than useless. They could not run the offenders to
earth, and their efforts to do so would bring down upon their employer
the wrath of the duffers. Result, all the fences on the station would
be fired for a dead certainty, and the destruction of more than a
hundred miles of heavy log fencing on rough country like Bruggabrong
was no picnic to contemplate.
This was the feasible light in which father shaded his desire to leave.
The fact of the matter was that the heartless harridan, discontent, had
laid her claw-like hand upon him. His guests were ever assuring him he
was buried and wasted in Timlinbilly’s gullies. A man of his
intelligence, coupled with his wonderful experience among stock, would,
they averred, make a name and fortune for himself dealing or
auctioneering if he only liked to try. Richard Melvyn began to think so
too, and desired to try. He did try.
He gave up Bruggabrong, Bin Bin East and Bin Bin West, bought Possum
Gully, a small farm of one thousand acres, and brought us all to live
near Goulburn. Here we arrived one autumn afternoon. Father, mother,
and children packed in the buggy, myself, and the one servant-girl, who
had accompanied us, on horseback. The one man father had retained in
his service was awaiting our arrival. He had preceded us with a
bullock-drayload of furniture and belongings, which was all father had
retained of his household property. Just sufficient for us to get along
with, until he had time to settle and purchase more, he said. That was
ten years ago, and that is the only furniture we possess yet—just
enough to get along with.
My first impression of Possum Gully was bitter disappointment—an
impression which time has failed to soften or wipe away.
How flat, common, and monotonous the scenery appeared after the rugged
peaks of the Timlinbilly Range!
Our new house was a ten-roomed wooden structure, built on a barren
hillside. Crooked stunted gums and stringybarks, with a thick
underscrub of wild cherry, hop, and hybrid wattle, clothed the spurs
which ran up from the back of the detached kitchen. Away from the front
of the house were flats, bearing evidence of cultivation, but a drop of
water was nowhere to be seen. Later, we discovered a few round, deep,
weedy waterholes down on the flat, which in rainy weather swelled to a
stream which swept all before it. Possum Gully is one of the best
watered spots in the district, and in that respect has stood to its
guns in the bitterest drought. Use and knowledge have taught us the
full value of its fairly clear and beautifully soft water. Just then,
however, coming from the mountains where every gully had its limpid
creek, we turned in disgust from the idea of having to drink this
water.
I felt cramped on our new run. It was only three miles wide at its
broadest point. Was I always, always, always to live here, and never,
never, never to go back to Bruggabrong? That was the burden of the
grief with which I sobbed myself to sleep on the first night after our
arrival.
Mother felt dubious of her husband’s ability to make a living off a
thousand acres, half of which were fit to run nothing but wallabies,
but father was full of plans, and very sanguine concerning his future.
He was not going to squat henlike on his place as the cockies around
him did. He meant to deal in stock making of Possum Gully merely a
depot on which to run some of his bargains until reselling.
Dear, oh dear! It was terrible to think he had wasted the greater part
of his life among the hills where the mail came but once a week, and
where the nearest town, of 650 inhabitants, was forty-six miles
distant. And the road had been impassable for vehicles. Here, only
seventeen miles from a city like Goulburn, with splendid roads, mail
thrice weekly, and a railway platform only eight miles away, why, man,
my fortune is made! Such were the sentiments to which he gave birth out
of the fullness of his hopeful heart.
Ere the diggings had broken out on Bruggabrong, our nearest neighbour,
excepting, of course, boundary-riders, was seventeen miles distant.
Possum Gully was a thickly populated district, and here we were
surrounded by homes ranging from half a mile to two and three miles
away. This was a new experience for us, and it took us some time to
become accustomed to the advantage and disadvantage of the situation.
Did we require an article, we found it handy, but decidedly the reverse
when our neighbours borrowed from us, and, in the greater percentage of
cases, failed to return the loan.
CHAPTER THREE
A Lifeless Life
Possum Gully was stagnant—stagnant with the narrow stagnation prevalent
in all old country places.
Its residents were principally married folk and children under sixteen.
The boys, as they attained manhood, drifted outback to shear, drove, or
to take up land. They found it too slow at home, and besides there was
not room enough for them there when they passed childhood.
Nothing ever happened there. Time was no object, and the days slid
quietly into the river of years, distinguished one from another by name
alone. An occasional birth or death was a big event, and the biggest
event of all was the advent of a new resident.
When such a thing occurred it was customary for all the male heads of
families to pay a visit of inspection, to judge if the new-comers were
worthy of admittance into the bosom of the society of the
neighbourhood. Should their report prove favourable, then their wives
finished the ceremony of inauguration by paying a friendly visit.
After his arrival at Possum Gully father was much away on business, and
so on my mother fell the ordeal of receiving the callers, male and
female.
The men were honest, good-natured, respectable, common bushmen farmers.
Too friendly to pay a short call, they came and sat for hours yarning
about nothing in particular. This bored my gentle mother excessively.
She attempted to entertain them with conversation of current literature
and subjects of the day, but her efforts fell flat. She might as well
have spoken in French.
They conversed for hours and hours about dairying, interspersed with
pointless anecdotes of the man who had lived there before us. I found
them very tame.
After graphic descriptions of life on big stations outback, and the
dashing snake yarns told by our kitchen-folk at Bruggabrong, and the
anecdotes of African hunting, travel, and society life which had often
formed our guests’ subject of conversation, this endless fiddle-faddle
of the price of farm produce and the state of crops was very fatuous.
Those men, like everyone else, only talked shop. I say nothing in
condemnation of it, but merely point out that it did not then interest
us, as we were not living in that shop just then.
Mrs Melvyn must have found favour in the eyes of the specimens of the
lords of creation resident at Possum Gully, as all the matrons of the
community hastened to call on her, and vied with each other in a
display of friendliness and good-nature. They brought presents of
poultry, jam, butter, and suchlike. They came at two o’clock and stayed
till dark. They inventoried the furniture, gave mother cookery recipes,
described minutely the unsurpassable talents of each of their children,
and descanted volubly upon the best way of setting turkey hens. On
taking their departure they cordially invited us all to return their
visits, and begged mother to allow her children to spend a day with
theirs.
We had been resident in our new quarters nearly a month when my parents
received an intimation from the teacher of the public school, two miles
distant, to the effect that the law demanded that they should send
their children to school. It upset my mother greatly. What was she to
do?
“Do! Bundle the nippers off to school as quickly as possible, of
course,” said my father.
My mother objected. She proposed a governess now and a good
boarding-school later on. She had heard such dreadful stories of public
schools! It was terrible to be compelled to send her darlings to one;
they would be ruined in a week!
“Not they,” said father. “Run them off for a week or two, or a month at
the outside. They can’t come to any harm in that time. After that we
will get a governess. You are in no state of health to worry about one
just now, and it is utterly impossible that I can see about the matter
at present. I have several specs. on foot that I must attend to. Send
the youngsters to school down here for the present.”
We went to school, and in our dainty befrilled pinafores and light
shoes were regarded as great swells by the other scholars. They for the
most part were the children of very poor farmers, whose farm earnings
were augmented by road-work, wood-carting, or any such labour which
came within their grasp. All the boys went barefooted, also a moiety of
the girls. The school was situated on a wild scrubby hill, and the
teacher boarded with a resident a mile from it. He was a man addicted
to drink, and the parents of his scholars lived in daily expectation of
seeing his dismissal from the service.
It is nearly ten years since the twins (who came next to me) and I were
enrolled as pupils of the Tiger Swamp public school. My education was
completed there; so was that of the twins, who are eleven months
younger than I. Also my other brothers and sisters are quickly getting
finishedwards; but that is the only school any of us have seen or
known. There was even a time when father spoke of filling in the free
forms for our attendance there. But mother—a woman’s pride bears more
wear than a man’s—would never allow us to come to that.
All our neighbours were very friendly; but one in particular, a James
Blackshaw, proved himself most desirous of being comradely with us. He
was a sort of self-constituted sheik of the community. It was usual for
him to take all new-comers under his wing, and with officious
good-nature endeavour to make them feel at home. He called on us daily,
tied his horse to the paling fence beneath the shade of a sallie-tree
in the backyard, and when mother was unable to see him he was content
to yarn for an hour or two with Jane Haizelip, our servant-girl.
Jane disliked Possum Gully as much as I did. Her feeling being much
more defined, it was amusing to hear the flat-out opinions she
expressed to Mr Blackshaw, whom, by the way, she termed “a mooching hen
of a chap”.
“I suppose, Jane, you like being here near Goulburn, better than that
out-of-the-way place you came from,” he said one morning as he
comfortably settled himself on an old sofa in the kitchen.
“No jolly fear. Out-of-the-way place! There was more life at
Bruggabrong in a day than you crawlers ’ud see here all yer lives,” she
retorted with vigour, energetically pommelling a batch of bread which
she was mixing.
“Why, at Brugga it was as good as a show every week. On Saturday
evening all the coves used to come in for their mail. They’d stay till
Sunday evenin’. Splitters, boundary-riders, dogtrappers—every manjack
of ’em. Some of us wuz always good fer a toon on the concertina, and
the rest would dance. We had fun to no end. A girl could have a fly
round and a lark or two there I tell you; but here,” and she emitted a
snort of contempt, “there ain’t one bloomin’ feller to do a mash with.
I’m full of the place. Only I promised to stick to the missus a while,
I’d scoot tomorrer. It’s the dead-and-alivest hole I ever seen.”
“You’ll git used to it by and by,” said Blackshaw.
“Used to it! A person ’ud hev to be brought up onder a hen to git used
to the dullness of this hole.”
“You wasn’t brought up under a hen, or it must have been a big Bramer
Pooter, if you were,” replied he, noting the liberal proportions of her
figure as she hauled a couple of heavy pots off the fire. He did not
offer to help her. Etiquette of that sort was beyond his ken.
“You oughter go out more and then you wouldn’t find it so dull,” he
said, after she had placed the pots on the floor.
“Go out! Where ’ud I go to, pray?”
“Drop in an’ see my missus again when you git time. You’re always
welcome.”
“Thanks, but I had plenty of goin’ to see your missus last time.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, I wasn’t there harf an hour wen she had to strip off her clean
duds an’ go an’ milk. I don’t think much of any of the men around here.
They let the women work too hard. I never see such a tired wore-out set
of women. It puts me in mind ev the time wen the black fellers made the
gins do all the work. Why, on Bruggabrong the women never had to do no
outside work, only on a great pinch wen all the men were away at a fire
or a muster. Down here they do everything. They do all the milkin’, and
pig-feedin’, and poddy-rarin’. It makes me feel fit to retch. I don’t
know whether it’s because the men is crawlers or whether it’s dairyin’.
I don’t think much of dairyin’. It’s slavin’, an’ delvin’, an’ scrapin’
yer eyeballs out from mornin’ to night, and nothink to show for your
pains; and now you’ll oblige me, Mr Blackshaw, if youll lollop
somewhere else for a minute or two. I want to sweep under that sofer.”
This had the effect of making him depart. He said good morning and went
off, not sure whether he was most amused or insulted.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Career Which Soon Careered To An End
While mother, Jane Haizelip, and I found the days long and life slow,
father was enjoying himself immensely.
He had embarked upon a lively career—that gambling trade known as
dealing in stock.
When he was not away in Riverina inspecting a flock of sheep, he was
attending the Homebush Fat Stock Sales, rushing away out to Bourke, or
tearing off down the Shoalhaven to buy some dairy heifers.
He was a familiar figure at the Goulburn sale-yards every Wednesday,
always going into town the day before and not returning till a day, and
often two days, afterwards.
He was in great demand among drovers and auctioneers; and in the stock
news his name was always mentioned in connection with all the principal
sales in the colony.
It takes an astute, clear-headed man to keep himself off shore in stock
dealing. I never yet heard of a dealer who occasionally did not
temporarily, if not totally, go to the wall.
He need not necessarily be downright unscrupulous, but if he wishes to
profit he must not be overburdened with niceties in the point of
honour. That is where Richard Melvyn fell through. He was crippled with
too many Utopian ideas of honesty, and was too soft ever to come off
anything but second-best in a deal. He might as well have attempted to
make his fortune by scraping a fiddle up and down Auburn Street,
Goulburn. His dealing career was short and merry. His vanity to be
considered a socialistic fellow, who was as ready to take a glass with
a swaggie as a swell, and the lavish shouting which this principle
incurred, made great inroads on his means. Losing money every time he
sold a beast, wasting stamps galore on letters to endless auctioneers,
frequently remaining in town half a week at a stretch, and being
hail-fellow to all the spongers to be found on the trail of such as he,
quickly left him on the verge of bankruptcy. Some of his contemporaries
say it was grog that did it all.
Had he kept clear-headed he was a smart fellow, and gave promise of
doing well, but his head would not stand alcohol, and by it he was
undermined in no time. In considerably less than a twelvemonth all the
spare capital in his coffers from the disposal of Bruggabrong and the
Bin Bins had been squandered. He had become so hard up that to pay the
drovers in his last venture he was forced to sell the calves of the few
milch-cows retained for household uses.
At this time it came to my father’s knowledge that one of our bishops
had money held in trust for the Church. On good security he was giving
this out for usury, the same as condemned in the big Bible, out of
which he took the text of the dry-hash sermons with which he bored his
fashionable congregations in his cathedral on Sundays.
Father took advantage of this Reverend’s inconsistency and mortgaged
Possum Gully. With the money thus obtained he started once more and
managed to make a scant livelihood and pay the interest on the bishop’s
loan. In four or five years he had again reached loggerheads. The price
of stock had fallen so that there was nothing to be made out of dealing
in them.
Richard Melvyn resolved to live as those around him—start a dairy; run
it with his family, who would also rear poultry for sale.
As instruments of the dairying trade he procured fifty milch-cows, the
calves of which had to be “poddied”, and a hand cream-separator.
I was in my fifteenth year when we began dairying; the twins Horace and
Gertie were, as you already know, eleven months younger. Horace, had
there been any one to train him, contained the makings of a splendid
man; but having no one to bring him up in the way he should go, he was
a churlish and trying bully, and the issue of his character doubtful.
Gertie milked thirteen cows, and I eighteen, morning and evening.
Horace and mother, between them, milked the remaining seventeen.
Among the dairying fraternity little toddlers, ere they are big enough
to hold a bucket, learn to milk. Thus their hands become inured to the
motion, and it does not affect them. With us it was different. Being
almost full grown when we started to milk, and then plunging heavily
into the exercise, it had a painful effect upon us. Our hands and arms,
as far as the elbows, swelled, so that our sleep at night was often
disturbed by pain.
Mother made the butter. She had to rise at two and three o’clock in the
morning, in order that it would be cool and firm enough to print for
market.
Jane Haizelip had left us a year previously, and we could afford no one
to take her place. The heavy work told upon my gentle, refined mother.
She grew thin and careworn, and often cross. My father’s share of the
work was to break in the wild cows, separate the milk, and take the
butter into town to the grocer’s establishment where we obtained our
supplies.
Dick Melvyn of Bruggabrong was not recognizable in Dick Melvyn, dairy
farmer and cocky of Possum Gully. The former had been a man worthy of
the name. The latter was a slave of drink, careless, even dirty and
bedraggled in his personal appearance. He disregarded all manners, and
had become far more plebeian and common than the most miserable
specimen of humanity around him. The support of his family, yet not,
its support. The head of his family, yet failing to fulfil the
obligations demanded of one in that capacity. He seemed to lose all
love and interest in his family, and grew cross and silent, utterly
without pride and pluck. Formerly so kind and gentle with animals, now
he was the reverse.
His cruelty to the young cows and want of patience with them I can
never forget. It has often brought upon me the threat of immediate
extermination for volunteering scathing and undesired opinions on his
conduct.
The part of the dairying that he positively gloried in was going to
town with the butter. He frequently remained in for two or three days,
as often as not spending all the money he got for the butter in a
drunken spree. Then he would return to curse his luck because his dairy
did not pay as well as those of some of our neighbours.
The curse of Eve being upon my poor mother in those days, she was
unable to follow her husband. Pride forbade her appealing to her
neighbours, so on me devolved the duty of tracking my father from one
pub to another and bringing him home.
Had I done justice to my mother’s training I would have honoured my
paternal parent in spite of all this, but I am an individual ever doing
things I oughtn’t at the time I shouldn’t.
Coming home, often after midnight, with my drunken father talking
maudlin conceited nonsense beside me, I developed curious ideas on the
fifth commandment. Those journeys in the spring-cart through the soft
faint starlight were conducive to thought. My father, like most men
when under the influence of liquor, would allow no one but himself to
handle the reins, and he was often so incapable that he would keep
turning the horse round and round in the one place. It is a marvel we
never met with an accident. I was not nervous, but quite content to
take whatever came, and our trusty old horse fulfilled his duty, ever
faithfully taking us home along the gum-tree-lined road.
My mother had taught me from the Bible that I should honour my parents,
whether they were deserving of honour or not.
Dick Melvyn being my father did not blind me to the fact that he was a
despicable, selfish, weak creature, and as such I despised him with the
relentlessness of fifteen, which makes no allowance for human frailty
and weakness. Disgust, not honour, was the feeling which possessed me
when I studied the matter.
Towards mother I felt differently. A woman is but the helpless tool of
man—a creature of circumstances.
Seeing my father beside me, and thinking of his infant with its mother,
eating her heart out with anxiety at home, this was the reasoning which
took possession of me. Among other such inexpressible thoughts I got
lost, grew dizzy, and drew back appalled at the spirit which was
maturing within me. It was a grim lonely one, which I vainly tried to
hide in a bosom which was not big or strong enough for its comfortable
habitation. It was as a climbing plant without a pole—it groped about
the ground, bruised itself, and became hungry searching for something
strong to which to cling. Needing a master-hand to train and prune, it
was becoming rank and sour.
CHAPTER FIVE
Disjointed Sketches And Grumbles
It was my duty to “rare the poddies”. This is the most godless
occupation in which it has been my lot to engage. I did a great amount
of thinking while feeding them—for, by the way, I am afflicted with the
power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and
inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things,
when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and
doubly, trebly so, for her.
Poor little calves! Slaves to the greed of man! Bereft of the mothers
with which Nature has provided them, and compelled to exist on milk
from the separator, often thick, sour, and icy cold.
Besides the milking I did, before I went to school every morning, for
which I had to prepare myself and the younger children, and to which we
had to walk two miles. I had to feed thirty calves and wash the
breakfast dishes. On returning from school in the afternoon, often in a
state of exhaustion from walking in the blazing sun, I had the same
duties over again, and in addition boots to clean and home lessons to
prepare for the morrow. I had to relinquish my piano practice for want
of time.
Ah, those short, short nights of rest and long, long days of toil! It
seems to me that dairying means slavery in the hands of poor people who
cannot afford hired labour. I am not writing of dairy-farming, the
genteel and artistic profession as eulogized in leading articles of
agricultural newspapers and as taught in agricultural colleges. I am
depicting practical dairying as I have lived it, and seen it lived, by
dozens of families around me.
It takes a great deal of work to produce even one pound of butter fit
for market. At the time I mention it was 3d. and 4d. per lb., so it was
much work and small pay. It was slaving and delving from morning till
night—Sundays, week-days, and holidays, all alike were work-days to us.
Hard graft is a great leveller. Household drudgery, woodcutting,
milking, and gardening soon roughen the hands and dim the outside
polish. When the body is wearied with much toil the desire to cultivate
the mind, or the cultivation it has already received, is gradually
wiped out. Thus it was with my parents. They had dropped from swelldom
to peasantism. They were among and of the peasantry. None of their
former acquaintances came within their circle now, for the iron ungodly
hand of class distinction has settled surely down upon Australian
society—Australia’s democracy is only a tradition of the past.
I say naught against the lower life. The peasantry are the bulwarks of
every nation. The life of a peasant is, to a peasant who is a peasant
with a peasant’s soul, when times are good and when seasons smile, a
grand life. It is honest, clean, and wholesome. But the life of a
peasant to me is purgatory. Those around me worked from morning till
night and then enjoyed their well-earned sleep. They had but two states
of existence—work and sleep.
There was a third part in me which cried out to be fed. I longed for
the arts. Music was a passion with me. I borrowed every book in the
neighbourhood and stole hours from rest to read them. This told upon me
and made my physical burdens harder for me than for other children of
my years around me. That third was the strongest part of me. In it I
lived a dream-life with writers, artists, and musicians. Hope, sweet,
cruel, delusive Hope, whispered in my ear that life was long with much
by and by, and in that by and by my dream-life would be real. So on I
went with that gleaming lake in the distance beckoning me to come and
sail on its silver waters, and Inexperience, conceited, blind
Inexperience, failing to show the impassable pit between it and me.
To return to the dairying.
Old and young alike we earned our scant livelihood by the heavy sweat
of our brows. Still, we _did_ gain an honest living. We were not
ashamed to look day in the face, and fought our way against all odds
with the stubborn independence of our British ancestors. But when 1894
went out without rain, and ’95, hot, dry, pitiless ’95, succeeded it,
there came a time when it was impossible to make a living.
The scorching furnace-breath winds shrivelled every blade of grass,
dust and the moan of starving stock filled the air, vegetables became a
thing of the past. The calves I had reared died one by one, and the
cows followed in their footsteps.
I had left school then, and my mother and father and I spent the days
in lifting our cows. When our strength proved inadequate, the help of
neighbours had to be called in, and father would give his services in
return. Only a few of our more well-to-do neighbours had been able to
send their stock away, or had any better place to which to transfer
them. The majority of them were in as tight a plight as ourselves. This
cow-lifting became quite a trade, the whole day being spent in it and
in discussing the bad prospect ahead if the drought continued.
Many an extra line of care furrowed the brows of the disheartened
bushmen then. Not only was their living taken from them by the drought,
but there is nothing more heartrending than to have poor beasts,
especially dairy cows, so familiar, valued, and loved, pleading for
food day after day in their piteous dumb way when one has it not to
give.
We shore ourselves of all but the bare necessaries of life, but even
they for a family of ten are considerable, and it was a mighty tussle
to get both ends within cover of meeting. We felt the full force of the
heavy hand of poverty—the most stinging kind of poverty too, that which
still holds up its head and keeps an outside appearance. Far more
grinding is this than the poverty inherited from generations which is
not ashamed of itself, and has not as an accompaniment the wounded
pride and humiliation which attacked us.
Some there are who argue that poverty does not mean unhappiness. Let
those try what it is to be destitute of even one companionable friend,
what it means to be forced to exist in an alien sphere of society, what
it is like to be unable to afford a stamp to write to a friend; let
them long as passionately as I have longed for reading and music, and
be unable to procure it because of poverty; let poverty force them into
doing work against which every fibre of their being revolts, as it has
forced me, and then see if their lives will be happy.
My school life had been dull and uneventful. The one incident of any
note had been the day that the teacher, better known as old Harris,
“stood up” to the inspector. The latter was a precise, collar-and-cuffs
sort of little man. He gave one the impression of having all his ideas
on the subjects he thought worthy of attention carefully culled and
packed in his brain-pan, and neatly labelled, so that he might without
fluster pounce upon any of them at a moment’s warning. He was
gentlemanly and respectable, and discharged his duties punctiliously in
a manner reflecting credit on himself and his position, but, comparing
the mind of a philanthropist to the Murrumbidgee in breadth, his, in
comparison, might be likened to the flow of a bucket of water in a
dray-rut.
On the day in question—a precious hot one it was—he had finished
examining us in most subjects, and was looking at our copy-books. He
looked up from them, ahemed! and fastidiously straightened his
waistcoat.
“Mr Harris!
“Yes, sir.”
“Comparisons are odious, but, unfortunately, I am forced to draw one
now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This writing is much inferior to that of town scholars. It is very
shaky and irregular. Also, I notice that the children seem stupid and
dull. I don’t like putting it so plainly, but, in fact, ah, they seem
to be possessed with the proverbial stupidity of country people. How do
you account for this?”
Poor old Harris! In spite of his drunken habits and inability to
properly discharge his duties, he had a warm heart and much
fellowshiply humanity in him. He understood and loved his pupils, and
would not have aspersions cast upon them. Besides, the nip he had taken
to brace himself to meet the inspector had been two or three, and they
robbed him of the discretion which otherwise might have kept him
silent.
“Si-r-r-r, I can and will account for it. Look you at every one of
those children. Every one, right down to this little tot,” indicating a
little girl of five, “has to milk and work hard before and after
school, besides walk on an average two miles to and from school in this
infernal heat. Most of the elder boys and girls milk on an average
fourteen cows morning and evening. You try that treatment for a week or
two, my fine gentleman, and then see if your fist doesn’t ache and
shake so that you can’t write at all. See if you won’t look a trifle
dozy. Stupidity of country people be hanged! If you had to work from
morning till night in the heat and dust, and get precious little for it
too, I bet you wouldn’t have much time to scrape your finger-nails,
read science notes, and look smart.” Here he took off his coat and
shaped up to his superior.
The inspector drew back in consternation.
“Mr Harris, you forget yourself!”
At this juncture they went outside together. What happened there we
never knew. That is all we heard of the matter except the numerous
garbled accounts which were carried home that afternoon.