OUT BACK AND SOME LETTERS
I
Jack was absolutely happy, in camp with Tom. Perhaps the most completely
happy time in his life. He had escaped the strange, new complications
that life was weaving round him. Yet he had not left the beloved family.
He was with Tom: who, after all, was the one that mattered most. Tom was
the growing trunk of the tree.
All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have
lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar
sense, is just a holiday experience. The lifelong happiness lies in
being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished
and overjoyed with life, fighting for life's sake. That is real
happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain. But the end is
like Jack's camping expedition, a time of real happiness.
Perhaps death, after a life of real courage, is like a happy camping
expedition in the unknown, before a new start.
It was spring in Western Australia, and a wonder of delicate blueness,
of frail, unearthly beauty. The earth was full of weird flowers,
star-shaped, needle-pointed, fringed, scarlet, white, blue, a whole
world of strange flowers. Like being in a new Paradise from which man
had not been cast out.
The trees in the dawn, so ghostly still. The scent of blossoming
eucalyptus trees: the scent of burning eucalyptus leaves and sticks, in
the camp fire. Trailing blossoms wet with dew; the scrub after the rain;
the bitter-sweet fragrance of fresh-cut timber.
And the sounds! Magpies calling, parrots chattering, strange birds
flitting in the renewed stillness. Then kangaroos calling to one another
out of the frail, paradisal distance. And the birr! of crickets in the
heat of the day. And the sound of axes, the voices of men, the crash of
falling timber. The strange slobbering talk of the blacks! The
mysterious night coming round the camp fire.
Red gum everywhere! Fringed leaves dappling, the glowing new sun coming
through, the large, feathery, honey-sweet blossoms flowering in clumps,
the hard, rough-marked, red-bronze trunks rising like pillars of burnt
copper, or lying sadly felled, giving up the ghost. Everywhere scattered
the red gum, making leaves and herbage underneath seem bestrewed with
blood.
And it was spring: the short, swift, fierce, flower-strange spring of
Western Australia, in the month of August.
Then evening came, and the small aromatic fire was burning amid the
felled trees. Tom stood hands on hips, giving directions, while the
blackened billy-can hung suspended from a cross-bar over the fire. The
water bubbling, a handful of tea is thrown in. It sinks. It rises.
"Bring it off!" yells Tom. Jack balances the cross-stick, holding the
wobbling can, until it rests safely on the ground. Then snatching the
handle, holds the can aloft. Tea is made.
The clearing gang had a hut with one side for the horses, the other for
the men's sleeping place. Inside were stakes driven into the ground,
bearing cross-bars with sacks fastened across, for beds. On the
partition-poles hung the wardrobes, and in a couple of boxes lay the
treasures, in the shape of watches, knives, razors, looking-glasses,
etc., safe from the stray thief. But the men were always tormenting one
another, hiding away a razor, or a strop, or a beloved watch.
Just in front of this shelter the camp oven had been built, for baking
damper and roasting meat, and to one side was the well, a very important
necessity, built by contract, timbered, and provided with winch, rope
and bucket.
All around the bush was dense like a forest, much denser than usual. The
slim-girthed trees grew in silent array, all alike and all asleep, with
undergrowth of scrub and fern and flowers, banksia short and sturdy with
its cone-shaped red-yellow flowers like fairy lamps, and here and there
a perfect wattle, or mimosa tree, with its pale gold flowers like little
balls of sun-dust, and here and there sandal-wood trees. Jack never
forgot the beauty of the first bushes and trees of mimosa, in a damp
place in the wild bush. Occasionally there was still an immense karri
tree, or a jarrah slightly smaller, though this was not the region for
these giants.
And far away, unending, upslope and downslope and rock-face one far
unending dimness of these changeless trees, going on and on without
variation, open enough to let one see ahead and all around, yet dense
enough to form a monotony and a sense of helplessness in the mind, a
sense of timelessness. Strongly the gang impressed on Jack that he must
not go even for five minutes' walk out of sight of the clearing. The
weird silent timelessness of the bush impressed him as nothing else ever
did, in its motionless aloofness. "What would my father mean, out here?"
he said to himself. And it seemed as if his father and his father's
world and his father's gods withered and went to dust at the thought of
this bush. And when he saw one of the men on a red sorrel horse
galloping like a phantom away through the dim, red-trunked, silent
trees, followed by another man on a black horse: and when he heard their
far, far-off yelping "Coo-ee!" or a shot as they fired at a dingo or a
kangaroo, he felt as if the old world had given him up from the womb,
and put him into a new weird grey-blue paradise, where man has to begin
all over again. That was his feeling: that the human way of life was all
to be begun over again.
The home that he and Tom made for themselves seemed to be a matter of
forked sticks. If you wanted an upright of any sort, drive a forked
stick into the ground, or dig it in, fork-end up. If you wanted a
cross-bar, lay a stick or a pole across two forks. Down the sides of
your house you wove brushwood. For the roof you plaited the long,
stringy strips of gum-bark. With a couple of axes and a jack-knife they
built a house fit for a savage king. Then they went out and made a
kitchen, with pegs hammered into the bole of a tree, for the frying
pans, the sawn surface of a large stump for a table, and logs to lie
back against.
North of the clearing lay the nucleus of a settlement, with pub,
saw-mill, store, one or two homes, and a farm or two outlying. And as
they cleared the land, the teamsters carried the best of the timber on
jinkers, or dragged it with chains hitched to bullock or horse teams, to
the mill. But milling was expensive, and most of the wood was
hand-split. Jack learned to cut palings and poles, and then to split
slabs that would serve to build slab houses, or sheds. In the spare time
they would have little hunts of wallabies or bandicoots or bungarras, or
blood-rats; or they would snare opossums or stalk dingoes.
But because he was really away in the wild, Jack felt he must write
letters home. So it is. The letters from home hardly interested him at
all. The thin sheets with their interminable writing were almost
repulsive to him. He would stow them in the barn and leave them for days
without reading them: he was "busy." And sometimes the mice nibbled
them, and in that way read them for him. He was a little ashamed of this
indifference. But he noticed other men were the same. When they got
these endless thin sheets from home, covered with ink of words, they
stowed them away in a kind of nausea, without reading more than a few
lines. And the people at home had such a pitying admonishing tone: like
the young naval lieutenant who made friends with the black aborigines by
promptly shaving them. And then letters were not profitable. A stamp
home cost sixpence, and a letter took about two months on the way. It
was always four months before you got an answer. And after you'd written
to your mother about something really important--like money--and waited
impatiently several months for the answer, when it came it never
mentioned the money, and made a mountain of a cold in your head which
you couldn't remember having had. What was the good of people at home
writing: "We are having true November weather, very cold, with fog and
sleet," when you were grilling under a fierce sun and the rush of the
intense antipodal summer. What was the good of it all? All dull as
ditchwater, and no use to anybody. He had promised his mother he would
write once a week. And his mother was his mother, he wanted to keep his
promise. Which he did for a month. But in camp, he didn't even know what
day it was, hardly what month: though the mail did come once a
fortnight, via the saw-mill.--He took out his mother's letter.
"You said in your letter from Colombo that you were sneezing. Do take
care in Australia in the rainy season. Ask not to be sent out in the
rain. I recollect the climate, always sunny and bright between showers.
That is what we miss so much now we are back in England, the sunny
skies. Of course, I do not want you to be a mollycoddle, but I know the
climate of Western Australia, it is very trying, particularly so in the
rainy season. I do hope and pray you are on a good station with a good
woman who will see you are not out getting drenched in those cold
downpours----"
Jack groaned aloud, astonished that his mother had got so far from her
own early days. How in the name of heaven had he come to mention
sneezing? Never again. He would not even say he was camping.
"Dear Mother:
"I am quite well and like farming out here all right. Old Mrs. Ellis
knew your father. She says he cut off her leg. I hope Father has got rid
of his Liver, you said he was taking variolettes for it. I hope they
have done him good. Mr. Ellis says a cockles pill and a ten-mile walk
will cure anything. He says it would cure a pig's liver. But when old
Tim, the half-caste, tried to swallow the pill it came out of the gap
where his front tooth used to be, so Mrs. Ellis gave him a teaspoonful
of sulphur, which he said would make him blow up. But it didn't. I think
I was more likely to blow up because she gave me a big teaspoon of
parafin which they call kerosene out here. She is a fine doctor, far
better than the medical man who lodges here, whose name is Rackett.
"I hope you are quite well. Give my love to all my aunts and sister and
father. I hope they are all quite well----"
Jack hurried this letter in confusion into its envelope, and spent
sixpence on it, knowing perfectly well it was all nonsense.
II
There was a pause in the clearing work, after the early hot spell, and
word from Lennie that there was to be a kangaroo hunt, and they were to
come down. An Old Man kangaroo, a king of boomers, had been seen around,
hoof-marks and paw-pad trails near the pool.
They met at dawn, by the well: Easu with two kangaroo hounds, like
greyhounds on leash; Lennie peacocking on an enormous hairy-heeled
roadster; a "superior" young Queenslander who had been sent west because
his father found him unmanageable and who wasn't a bad sort, though his
nickname was Pink-eye Percy; Lennie's "Comseed" friend, Joe Low; Alec
Rice, the young fellow who was courting Grace; Ross Ellis, and Herbert,
who was well again, then Tom on a grey stallion, and Jack, in riding
breeches and gaiters and clean shirt, astride the famous Lucy.
Easu was born in the saddle, he rode easy on his big roan. He waved his
hat excitedly at the group, and led off into the scrub, through the
slender, white-barked trees of the open bush. The others rode fast in
ragged order, among the thin, open trees. Jack let Lucy pick her way,
sometimes ahead, sometimes in sight of the others. They rode in silence.
Then they came out unexpectedly into low, grey-green scrub without
trees, and crisp grey-white soil that crumbled under the hoofs of the
horses. There they were, all out in the blue and gold light, with
billows of blue-green scrub running away to right and left, towards a
rise in front.
"Hold hard there!" sang out Easu, holding up the whip in his right hand.
He held the reins loosely in his left, and with the reins, the leash on
which the dogs were pulling. Dogs and horse he held in that left hand.
"I want y' t' divide. Tom, y' lead on a zigzag course down north. Ross,
you work south.--And this--this fox-hunting gentleman----" He paused,
and Jack felt himself going scarlet.
"Says thank ye, an' hopes he's a gentleman, since y've mentioned it,"
put in Lennie, in his mild, inconsequential way.
There was a laugh against Red: for there was no mistaking him for a
gentleman, in any sense of the word. However, he was too much excited by
the hunt to persevere.
The fellows were stowing away their pipes in their pockets, and
buttoning their coats, ready for the dash. Easu, thrilled by his own
unquestioned leadership, gave the orders. All listened closely.
"Call up! Call up! Follow my leader and find the trail. Biggest boomer
ever ye----"
"Come!" cried Tom.
"And I'm here!" cried Lennie.
Away they went into the gully and through the scrub, riding light but
swift, in different directions.
"Let go th' mare's head," yelled Tom over his shoulder. "We're coming to
timber, an' she'd best pilot herself."
"Right!" cried Jack.
"Don't ye kill Lucy," shrieked Lennie. "Because me heart's set on her.
Keep y' hands an' y' heels off y' horse, an' y' head on y' shoulders."
The bolt of horsemen through the bush sent parrots screaming savagely
over the feathery tree-tops. Jack let Lucy have her way. She was light
and swift and sure-footed, old steeplechaser that she was. The slim
straight trees slipped past, the motion of the horse surging her own way
was exhilarating to a degree.
But Tom had heard something: not the parrots, not the soft thud of the
following horses. He must have heard with his sixth sense: perhaps the
warning call of the boomer. With face set and eyes burning he swung and
urged his horse in a new direction. And like men coming in to supper
from different directions, the handful of horsemen came swish-swish
through the scrub, toward a centre.
Lucy pricked one ear. Perhaps she too had heard something. Then she
gathers herself together and goes like the wind after the twinkling grey
quarters of Tom's stallion. Her excitement mounts to Jack's head, and he
rides like a catapult on the wind.
Again Tom was reining in, pulling his horse almost on to its haunches.
And Jack must hold like a vice with his knees, for Lucy was pawing the
air, frantic at being held up.
"Coo-ee!" came Tom's clear tenor, ringing through the bush. "Coo-ee!
Coo-ee! Coo-ee!" A marvellous sound, and Lucy pawing and dancing among
the scrub.
"Coo-ee! Coo-ee! Coo-ee!"
It seemed to Jack, this sound in the bush was like God. Like the call of
the heroic soul seeking its body. Like the call of the bodiless soul,
sounding through the immense dead spaces of the dim, open bush, strange
and heroic and inhuman. The deep long "coo," mastering the silence, the
high summons of the long "eee." The "coo" rising more imperious, and
then the "eee!" thrilling and holding aloft. Then the swift lift and
fall: "Coo-eee! Coo-eee! Coo-eee!" till the air rocks with the fierce
pulse, as if a new heart were in motion, and the shriek and scream of
the "eee!" rips in strange flashes into the far-off, far-off
consciousness.
Much stranger than the weird yelp of the Red Indians' war-cry was this
rocking, ripping noise in the vast grey bush.
The others were coming in from right to left, like silent phantoms
through the sunny evanescence of the bush, riding hard. Tom is displaced
by Red. A few quick words given and taken. Easu has unleashed the dogs,
slashed the long lash with a resounding crack in the air. The long lean
dogs stretch out--uncannily long, from tip to tip. Tom lets go and away.
Jack lets go and away, and unconsciously his hand goes down for the bow
of the slippery saddle.
Lucy had the situation well in hand, which was more than Jack had.
Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud! Up, fly! _Crash!_--Hello?--All right. A
beauty! A dream of a jumper, this Lucy. But Jack wished his seat weren't
so slippery.
They were turning into bigger timber: trees further apart, but much
bigger, and with hanging limbs. "Look out! Look out f' y' head!" Jack
kept all his eyes open, till he knew by second sight when to duck. He
watched the twinkling hind quarters of Tom's grey, among the trees.
There was a short yapping of the dogs. Lucy was going like the wind,
Jack was riding light, but she was beginning to breathe heavily. No
longer so young as she was. How hot the sun was, in the almost shadeless
bush. And what was leading, where was the 'roo? Jack strained his eyes
almost out of his head, but could see nothing.
They were on the edge of the hills, and the country changed continually.
No sooner were you used to scrub, than it was thin trees. No sooner did
you know that Lucy could manipulate thin trees, than you were among big
timber, with more space and dangerous boughs. Then it was salty
paper-bark country--and back to forest again: close trees, fallen logs,
blood-rat holes and sudden outcropping of dark-brown, ancient-looking
rocks with little flat crags, to be avoided. But the other men were
going full speed, and full speed you must follow, watching with all your
eyes, and riding light, and swept along in the rim.
Up! That was over an elephant log, and down went a man at Tom's heels.
It was Grace's young man. No matter. Jack was going to look over his
shoulder when Tom again shouted "Up!" and Jack and Lennie followed over
the fallen timber.
Suddenly they were in a great black blanket of burnt country, clear of
undergrowth or scrubs, with skeletons of black, charred trees standing
gruesome. And there, right under their noses, leapt three kangaroos,
swerving across. The baby one, Joey, was first, lithe, light, apparently
not a bit afraid, but wildly excited; then the mother doe, all out,
panting, anxious-eyed, stiffly jumping; and behind, a long way, with the
dogs like needles coming after, ran the Old Man boomer; a great big chap
making mighty springs and in varying directions. Yes, he was making a
rear-guard action for the safety of his mate and spawn. Leaping with
great leaps, as if to the end of the world, leaning forward, his little
hands curled in, his immense massive tail straight out behind him like
some immense living rudder. And seeming perfectly calm, almost
indifferent. With steady, easy, enormous springs he went this way, that
way, detouring, but making for the same ridge his doe and Joey had
passed.
The charred ground proved treacherous, holes, smouldering trunks of
trees, smouldering hollows where trunks had been. Soon two horses were
running loose, with men limping after them. But on went the rest. Thud
and crackle went the hoofs of the galloping horses in the charcoal, as
after the dogs, after the 'roos they followed, kicking up clouds of grey
ash-mounds and red-burnt earth, jumping suddenly over the still-glowing
logs.
The chase paused on the ridge, for the drop was sudden and steep, with
rocks and boulders cropping out. Down slid the dogs in a cloud, yelping
hard, making Easu at all costs turn to try the right, Tom to try the
left.
They dropped awkwardly and joltingly down, between rocks, in loose
charcoal powder and loose earth.
"Ain't that ole mare a marvel, Jack!" said Tom. "This nag is rode stiff,
all-under my knees."
Jack's face was full of wild joy. The stones rattled, the men stood back
from the stirrups, the horses seemed to be diving. But Lucy was light
and sure.
Down they jolted into the gully. Easu came up swearing--lost the quarry
and dogs, Jack pulled Lucy over a boulder to get out of Easu's way: a
thing he shouldn't have done. Crack! went his head against a branch, and
Jack was bruising himself on the ground before he knew where he was.
But he was on his feet again, intently chasing Lucy.
"Here y'are!" It was Herbert who leaned down, picked up the reins of the
scampering mare, and threw them to Jack. Jack's face was bleeding.
Lennie came up and opened his mouth in dismay. But somebody coo-eed, and
the chase was too good to lose. They are all gone.
Jack stiffly mounted, to find himself blinded by trickling blood. Lucy
once more was stirring between his knees, stretching herself out, and he
had to let her go, fumbling meanwhile for a handkerchief which he pushed
under his hat-brim, and pulled down the old felt firmly. Wiping his eyes
with his sleeve, he found the wound staunched by the impromptu dressing.
The scene had completely changed. Lucy was whisking him around the side
of a huge dark boulder. They were in the dry bed of the gully, on
stones.
Lucy stopped dead, practically on her haunches, but her impetus carried
her over, and she was slithering down into a loose gravelly hole. Jack
jumped off, to find himself face to face with the biggest boomer
kangaroo he had ever imagined. It was the Old Man, sitting there at the
bottom of the gravel-hole, in the hollow of a barren she-oak, his absurd
paws drooping dejectedly before him and his silly dribbling under-jaw
working miserably.
"He's trying to get the wind up for another fly," thought Jack, standing
there as dazed as the 'roo itself, and feeling himself very much in the
same condition. Then he wondered where the doe and Joey were, and where
all the other hunters. He hoped they wouldn't come. Lucy stood by, as
calm as a cucumber.
Jack took a step nearer the Old Man 'roo, and instantly brought up his
fists as the animal doubled its queer front paws and hit out wildly at
him. He wanted to hit back.
"Mind the claws!" called somebody, with a quiet chuckle, from above.
Jack looked round, and there was Lennie and the heavy horse, the horse
head-down, tail up, feet spread, like a salamander lizard on a wall,
slithering down the grade into the hole, Lennie erect in the stirrups.
Jack gave a loud laugh.
And the Old Man, either possessed of a sense of humour or terrified to
death, seized the nearest thing at hand--which happened to be Jack;
grabbed him, gripped him, hugged him in desperate fury, and tried to get
up his huge, flail-like hind leg, to rip up the enemy with the toe claw.
One stroke of that claw, and Jack was done.
In terror, anger, surprise, Jack jumped at the kangaroo's throat, as far
as the animal's grip would let him. The 'roo, trying all the time to use
his hind legs, upset, so that the two went rolling on the gravel
together. Jack was in horrid proximity to the weird grey fur, clutched
by the weird-smelling, violent animal, in a sort of living earthquake,
as the kangaroo writhed and bounced to use his great, oar-like hind
legs, and Jack clung close and hit at the creature's body, hit, hit,
hit. It was like hitting living wire bands. Somebody was roaring, or
else it was his own consciousness shouting: "Don't let the hind claw get
to work."--How horrible a wild thing was, when you were mixed up with
it! The terrible nausea of its powerful, furry, violent-blooded contact.
Its unnatural, almost obscene power! Its different consciousness! Its
overpowering smell!
The others were coming back up the stream-bed, jumping the rocks,
towards this place where Jack had fallen and Lennie had come down after
him. Easu was calling off the dogs, ferociously. Tom rushed in and got
the 'roo by the head.
Lennie was lying on the gravel laughing so hard he couldn't stand on his
legs.
III
Jack wrote a letter to his old friend, the vet with the "weakness," in
England.
"We are out at a place back of beyond, at a place called Gum Tree
Valley, so I take up my pen to write as I have time.--Tom Ellis is here
bossing the clearing gang, and he has a lot of Aunts, whom he rightly
calls ants. One of them has a place near here, and we go to dinner on
Sundays, and to help when wanted. We stayed all last week and helped
muster in the sheep for the shearing. We rode all round their paddock
boundaries and rounded in the sheep that had strayed and got lost. They
had run off from the main--about a score of flocks--and were feeding in
little herds and groups miles apart. It's a grand sight to see them all
running before you, their woolly backs bobbing up and down like brown
water. I can tell you I know now the meaning of the Lost Sheep, and the
sort of joy you have in cursing him when you find him.
"You told me to let you know if I heard any first hand news of gold
finding. Well, I haven't heard much. But a man rode into
Greenlow's--that's Tom's Aunt--place on Sunday, and he said to Tom: 'Are
those the Stirling Ranges?' Tom said: 'No, they're not. They're the
Darling Ranges.' He said: 'Are you sure?'"--and got very excited. The
black-fellows came and stood by and they were vastly amused, grinning
and looking away. He got out a compass and said: 'You are wrong, Mr.
Ellis, they are the Stirling Ranges.' Tom said: 'Call 'em what you
choose, chum. We call 'em Darling--and them others forty mile southwest
we call the Stirling.' The man groaned. Minnie Greenlow called us to
come in to tea, and he came along as well. His manners were awful. He
fidgetted and pushed his hat back on his head and leant forward and spat
in the fire at a long shot, and tipped his cup so that his tea swobbed
in his saucer, then drank it out of the saucer. Then he pushed the cake
back when handed to him, and leaned his head on his arms on the table
and groaned. You'd have thought he was drunk, but he wasn't, because he
said to Tom, 'Are ye sure them's not the Stirling Ranges? I can't drink
my tea for thinkin' about it.' And Tom said: 'Sure.' and then he seemed
more distracted than ever, and blew through his teeth and mopped his
head, and was upset to a degree.
"When we had finished tea and we all went outside he said: 'Well, I
think I'll get back now. It's no use when the compass turns you down.
I'll never find it." We didn't know what he was talking about, but when
he'd got into his buggy and drove away the blacks told us: 'Master
lookin' for big lump yellow dirt--He think that very big fish, an' he
bury him long time. Cornin' back no finda him.'--While the boys were
talking who should shout to have the slip rail let down but this same
stranger and he drove right past us and away down the long paddock. When
he got to the gate there he turned round and came back and drew up by us
muttering, and said: 'Where did you tell me the Stirling Ranges
were?'--Tom pointed it out, and he said, 'So long!' and drove off. We
didn't see him again. We didn't want to. But Tom is almost sure he found
a lump of gold some time back and buried it for safety's sake and now
can't find it.
"That's all the gold I've heard about out here.
"Now for news. One day I went out with tucker to old Jack Moss. He's
keeping a bit of land warm for the Greenlows, shepherds sheep down
there, about forty miles from everywhere. He talked and talked, and when
he didn't talk he didn't listen to me. He looked away over the scrub and
sucked his cutty. They say he's hoarded wealth but I didn't see any
signs. He was in tatters and wore rags round his feet for boots, which
were like a gorilla's. Another day we had a kangaroo hunt. We all chased
an Old Man for miles and at last he tinned and faced us. I was so close
I had no time to think and was on him before I had time to pull up. I
jumped to the ground and grappled, and we rolled over and over down the
gully. They couldn't shoot him because of me, but they fought him off
and killed him. And then we saw his mate standing near among the stones,
on her hind legs, with her front paws hanging like a helpless woman.
Then Tom, who was tying up my cuts, called out: 'Look at her pouch! It's
plum full of little nippers!' and so it was. You never saw such a trick.
So we let her go. But we got the Old Man.
"Another day we rode round the surveyed area here, which Mr. Ellis is
taking up for the twins Og and Magog. I asked Tom a lot of questions
about taking up land. I think I should like to try. Perhaps if I do you
will come out. You would like the horses. There are quite a lot wild. We
hunt them in and pick out the best and use them. That's how lots of
people raise their horse-flesh. They are called brumbies. Excuse me for
not ending properly, the mailman is coming along, he comes once a
fortnight. We are lucky.
Jack."
IV
To his friend, the pugilist, he wrote:
"Dear Pug:
"You ask me what I think about sending Ned out here. Well, there's no
opening that I can see for a gym. But work, that's another question,
there's more than enough. I am at work at a place called Gum Tree
Valley, clearing, but we came up to Tom's Aunt's place last week, to
help, and we've been shearing. At least I haven't. I've been the chap
who tars. You splash tar on like paint when the shearers make a misfire
and gash the poor brutes and curse you. Lord, don't they curse, if the
boss isn't round. He's got a grey beard and dribbles on it, and the
flies get caught in it and buzz as if it was a spider's web. He makes
everyone work from mom till night like the Devil. Gosh, if it wasn't
that it is only for a short spell, I'd get. Don't you worry, up-country
folk know how to get your tucker's worth out of you all right Today the
Sabbath we had a rest.--I don't think! We washed our clothes. Talk about
a goodly pile! Only a rumour. For the old man fetched along his vests
and pants, and greasy overalls and aprons, his socks, his slimy hanks
and night-shirt Imagine our horror. He's Tom's Aunt's husband, and has
no sons only herds of daughters, so we had to do it. We scrubbed 'em
with horse-brushes on the stones. Jinks, but I rubbed some holes in 'em!
"But cheer up. I'm not grumbling. I like getting experience as it is
called.
"I mean to take up land and have a place of my own some day, then you
and Ned could visit me and we could have some fun with the gloves.
Lennie says I'm like a kangaroo shaping and punching at nothing, so I
got a cow's bladder and blew it up and tied it to a branch, and I batter
on it. Must have something to hit. You know kangaroos shape up and make
a punch. They are pretty doing that. We have a baby one, Joey, and it
takes a cup in its little hands and drinks. Honest to God it's got
hands, you never saw such a thing.
"Kindest regards to your old woman and Ned. Lord only knows how I've
missed you, and pray that some day I will be fortunate enough to meet
you again. Until then.
"Farewell.
"A Merry Xmas and a Glad New Year, by the time you get this. Think of me
in the broiling heat battling with sheep, their Boss, and the flies, and
you'll think of me true.
"Ever your sincere friend
Jack."
V
As the time for returning from camp drew near, Jack dwelt more and more
on this question of the future--of taking up land. He wished so often
that life could always be a matter of camping, land-clearing, kangaroo
hunting, shearing, and generally messing about. But deep underneath
himself he knew it couldn't: not for him at least. Plenty of fellows
lived all their life messing from camp to camp and station to station.
But himself--sooner or later he would have to bite on to something. He'd
have to plunge in to that cold water of responsible living, some time or
other.
He asked Tom about it.
"You must make up y' mind what you want to go in for, cattle, sheep,
horses, wheat, or mixed farming like us," said Tom. "Then you can go out
to select. But it's no good before you know what you want."
Jack was surprised to find how little information he got from the men he
mixed with. They knew their jobs: teamsters knew about teams, and jobs
on the mill; the timber workers knew hauling and sawing; township people
knew trading; the general hands knew about hunting and bush-craft and
axe handling; and farmers knew what was under their nose, but nothing of
the laws of the land, or how he himself was to get a start.
At last he found a small holder who went out as a hired man after he had
put in the seed on his own land. And this, apparently, was how Jack
would have to start. The man brought out various grubby Government
papers, and handed them over.
Jack had a bad time with them: Government reports, blue books,
narratives of operations. But he swotted grimly. And he made out so
'much:
1. Any reputable immigrant over 21 years could procure 50 acres of
unimproved rural Crown land open for selection; if between the ages of
14 and 21, 25 acres.
2. Such land must be held by "occupation certificate," deemed
transferable only in case of death, etc.
3. The occupation certificate would be exchanged for a grant at the end
of five years, or before that time, providing the land had been enclosed
with a substantial fence and at least a quarter cultivated. But if at
the end of the five years the above conditions, or any of them, had not
been observed, the lots should revert to the Crown.
4. Country land was sub-divided into agricultural and pastoral, either
purchasable at the sum of 10/- an acre, or leased: the former for eight
years at the nominal sum of 1/- an acre, with the right of purchase, the
latter for one year at annual rental of 2/- per hundred acres, with
presumptive renewal; or five pounds per 1000 acres with rights.
Jack got all this into his mind, and at once loathed it. He loathed the
thought of an "occupation certificate." He loathed the thought of being
responsible to the Government for a piece of land. He almost loathed the
thought of being tied to land at all. He didn't want to own things;
especially land, that is like a grave to you as soon as you do own it.
He didn't want to own anything. He simply couldn't bear the thought of
being tied down. Even his own unpacked luggage he had detested.
But he started in with this taking-up land business, so he thought he'd
try an easy way to get through with it.
"Dear Father,
"I could take up land on my own account now if you sent a few hundred
pounds for that purpose per Mr. George. He would pay the deposit and
arrange it for me. I have my eye on one or two improved farms falling
idle shortly down this Gum Valley district, which is very flourishing.
When they fall vacant on account of settlers dropping them, they can be
picked up very cheap.
"I hope you are quite well, as I am at present
"Your affec. son
Jack."
Jack spent his sixpence on this important document, and forgot all about
it. And in the dead end of the hot summer, just in the nick of time, he
got his answer:
Sea View Terrace,
Bournemouth.
2. 2. '83,
Dear Jack:
"Thank you for your most comprehensive letter of 30/11/82. It is quite
impossible for me to raise several hundreds of pounds, or for the matter
of that, one hundred pounds, in this offhand manner. I don't want to be
hard on you, but we want you to be independent as soon as possible. We
have so many expenses, and I have no intention of sinking funds in the
virgin Australian wild, at any rate until I see a way clear to getting
some return for my money, in some form of safe interest accruing to you
at my death.--You must not expect to run before you can walk. Stay where
you are and learn what you can till your year is up, and then we will
see about a jackeroo's job, at which your mother tells me you will earn
£1. a week, instead of our having to pay it for you.
"We all send felicitations
Your affectionate father
G. B. Grant."
But this is running ahead.--It is not yet Christmas, 1882.