A Far Inland Sketch.
‘A rising township of some four hundred inhabitants, situated on the
Trickle Trickle River. Distance from Sydney, north-west, six hundred
and fifty miles.’
Thus the _Australian Gazetteer_, speaking of the far-inland village of
Jillibeejee. For days you shall have ridden over bush roads, fetlock
deep in dust, through monotonous open forest, or over still more
monotonous plain, ere, far away on a dry brown ridge, you catch the
glitter of something in the bright, hot sunshine. This proceeds from
the first roof in Jillibeejee. Then, making your horse stride
carefully over the Trickle Trickle, whose banks are apt to crumble,
you breast the ridge and take a bird’s-eye view of the township as it
lies frying in the sun.
This ridge must be fully fifty feet above the level of the surrounding
country, and is probably the ‘rising’ referred to by the jocular
_Gazetteer_.
The first building is deserted; so is the second. As you ride along
you come to others, dilapidated but, from sounds within, peopled.
There are altogether forty houses in Jillibeejee, which, by the
_Gazetteer’s_ reckoning, gives us an average of ten inmates to each
one.