who's “Union,” and talk about water, and exchange hints as to good
tucker-tracks, and discuss the strike, and curse the squatter (which
is all they have got to curse), and growl about Union leaders, and tell
lies against each other sociably. There are tally lies; and lies about
getting tucker by trickery; and long-tramp-with-heavy-swag-and-no-water
lies; and lies about getting the best of squatters and
bosses-over-the-board; and droving, fighting, racing, gambling and
drinking lies. Lies _ad libitum_; and every true Australian bushman must
try his best to tell a bigger out-back lie than the last bush-liar.
Pat is not quite easy in his mind. He found an old pair of pants in the
scrub this morning, and cannot decide whether they are better than his
own, or, rather, whether his own are worse--if that's possible. He does
not want to increase the weight of his swag unnecessarily by taking both
pairs. He reckons that the pants were thrown away when the shed cut out
last, but then they might have been lying out exposed to the weather
for a longer period. It is rather an important question, for it is very
annoying, after you've mended and patched an old pair of pants, to find,
when a day or two further on the track, that they are more rotten than
the pair you left behind.
There is some growling about the water here, and one of the men makes a
billy of tea. The water is better cooked. Pint-pots and sugar-bags
are groped out and brought to the kitchen hut, and each man fills his
pannikin; the Irishman keeps a thumb on the edge of his, so as to
know when the pot is full, for it is very dark, and there is no more
firewood. You soon know this way, especially if you are in the habit of
pressing lighted tobacco down into your pipe with the top of your thumb.
The old slush-lamps are all burnt out.
Each man feels for the mouth of his sugar-bag with one hand while he
keeps the bearings of his pot with the other.
The Irishman has lost his match-box, and feels for it all over the table
without success. He stoops down with his hands on his knees, gets the
table-top on a level with the flicker of firelight, and “moons” the
object, as it were.
Time to turn in. It is very dark inside and bright moonlight without;
every crack seems like a ghost peering in. Some of the men will roll
up their swags on the morrow and depart; some will take another day's
spell. It is all according to the tucker.
THE UNION BURIES ITS DEAD
While out boating one Sunday afternoon on a billabong across the river,
we saw a young man on horseback driving some horses along the bank. He
said it was a fine day, and asked if the Water was deep there. The joker
of our party said it was deep enough to drown him, and he laughed and
rode farther up. We didn't take much notice of him.
Next day a funeral gathered at a corner pub and asked each other in to
have a drink while waiting for the hearse. They passed away some of the
time dancing jigs to a piano in the bar parlour. They passed away the
rest of the time skylarking and fighting.
The defunct was a young Union labourer, about twenty-five, who had
been drowned the previous day while trying to swim some horses across a
billabong of the Darling.
He was almost a stranger in town, and the fact of his having been a
Union man accounted for the funeral. The police found some Union papers
in his swag, and called at the General Labourers' Union Office for
information about him. That's how we knew. The secretary had very little
information to give. The departed was a “Roman,” and the majority of
the town were otherwise--but Unionism is stronger than creed. Liquor,
however, is stronger than Unionism; and, when the hearse presently
arrived, more than two-thirds of the funeral were unable to follow.
The procession numbered fifteen, fourteen souls following the broken
shell of a soul. Perhaps not one of the fourteen possessed a soul any
more than the corpse did--but that doesn't matter.
Four or five of the funeral, who were boarders at the pub, borrowed a
trap which the landlord used to carry passengers to and from the railway
station. They were strangers to us who were on foot, and we to them. We
were all strangers to the corpse.
A horseman, who looked like a drover just returned from a big trip,
dropped into our dusty wake and followed us a few hundred yards,
dragging his packhorse behind him, but a friend made wild and
demonstrative signals from a hotel veranda--hooking at the air in front
with his right hand and jobbing his left thumb over his shoulder in the
direction of the bar--so the drover hauled off and didn't catch up to us
any more. He was a stranger to the entire show.
We walked in twos. There were three twos. It was very hot and dusty;
the heat rushed in fierce dazzling rays across every iron roof and
light-coloured wall that was turned to the sun. One or two pubs closed
respectfully until we got past. They closed their bar doors and the
patrons went in and out through some side or back entrance for a few
minutes. Bushmen seldom grumble at an inconvenience of this sort, when
it is caused by a funeral. They have too much respect for the dead.
On the way to the cemetery we passed three shearers sitting on the shady
side of a fence. One was drunk--very drunk. The other two covered their
right ears with their hats, out of respect for the departed--whoever he
might have been--and one of them kicked the drunk and muttered something
to him.
He straightened himself up, stared, and reached helplessly for his hat,
which he shoved half off and then on again. Then he made a great effort
to pull himself together--and succeeded. He stood up, braced his back
against the fence, knocked off his hat, and remorsefully placed his foot
on it--to keep it off his head till the funeral passed.
A tall, sentimental drover, who walked by my side, cynically quoted
Byronic verses suitable to the occasion--to death--and asked with
pathetic humour whether we thought the dead man's ticket would be
recognized “over yonder.” It was a G.L.U. ticket, and the general
opinion was that it would be recognized.
Presently my friend said:
“You remember when we were in the boat yesterday, we saw a man driving
some horses along the bank?”
“Yes.”
He nodded at the hearse and said “Well, that's him.”
I thought awhile.
“I didn't take any particular notice of him,” I said. “He said
something, didn't he?”
“Yes; said it was a fine day. You'd have taken more notice if you'd
known that he was doomed to die in the hour, and that those were the
last words he would say to any man in this world.”
“To be sure,” said a full voice from the rear. “If ye'd known that, ye'd
have prolonged the conversation.”
We plodded on across the railway line and along the hot, dusty road
which ran to the cemetery, some of us talking about the accident, and
lying about the narrow escapes we had had ourselves. Presently someone
said:
“There's the Devil.”
I looked up and saw a priest standing in the shade of the tree by the
cemetery gate.
The hearse was drawn up and the tail-boards were opened. The funeral
extinguished its right ear with its hat as four men lifted the coffin
out and laid it over the grave. The priest--a pale, quiet young
fellow--stood under the shade of a sapling which grew at the head of
the grave. He took off his hat, dropped it carelessly on the ground,
and proceeded to business. I noticed that one or two heathens winced
slightly when the holy water was sprinkled on the coffin. The drops
quickly evaporated, and the little round black spots they left were
soon dusted over; but the spots showed, by contrast, the cheapness and
shabbiness of the cloth with which the coffin was covered. It seemed
black before; now it looked a dusky grey.
Just here man's ignorance and vanity made a farce of the funeral. A
big, bull-necked publican, with heavy, blotchy features, and a supremely
ignorant expression, picked up the priest's straw hat and held it
about two inches over the head of his reverence during the whole of the
service. The father, be it remembered, was standing in the shade. A few
shoved their hats on and off uneasily, struggling between their disgust
for the living and their respect for the dead. The hat had a conical
crown and a brim sloping down all round like a sunshade, and the
publican held it with his great red claw spread over the crown. To
do the priest justice, perhaps he didn't notice the incident. A stage
priest or parson in the same position might have said, “Put the hat
down, my friend; is not the memory of our departed brother worth more
than my complexion?” A wattle-bark layman might have expressed himself
in stronger language, none the less to the point. But my priest seemed
unconscious of what was going on. Besides, the publican was a great
and important pillar of the church. He couldn't, as an ignorant
and conceited ass, lose such a good opportunity of asserting his
faithfulness and importance to his church.
The grave looked very narrow under the coffin, and I drew a breath of
relief when the box slid easily down. I saw a coffin get stuck once, at
Rookwood, and it had to be yanked out with difficulty, and laid on the
sods at the feet of the heart-broken relations, who howled dismally
while the grave-diggers widened the hole. But they don't cut contracts
so fine in the West. Our grave-digger was not altogether bowelless,
and, out of respect for that human quality described as “feelin's,” he
scraped up some light and dusty soil and threw it down to deaden the
fall of the clay lumps on the coffin. He also tried to steer the first
few shovelfuls gently down against the end of the grave with the back
of the shovel turned outwards, but the hard dry Darling River clods
rebounded and knocked all the same. It didn't matter much--nothing
does. The fall of lumps of clay on a stranger's coffin doesn't sound any
different from the fall of the same things on an ordinary wooden box--at
least I didn't notice anything awesome or unusual in the sound; but,
perhaps, one of us--the most sensitive--might have been impressed by
being reminded of a burial of long ago, when the thump of every sod
jolted his heart.
I have left out the wattle--because it wasn't there. I have also
neglected to mention the heart-broken old mate, with his grizzled head
bowed and great pearly drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was
absent--he was probably “Out Back.” For similar reasons I have omitted
reference to the suspicious moisture in the eyes of a bearded bush
ruffian named Bill. Bill failed to turn up, and the only moisture was
that which was induced by the heat. I have left out the “sad Australian
sunset” because the sun was not going down at the time. The burial took
place exactly at midday.
The dead bushman's name was Jim, apparently; but they found no
portraits, nor locks of hair, nor any love letters, nor anything of that
kind in his swag--not even a reference to his mother; only some papers
relating to Union matters. Most of us didn't know the name till we
saw it on the coffin; we knew him as “that poor chap that got drowned
yesterday.”
“So his name's James Tyson,” said my drover acquaintance, looking at the
plate.
“Why! Didn't you know that before?” I asked.
“No; but I knew he was a Union man.”
It turned out, afterwards, that J.T. wasn't his real name--only “the
name he went by.” Anyhow he was buried by it, and most of the “Great
Australian Dailies” have mentioned in their brevity columns that a young
man named James John Tyson was drowned in a billabong of the Darling
last Sunday.
We did hear, later on, what his real name was; but if we ever chance to
read it in the “Missing Friends Column,” we shall not be able to give
any information to heart-broken mother or sister or wife, nor to anyone
who could let him hear something to his advantage--for we have already
forgotten the name.
ON THE EDGE OF A PLAIN
“I'd been away from home for eight years,” said Mitchell to his mate,
as they dropped their swags in the mulga shade and sat down. “I hadn't
written a letter--kept putting it off, and a blundering fool of a fellow
that got down the day before me told the old folks that he'd heard I was
dead.”
Here he took a pull at his water-bag.
“When I got home they were all in mourning for me. It was night, and the
girl that opened the door screamed and fainted away like a shot.”
He lit his pipe.
“Mother was upstairs howling and moaning in a chair, with all the girls
boo-hoo-ing round her for company. The old man was sitting in the back
kitchen crying to himself.”
He put his hat down on the ground, dinted in the crown, and poured some
water into the hollow for his cattle-pup.
“The girls came rushing down. Mother was so pumped out that she couldn't
get up. They thought at first I was a ghost, and then they all tried to
get holt of me at once--nearly smothered me. Look at that pup! You want
to carry a tank of water on a dry stretch when you've got a pup that
drinks as much as two men.”
He poured a drop more water into the top of his hat.
“Well, mother screamed and nearly fainted when she saw me. Such a picnic
you never saw. They kept it up all night. I thought the old cove was
gone off his chump. The old woman wouldn't let go my hand for three
mortal hours. Have you got the knife?”
He cut up some more tobacco.
“All next day the house was full of neighbours, and the first to come
was an old sweetheart of mine; I never thought she cared for me till
then. Mother and the girls made me swear never to go away any more; and
they kept watching me, and hardly let me go outside for fear I'd--”
“Get drunk?”
“No--you're smart--for fear I'd clear. At last I swore on the Bible that
I'd never leave home while the old folks were alive; and then mother
seemed easier in her mind.”
He rolled the pup over and examined his feet. “I expect I'll have to
carry him a bit--his feet are sore. Well, he's done pretty well this
morning, and anyway he won't drink so much when he's carried.”
“You broke your promise about leaving home,” said his mate.
Mitchell stood up, stretched himself, and looked dolefully from his
heavy swag to the wide, hot, shadeless cotton-bush plain ahead.
“Oh, yes,” he yawned, “I stopped at home for a week, and then they began
to growl because I couldn't get any work to do.”
The mate guffawed and Mitchell grinned. They shouldered the swags, with
the pup on top of Mitchell's, took up their billies and water-bags,
turned their unshaven faces to the wide, hazy distance, and left the
timber behind them.
IN A DRY SEASON
Draw a wire fence and a few ragged gums, and add some scattered sheep
running away from the train. Then you'll have the bush all along the New
South Wales western line from Bathurst on.
The railway towns consist of a public house and a general store, with a
square tank and a school-house on piles in the nearer distance. The tank
stands at the end of the school and is not many times smaller than the
building itself. It is safe to call the pub “The Railway Hotel,” and the
store “The Railway Stores,” with an “s.” A couple of patient, ungroomed
hacks are probably standing outside the pub, while their masters
are inside having a drink--several drinks. Also it's safe to draw a
sundowner sitting listlessly on a bench on the veranda, reading the
_Bulletin_. The Railway Stores seem to exist only in the shadow of the
pub, and it is impossible to conceive either as being independent of
the other. There is sometimes a small, oblong weather-board
building--unpainted, and generally leaning in one of the eight possible
directions, and perhaps with a twist in another--which, from its
half-obliterated sign, seems to have started as a rival to the Railway
Stores; but the shutters are up and the place empty.
The only town I saw that differed much from the above consisted of a
box-bark humpy with a clay chimney, and a woman standing at the door
throwing out the wash-up water.
By way of variety, the artist might make a water-colour sketch of a
fettler's tent on the line, with a billy hanging over the fire in front,
and three fettlers standing round filling their pipes.
Slop sac suits, red faces, and old-fashioned, flat-brimmed hats, with
wire round the brims, begin to drop into the train on the other side of
Bathurst; and here and there a hat with three inches of crape round the
crown, which perhaps signifies death in the family at some remote date,
and perhaps doesn't. Sometimes, I believe, it only means grease under
the band. I notice that when a bushman puts crape round his hat he
generally leaves it there till the hat wears out, or another friend
dies. In the latter case, he buys a new piece of crape. This outward
sign of bereavement usually has a jolly red face beneath it. Death is
about the only cheerful thing in the bush.
We crossed the Macquarie--a narrow, muddy gutter with a dog swimming
across, and three goats interested.
A little farther on we saw the first sundowner. He carried a Royal
Alfred, and had a billy in one hand and a stick in the other. He was
dressed in a tail-coat turned yellow, a print shirt, and a pair of
moleskin trousers, with big square calico patches on the knees; and his
old straw hat was covered with calico. Suddenly he slipped his swag,
dropped his billy, and ran forward, boldly flourishing the stick. I
thought that he was mad, and was about to attack the train, but he
wasn't; he was only killing a snake. I didn't have time to see whether
he cooked the snake or not--perhaps he only thought of Adam.
Somebody told me that the country was very dry on the other side of
Nevertire. It is. I wouldn't like to sit down on it any where. The
least horrible spot in the bush, in a dry season, is where the bush
isn't--where it has been cleared away and a green crop is trying to
grow. They talk of settling people on the land! Better settle _in_ it.
I'd rather settle on the water; at least, until some gigantic system of
irrigation is perfected in the West.
Along about Byrock we saw the first shearers. They dress like the
unemployed, but differ from that body in their looks of independence.
They sat on trucks and wool-bales and the fence, watching the train,
and hailed Bill, and Jim, and Tom, and asked how those individuals were
getting on.
Here we came across soft felt hats with straps round the crowns, and
full-bearded faces under them. Also a splendid-looking black tracker in
a masher uniform and a pair of Wellington boots.
One or two square-cuts and stand-up collars struggle dismally through to
the bitter end. Often a member of the unemployed starts cheerfully
out, with a letter from the Government Labour Bureau in his pocket, and
nothing else. He has an idea that the station where he has the job will
be within easy walking distance of Bourke. Perhaps he thinks there'll
be a cart or a buggy waiting for him. He travels for a night and day
without a bite to eat, and, on arrival, he finds that the station is
eighty or a hundred miles away. Then he has to explain matters to
a publican and a coach-driver. God bless the publican and the
coach-driver! God forgive our social system!
Native industry was represented at one place along the line by three
tiles, a chimney-pot, and a length of piping on a slab.
Somebody said to me, “Yer wanter go out back, young man, if yer wanter
see the country. Yer wanter get away from the line.” I don't wanter;
I've been there.
You could go to the brink of eternity so far as Australia is concerned
and yet meet an animated mummy of a swagman who will talk of going “out
back.” Out upon the out-back fiend!
About Byrock we met the bush liar in all his glory. He was dressed
like--like a bush larrikin. His name was Jim. He had been to a ball
where some blank had “touched” his blanky overcoat. The overcoat had
a cheque for ten “quid” in the pocket. He didn't seem to feel the
loss much. “Wot's ten quid?” He'd been everywhere, including the Gulf
country. He still had three or four sheds to go to. He had telegrams in
his pocket from half a dozen squatters and supers offering him pens on
any terms. He didn't give a blank whether he took them or no. He thought
at first he had the telegrams on him but found that he had left them
in the pocket of the overcoat aforesaid. He had learned butchering in a
day. He was a bit of a scrapper himself and talked a lot about the ring.
At the last station where he shore he gave the super the father of a
hiding. The super was a big chap, about six-foot-three, and had knocked
out Paddy Somebody in one round. He worked with a man who shore four
hundred sheep in nine hours.
Here a quiet-looking bushman in a corner of the carriage grew restless,
and presently he opened his mouth and took the liar down in about three
minutes.
At 5.30 we saw a long line of camels moving out across the sunset.
There's something snaky about camels. They remind me of turtles and
goannas.
Somebody said, “Here's Bourke.”
HE'D COME BACK
The yarn was all lies, I suppose; but it wasn't bad. A city bushman told
it, of course, and he told it in the travellers' hut.
“As true's God hears me I never meant to desert her in cold blood,” he
said. “We'd only been married about two years, and we'd got along grand
together; but times was hard, and I had to jump at the first chance of a
job, and leave her with her people, an' go up-country.”
He paused and fumbled with his pipe until all ears were brought to bear
on him.
“She was a beauty, and no mistake; she was far too good for me--I often
wondered how she came to have a chap like me.”
He paused again, and the others thought over it--and wondered too,
perhaps.
The joker opened his lips to speak, but altered his mind about it.
“Well, I travelled up into Queensland, and worked back into Victoria 'n'
South Australia, an' I wrote home pretty reg'lar and sent what money
I could. Last I got down on to the south-western coast of South
Australia--an' there I got mixed up with another woman--you know what
that means, boys?”
Sympathetic silence.
“Well, this went on for two years, and then the other woman drove me to
drink. You know what a woman can do when the devil's in her?”
Sound between a sigh and a groan from Lally Thompson. “My oath,” he
said, sadly.
“You should have made it _three_ years, Jack,” interposed the joker;
“you said two years before.” But he was suppressed.
“Well, I got free of them both, at last--drink and the woman, I
mean; but it took another--it took a couple of years to pull myself
straight--”
Here the joker opened his mouth again, but was warmly requested to shut
it.
“Then, chaps, I got thinking. My conscience began to hurt me, and--and
hurt worse every day. It nearly drove me to drink again. Ah, boys, a
man--if he is a man--can't expect to wrong a woman and escape scot-free
in the end.” (Sigh from Lally Thompson.) “It's the one thing that always
comes home to a man, sooner or later--you know what that means, boys.”
Lally Thompson: “My oath!”
The joker: “Dry up yer crimson oath! What do you know about women?”
Cries of “Order!”
“Well,” continued the story-teller, “I got thinking. I heard that my
wife had broken her heart when I left her, and that made matters worse.
I began to feel very bad about it. I felt mean. I felt disgusted with
myself. I pictured my poor, ill-treated, little wife and children in
misery and poverty, and my conscience wouldn't let me rest night or
day”--(Lally Thompson seemed greatly moved)--“so at last I made up my
mind to be a man, and make--what's the word?”
“Reparation,” suggested the joker.
“Yes, so I slaved like a nigger for a year or so, got a few pounds
together and went to find my wife. I found out that she was living in
a cottage in Burwood, Sydney, and struggling through the winter on what
she'd saved from the money her father left her.
“I got a shave and dressed up quiet and decent. I was older-looking and
more subdued like, and I'd got pretty grey in those few years that I'd
been making a fool of myself; and, some how, I felt rather glad about
it, because I reckoned she'd notice it first thing--she was always quick
at noticing things--and forgive me all the quicker. Well, I waylaid
the school kids that evening, and found out mine--a little boy and a
girl--and fine youngsters they were. The girl took after her mother, and
the youngster was the dead spit o' me. I gave 'em half a crows each and
told them to tell their mother that someone would come when the sun went
down.”
Bogan Bill nodded approvingly.
“So at sundown I went and knocked at the door. It opened and there stood
my little wife looking prettier than ever--only careworn.”
Long, impressive pause.
“Well, Jack, what did she do?” asked Bogan.
“She didn't do nothing.”
“Well, Jack, and what did she say?”
Jack sighed and straightened himself up: “She said--she said--'Well, so
you've come back.'”
“Painful silence.
“Well, Jack, and what did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“Well, and so you had!” said Tom Moonlight.