Thirty Years in Australia

RRAY J

thing to being a missionary that he ever came to. There are roads and thriving townships along that route now; in our time it was the wildest Bush-track, about which lay the homesteads of the pioneer squatters, at a day's journey one from another. These good men used to welcome warmly the infrequent parson, round up their hands f

ter on its back, was saddled and he in his Bush riding costume of short coat, tough trousers, and leather leggings, ready to set forth in the usual way. But I was ill just then, and when it ca

est way out of the difficulty. "The change of

a buggy. We had not yet provided ourselves with a vehicle of our own, although we owned a horse. Practically we owned dozens of horses, because the squatters were always pressing loans of them upon us, exchanging fresh for stale, paddocking any that needed to be turned out; and

ather, but Australian born, as also was his wife. They were the oldest of old families, their history interwoven with the very foundations of the State. Her father was killed by bushrangers, his father was almost killed by them, or by blacks-I forget which; and he showed me dinted gun-barrels and other trophies that implied a battle for existence on his own part in the

dequate. He had the shafts removed from our buggy, and a pole substituted, and gave us a pair of strong, staunch, sweet-tempered horses, which I have no doubt saved our lives on one occasion, if not on two. There was no discussion about it. They were

stuffed luncheon basket and invalid comforts under the buggy seat. Everybody did that when seeing us off. It was a pity I could not do justice to the good things we turned out upon the grass when we made our noontide halt

Not we, at any rate. The hills crowded upon the river, and to get past them you either had to make a long and uninteresting detour inland or clamber over the shoulders that sloped sheer into the swiftly-running stream. We chose this left-hand route, and thus put the splendid mettle of our horses to full proof for the first time. Some of those "sidings" were so steep that while the staunch creatures clung to the track, digging thei

g himself. In those endless miles of wilderness, faintly scratched with crossing and re-crossing bridle-tracks, nothing to guide him that was visible to me, he was, from the first, as

d in the buggy wheels and swished our hands and faces; and we had to recognise that we were off the track, and that the darkest of dark nights had untimely caught us. We were not lost, because we could hear the dogs barking at the homestead that was our goal, but we were as good as lost-"bushed" for the night, although for some time we would not acknowledge it. If the reader asks what carriage-lamps were made for, I reply, not for Bushmen in those days. People living in and about the towns used them, in obedience to by-laws, and the coaches travelled at night with grand hoods of light

self, and with the greatest difficulty found me again. The horses stood quiet and patient, just snuffing and jingling a little, and we tied them up and crept around the immediate neighbourhood together, hand in hand, until they in turn were lost-lost for many agonisin

f Mother Earth. We spread our one rug thereon, and covered ourselves with the shawl that had Dik's shot-holes in it. That shawl-a wedding present-was a dream of a shawl for softness, thickness, cosiness, a family treasure for ever so many years. Babies were rolled in it, and little invalids sitting up, and anybody who was shivery or ailing (disease germ

for me and another enterprising matron to camp out with a party of engineers surveying a proposed road through a wild jumble of hills and glens, at what would have been an ideal spot. They were taking tents and beds, and nice things to cook at the glorious fire they would keep us warm with; nothing they could think of to enhance our enjoyment had been forgotten. Alas! the rain came, and extinguished that project and my joy. On the afternoon of the expected happy night, a host-that-should-h

nows when he must respect that state of things. A Bush fire is more easily started than put out. So we lay and listened to the trampling and munching of the invisible horses, the scratchings and runnings and snoring g

d hours before it came. As soon as we could find our way we went to the river to wash. How starvingly raw and cold that early morning was! And to this day I am sorry for myself when I remember how I felt, after the sleepless, supperless, wet, sick night. I would have been glad to lie dow

e to tumble straightway into bed. For it was useless to attempt to observe any of the usages of polite society, under the circumstances. Daily, through that trip, I arrived in this condition, more or less, at some new strange hous

gation had dispersed to its work); and after an early lunch we took the road again. I was firm in insisting upon keeping a tight hold of my

g down before, its neat vineyard and orchard climbing behind, that as a picture I hung it "on the line," there and then, and the gallery of memory holds nothing of the same age that has worn so well. It was a bachelor establishment-an awkward circumstance, at the first blush, but soon perceived to

t's concern and my own disappointment. The housekeeper bore me off to bed, and coddled me with arrowroot or beef-tea or something, while at the same time she supervised the serving of a meal which was described to me afterwards in tantalising terms. I was glad that my bedroom was close to the dining-room-probably opened out of it, like so many guest-chambers of the period. I

of our children, in low tones, not to disturb the adjacent worshippers. She, too, I never saw before or since-it was indeed a case of ships that pass in the night-but I have loved

den while breakfast was preparing, and I was sorry the half hour could not be lengthened to a day-or a week. But the exigencies of G.'s time-table dr

d here it curved between hilly banks and woods whose fringes dipped into the stream. Primeval forest it was, too (except for that daily rarer brush fence), the free home of beautiful birds that may now be sought in vain within the boundaries of the state; and a stream still populous with wild-fowl of many kinds. By noon we must have worked a little inland, for my journal says it was a creek we camped by f

Occasionally she was conveyed to a township which possessed one, and there awaited in lodgings the opportunity to profit by his services; but the majority of Bush women preferred to stay at home and make shift with the peripatetic Gamp, old and unscientific as she always was. There was no fuss made over the

rsions on horseback, and we spent a second night under t

wal of State aid from the originally established (English) church, only the Roman Catholics standing out from the miscellaneous company. This seemed a sad "come-down" to us at first, with our hereditary reserve and exclusiveness in relation to "dissenters"-a word long eliminated from our vocabulary. The miner who, being invited to church, replied affably, "Ay, ay, I'll give ye all a turn," showed us our place in the colonial scheme of things, and we did not like it a bit. But we soon adapted ourselves. And G. and the current Presbyter

ding, the horses unharnessed, feeding under the trees; they had brought worshippers from many miles away, their sincerity as such proved by the trouble they had taken to reach the rendezvous, and by the heartiness of their demeanour while service was going on. The school forms, made for children, would bend, and sometimes break, under the heavy men, close-packed alo

ion-whence, after a good meal, they drove us to the second service of the day, similar to the first. We then drove ourselves to a third station (a delightful place, G.'s f

de the necessary early departure, and a few hours la

ire far ahead. Since we were not responsible for starting it, we hailed it as a welcome variation in the monotony of our drive. We hoped to skirt it near enough to see what it was doing. Bush fires were p

roaring to the sky. Our anxiety to get close to it gradually gave place to a wish that it were further away. Misgivings deepen

other side, and finding a crossing-place. To go into the unburnt scrub on either hand would have been madness, for nothing could have saved us had the fire caught us there. Every inch of earth provided fuel for it, except the narrow

nego in the burning fiery furnace, enveloped in a glare as of the infernal regions. The tree-torches over our heads dropped blazing leaves on us (the useful grey shawl again intervening): the grass-blades caught and c

uld have destroyed us all. Digging their heads into their chests, obeying voice, whip, and rein, they strained along doggedly, keeping the track as they had done on the steep sidings, until they brou

the behaviour of the person interviewed. The thin veneer of his sympathy for us was as glass over his solid and shining satisf

mselves in a romantic nook of the hills-who ought not to have been asked to entertain a lady,

mlet that is now a full-grown town, with a railway to it. On the way we stopped to watch the evolutions of an eagle-hawk, which had caught up an opossum (stupid as an owl in daylight), and was sailing through the ether with it, fiercely chased by all the

s from a fiery, saved us from a watery, grave-possibly. G., it is true, was a good swimmer, but I was not, and the worst mi

to the fording-place. The only thing to do, therefore, was to take the last one known, while anticipating-rightly as it

r, until we swayed and rocked and swung round upon our axis, and the current took the horses off their feet and began to drift them down. But their heads still pointed to the old landing-place: with all their str

-that house where even the blacks were made welcome, one of them having the run of visitors' bedrooms in the night. There G. left