In Bad Company and other stories

Mr. Lodbroke and the rest of the party are at this time fully engaged in lighting fires, and 'steadying the cattle.' Their turn for luxury, tea, and improving conversation will come at a later period.

'Terrible hard they seem to camp to-night,' quoth Jim, taking off a wedge of beef with his clasp-knife, and looking approvingly at Mr. Elms, who is rushing frantically after an old cow with a fire-stick in his hand. 'One comfort is, some of it'll be out of 'em by the time we're on watch.'

'Surely we two won't be able to keep them on the camp?' queries Mr. Jones, alarmed at the responsibility about to devolve upon him and his companion, and picturing cattle escaping into the darkness in all directions.

'Dessay we'll do well enough, after a bit,' said that experienced person reassuringly. 'Just you keep walking round 'em till you come to me. I'll be t'other side. If two or three sneaks out, rush at 'em and keep a fire-stick handy to throw. If a string makes for goin', holler for me. But they ain't fond of leavin' one another, nor yet travellin' in the dark. We'd as well go on now.'

Supper having been concluded without unnecessary hurry on his part, Monaro Jim walks forth, filling his pipe as he goes. He explains to Mr. Jones the position of the fires he is to guard, and departs to his post. As they advance, the rest of the party make for the main camp-fire with considerable alacrity, leaving Mr. Jones nervous but sternly determined. For the first half-hour he paces rapidly from fire to fire, anxiously peering into the darkness and driving back straggling animals. Rather to his surprise they rush back to their companions in the herd directly they see him or hear his voice, in preference to what he supposed to be their obvious course, viz. to disappear in the darkness and elude pursuit.

Finding that Jim did not think the same activity necessary, and observing that the cattle, with few exceptions, remained stationary, even commenced to lie down, Mr. Jones moderates his energy and lights his pipe. He finds time to smoke in peace by the middle fire. As the night wears on he employs himself in replenishing the fires on his side, and occasionally carrying or dragging heavy logs of wood. Happening to look at his watch after doing all this, he finds to his astonishment that half his vigil is over. He feels refreshed by his late heartily-eaten meal. He warms himself from time to time by the blazing fires which he has piled up. Once every half-hour he walks round his watch and ward. The night is calm and starlit. The cattle have mostly lain down, and are apparently not disposed to stir. When another hour has passed, Mr. Jones begins to realise a treacherous inclination for slumber.

He has been up early, has worked hard all day, and after the third hour of watching begins to feel as if he would give all the world for a good, careless sleep. However, he combats the feeling, and it passes off. Great comfort comes from the thought that when his watch is over at ten o'clock, he can have unbroken rest till breakfast-time.

The last hour dies hard, but comes to its end in due time, and then Mr. Jones, with secret joy, veiled under a careless manner, shakes the feet of the pair who are to relieve him and his mate, telling them to keep moving as the cattle are troublesome on the far side. Having seen them drowsily dressing and finally on their way to his outside fire, Mr. Jones betakes himself to his cork mattress, ground-sheet, and blankets, where under five minutes he is sleeping that sleep which comes to the just and the unjust alike if only they be sufficiently tired.

At half-past five A.M. Dan, the cook, is roaring out unfeelingly, 'All aboard!' It seems but a few minutes to our tired hero, but on reference to his watch the fact is fully borne out. So ends his first night's watching.

Another day, with its difficulties to be surmounted and its dangers to be risked. We have said farewell to the cold uplands of Monaro proper, and are entering a mountain land, amid deep ravines and narrow gorges, sunless glens, dense forests, and precipitous ranges. We become aware that our droving difficulties are commencing. The subsoil, saturated with the rains of the most severe season known for thirty years, gives under the heavy trampling of the leading bullocks. In the vain struggle to pass quickly many of the stronger cattle only succeed in getting deeper and deeper into the treacherous hillsides.

It is even difficult to ride, and Mr. Jones more than once finds himself confronted by a bullock of forbidding aspect, who, unable to advance or retire, glares as if too happy to have the chance of 'skewering' him, and keeps, with the defiance of despair, turning his horns instead of his heels towards Mr. Jones' person.

However, by patience and strategy, these difficulties are disposed of and the camp is reached, in the darkest and most gloomy of forests. No more easy days, no more 'lazy-ally' for us. We have entered the 'big timber,' crede Monaro Jim, and it will be all hard work and 'slogging' till we sight the parks and meadows of Gippsland. So we fare on, gradually ascending the forest hills which are to bring us to the celebrated pass by which we shall surmount the grand alpine chain. Sometimes we pass through darksome forests, where the scanty vegetation tantalises the hungry drove; now we stand upon the brow of rocky pinnacles and see stretching before us a cloud-world of mountain peaks and glaciers, rosy in the flush of dawn. We dine by the side of clear, cold, alpine streams, which ripple and gurgle through long summer days, full-fed as now. By such a brook, it chances one day, as we round a rugged promontory, that the unwonted appearance of a settler's hut startles us; an inhabited dwelling too, with smoke issuing from the chimney, a real woman, and (ever so many) children. Shy and wondering, they stand gazing at us as if we were Red Indians, while their mother civilly offers milk and potatoes – luxuries both.

'Her husband was away,' she explained in answer to our inquiries. 'He was nearly always out on the run, and sometimes away for weeks at a time, mustering.'

'Was she not afraid?'

'Oh no; who would harm her? And there was not much to steal.'

'Wasn't she awfully dull?' (This from Mr. Jones.)

'Well, it was rather quiet, but there – the children, and the cows, and the garden, – she always had something to do.'

'Her husband was handy if he made that water-wheel, eh?'

'Oh no. Yankee Jack, the digger, made that one summer he was prospecting about here.'

'However did they manage to get the dray here?'

'Well' (rather proudly), 'it was the only dray for many a mile round; her father gave it to them – and Joe, he packed it on the old horse, up the range, bit by bit.'

'Did she think the mountains fine?'

'Oh yes. They were very well, but she wished they wouldn't rise just out of their back-door like.'

We said farewell to the kindly, simple dame and her sturdy brood of Anglo-Saxons – blue-eyed and rosy-faced as if they had come out of Kent or Devonshire – true types of a race which claims the waste places of the earth for a heritage and which creates thereof New Englands and Greater Britains.

We wander slowly on with our sauntering, grazing herd, this rarely mild, calm winter day. We look back as the cottage grows dim in the distance – the little garden, the water-wheel, the patient wife listening ever for the hoof-tramps of her husband's horse, fade in the darkening eve. But we do not forget the little home picture, this floweret of tender bloom beneath the melancholy alp.

'We'll have to look out pretty sharp to-morrow, Mr. Jones,' says Monaro Jim. 'We've got rather bad country before us.'

'Bad country? Why, what do you call this?' hastily returns that gentleman.

'We're only just a-comin' to it,' calmly explains the saturnine stock-rider. 'You'll see what the sidelings is like; why, this here's a plain to it – cattle slipping and perhaps killing theirselves, big rocks falling fit to knock yer brains out; there ain't hardly a yard fit for a horse to carry you. Them boots of your'n won't look very fresh to-morrow night.' Here Jim took a soothing draw at his pipe, and glanced pityingly at Mr. Jones' neat elastic-sided boots, apparently absorbed in pleasing thoughts of evil which the morrow night will bring forth.

'Is there much more "sideling," as you call it?' inquired Mr. Jones, rather overcome by this terrific description, and almost prepared to arrive in Gippsland like a barefooted friar, if indeed he ever reached that far and, as he is beginning to believe, fabulous country.

'Not more'n a week of the wust of it,' answered the hard-hearted Jim. 'I wish we was well over it. I've known a-many accidents in the sidelings in my time.'

The dawn is still grey as we ascend a green peak, at the summit of which commences the first of the dreaded sidelings. The peculiarity of the track here is, that while on the upper side the mountains through which the Snowy River cleaves its rugged path rear themselves heavenwards with a gradient of about one foot in three, on the lower side there is not an inch of level ground between the track and the foaming waters of the river. Where the river shore should have been is a mass of granite crags and boulders. The trails of the many herds which have preceded us are deeply-worn ruts, along which it is just possible for men to walk in single file; if slippery with recent rains, or if any confusion occurs, they are all but impassable. If the cattle, as was their constant endeavour, manage to climb upwards, it is difficult and dangerous to force them down. If they slip or fall downwards towards the river, it is a forlorn hope to get them up.

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIVE-BORN TYPE

Numberless speculations, dogmatisms, and prophecies have found utterance, in and out of Australia, touching the characteristics and destiny of the Children of the Soil. Colonial critics sitting in judgment upon their own and other people's offspring have chiefly felt moved to deliver a verdict of inferiority to the sacred British type. Not noticeably diverse has been that of the untravelled European philosopher or social student. In nearly all cases, the mildest judgment indicated some degree of physical or mental differentiation; another term, for degeneration. If in the former greater height and length of limb were conceded, to be neutralised by lack of muscle and vitality. Worse again, if in the latter category a savage precocity and perceptive intelligence were admitted, it was rarely if ever supported by persistency, application, or broad mental grasp.

In the very early days of New South Wales, which I am old enough, alas! to remember, my boyish experience familiarised me with various products, animate and inanimate, of the Cape of Good Hope, then a handy storehouse of necessaries, for this far and oft-forgotten continent. The mention of 'Cape' geese, 'Cape' wine, 'Cape' horses, 'Cape' gooseberries, was unceasing. Indeed I once heard the pied peewit – a bird familiar to all observing youth – referred to as a Cape 'magpie.' This was, of course, natural enough. But the logical outcome of this simple nomenclature, which puzzled me at the time, was that 'Cape,' used in that sense, was another name for almost any article resembling but inferior to a prized original. Thus the Cape wine was what we still, perhaps erroneously, consider that inspiriting but less delicate beverage to be; the Cape geese were smaller and marketably less valuable than their thick-necked solemn English cousins; the Cape gooseberries were sweet with a mawkish sweetness, how far below the rough richness of the English fruit! The Cape horses, not devoid of pace, were weedy and low-caste; while the Cape pigeon was not a pigeon at all, but a gull; and even the Cape magpie was held to be a species of lark, dressed up in the parti-coloured plumes of his august relative, the herald of the dawn.

Can my readers recall a period in which the adjectives 'colonial' or 'native' were not held to express very similar ideas as contrasted with 'European' or 'imported'? Along with the 'Cape' associations, I acquired, from many sources, a fixed idea that an indefinable, climatic process was somehow at work in Australia, preventing like from producing like. It applied equally to men and women, horses and cattle, sheep and goats, plants and flowers, qualities and manners. Over this anomaly, dooming the unconscious 'currency lads and lasses' to perpetual 'Cape' creolism, I marvelled greatly. My sympathies, meantime, were loyally enlisted with the 'native' party.

Years rolled on. I visited other colonies and roamed over tracts of broad Australia, far from my boyhood's home. Yet I never lost sight of the question which so troubled my youth. I neglected no opportunity of making observations, recording facts, or instituting comparisons connected with this mysterious subtle Australian degeneration theory.

I even enjoyed the privilege – of which I desire to speak reverently and gratefully – of visiting the dear old land, whence came the ancestors of all Australians, the land of the real, veritable 'old masters,' before any like-seeming but disappointing 'Cape' copies of the glorious originals were thought of. I enjoyed thus certain opportunities, of which I did not fail to make reasonable use.

I mention personal facts merely to show that, having early in life apprehended the magnitude of the question, I set myself, not without certain facilities for generalisation, or reasonable time devoted to the inquiry (about fifty years – ah me!), to do battle with the error, now as then, possessing vitality and power of propagation.

The first primary fact which appealed to my reasoning powers as subversive of the 'Cape' or degeneration doctrine was that of the high and increasing value of the fleece of the Australian merino sheep. This astonishing animal, bred from individuals of selected cabanas of the highest Spanish lineage, was landed in New South Wales in the early years of settlement, and tenderly cherished by the Macarthurs, Rileys, Coxes, and other leading colonists, more enthusiastic for the welfare of the land than their own aggrandisement. Kept free from 'improvement'(?) by heterogeneous imported blood, it was actually declared by Shaw of Victoria and other clear-visioned pastoral prophets to be equal, nay superior, to the best imported sheep. It was contended for him that the calumniated climate and pastures of Australia had in the acclimatised merino produced a fleece delicately soft, free, lustrous; withal, so highly adapted for the finer fabrics that nothing European could compare with it. That from the type, now securely fixed, and capable of reproducing itself illimitably, had been evolved the most valuable fleece-producing animal, reared in the open air and under natural conditions, in the whole world. That so far from the infusion of the best Spanish and Gascon blood improving the Camden merino, as it commenced to be called, marked deterioration followed. Horror of horrors! imported blood injurious – what heresy was this? Yet, incontestably, the prices of the Havilah, Mount Hope, Larra, and Ercildoune clips would seem to have triumphantly established Mr. Shaw's daring proposition.

As to horses, slowly and yet surely it began to be asserted, if not believed, that any stud-master in possession of a family of Australian thoroughbreds, originally imported and bred uncrossed for generations beneath the bright Australian sky, reared on the crisp Australian pastures, had probably better pause before he introduced English blood, unless he knew it to be absolutely superior and likely to assimilate successfully. Later on men were found to say that, given pure pedigree, speed, and soundness on the part of sire and dam, Australian blood-horses, though reared for generations under the fibre-relaxing climatic influences of the Great South Land, were as grandly grown, as speedy, as sound in wind and limb, as full of vigour and vitality, as any of the 'terribly high-bred cattle' which at Newmarket represent the ne plus ultra of equine perfection.

To this latter-day heresy, speculations as to what might have come to the reputation of the race-courses of the land if evil hap had chanced to the son of Cap-à-pie and Paraguay, lent considerable force.

Gradually, also, uprose a bucolic, protesting party, who denied that the unqualified supremacy of the British-bred shorthorn was to last for all time. Second Hubback cows and bulls of the blood of Belvidere and Mussulman, Favourite and Comet, had landed here before the rival names of Bates and Booth were household words, from the Hawkesbury to the Sylvester. Careful breeders, enthusiasts for pedigree, had jealously kept the blood pure. Size and beauty, hair, colour and handling, constitution and flesh-amassing power were equalled or even exceeded in their descendants. Though sorely trammelled by the 'Cape' orthodoxy, these even at length ventured to raise their flag and proclaim a revolutionary epic of fullest colonial brotherhood, other things being equal. Following them came the champions of Devon and Hereford cattle. Lastly, the Suez mail brought news that certain Bates' Duchesses, born and bred in America, in the United States, where the 'Cape' theory as regarding man and beast to this day doth flourish luxuriantly, were re-exported and sold in England for dream-prices before an idolatrous audience. 'So mote it be,' argued the bolder reasoner – 'even yet in Australia preserve we but our pure tribes inviolate!'

It irks one to recall how rigidly comprehensive was the elastic network of the 'Cape' theory. By no means would the bulldog fight, nor die in battle the close-trimmed cock, nor sing the bird, nor flower perfume the breeze in Australia, as did their prototypes in 'Merrie England.' Long years since this prejudicial indictment has been laid to rest amid the limbo of forgotten absurdities. Man, the most highly-organised animal, suffered of course the most injurious disparagement; he has but slowly been able to clear himself from these damaging aspersions.

Yet, methinks, old Time, his 'whirligigs and revenges,' is even now uplifting the personal character of the Southern Briton, no longer forced to resent the damaging accusation. In the lower forms of the great School of Effort our champions have arisen and done battle with many a dux of the Old World. They have abundantly demonstrated that they could 'make the pace' and yet exhibit the 'staying power,' which is the great heritage of the breed. Lofty of stature and lithe of limb as they may be – though all are not so – they have shown that they inherited the stark sinews, the unyielding muscles, the indomitable, dogged energy of those 'terrible beef-fed islanders' from whom we are all descended. In the boat, on the cricket-field, at the rifle-targets, and in the saddle, the Australian has shown that he can hold his own with his European relatives.

It remains to be seen whether in the more æsthetic departments he has exhibited the same power of competing on equal terms with his Northern kinsmen. I now venture to assert, considering the limited number of families relatively from which choice could be made, that a very large proportion of Australian-born persons, of both sexes, have exhibited a high degree of talent, and, in some cases, unquestioned genius in the literary, forensic, or scientific arena. That small and distant English-speaking population, which in a single generation produced such men as Wentworth, Robertson, Martin, Dalley, Stephen, Forster, Halloran, Deniehy, Kendall, and Harper – Australians by birth or rearing – may fairly lay claim to the highest intellectual proclivities, to a moral atmosphere favourable to mental development. It is inexpedient to mention names in a limited community, but I may assert, without laying myself open to that accusation of boasting for which a colonial synonym has been adopted, that in the learned professions Australians may be found, if not at the acknowledged pinnacle, so near as to be worthily striving for pre-eminence. Among the fair daughters of the land we know that there are numbered singers, painters, musicians, histrionic artists, and writers, of an eminence which fits them worthily to compete with European celebrities.

Pledged to observing, with deep interest, the native Australian type, so far as it has been presented to me, I have rarely missed an opportunity of testing not only the general characteristics of the individuals examined, – I have even pushed my inquiries almost to the verge of rudeness as to the nationality of parents and grandparents; from the Parramatta River to the Clarence, from the Moyne to the Murrumbidgee, from the Yarra to the Mataura, I have noticed 'natives' of all ranks, ages, and sexes. The eager ethnological reader will naturally require my conclusive opinion – a prosaic, possibly a disappointing one. Australian-born persons, with trifling exceptions, are very like everybody else, born of British blood, anywhere. So far from all being run into one mould, as it pleases strangers to believe, they present as many instances of individual divergence from the ordinary Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic types – mentally and physically – as are to be found in Europe or elsewhere. Then the heat, the constant eating of meat, the locomotive, speculative habit of the land – do these not produce a variation of type? How can they be like people born in the green Motherland? is eagerly asked. My answer is – that 'race is everything.' A little heat more or less, a little extra wayfaring, the prevalence of the orange and banana, of abundant food – these things do not suffice to relax the fibre and lower the stamina of the bold sea-roving breed which has never counted the cost of the deadliest climate or the wildest sea where honour was to be satisfied, thirst for adventure to be slaked, or even that lower but essential desideratum, a full purse to be secured. If the air be hot, there sighs the ocean breeze to temper it withal. On the great interior plateaux, the pure, dry atmosphere, which invigorates the invalid, rears up uninjured the hardy broods of the farmer, the stock-rider, and the shepherd. Stalwart men and wholesome, stirring lasses do they make. The profusely-used beef and mutton diet, due to our countless flocks and herds, though it does not tend to produce grossness of habit, is a muscle-producing food, best fitted for those who are compelled to travel far and fast. The ordinary bush-labourer, reared on a farm or a station, is generally a tall, rather graceful personage. He may be comparatively slight-looking, but if you test or measure him, you will find that the spareness is more apparent than real. His limbs are muscular and sinewy; his chest is broad; his shoulders well spread; he is extremely active, and, either on foot or horseback, can hold his own with any nationality. Wiry and athletic, he is much stronger than he looks. He will generally do manual labour after a fashion and at a pace that would astonish a Kent or Sussex yokel. If he have not the abnormally broad frame of the English navvy or farm-labourer, neither has he the bowed frame, the bent back, the shorter limbs of the European hind. With all his faults he is much more as Nature made him, unwarped by ceaseless compulsory labour, and more capable of the rational enjoyment of life.

With regard to mental characteristics. It has been the fashion to assert that a certain want of thoroughness is observable in the native Australian youths. 'They will not fag at their books to the same extent as a Britisher. They are superficial, light-minded, unstable, what not.'

I well believe this to be an unfounded charge. When will people cease to talk of 'Australians' doing this and that, or permit colonists to differ among themselves from birth, as elsewhere? Here, under the Southern Cross as under Ursa Major, are born the imaginative and the practical, the energetic, the dreamy, the slow and the brilliant, the cautious and the rash, the persevering and the fickle. As the inscrutable human unit enters the world, so must he or she remain, I hold, but partially modified by human agency, until the day of death. Change of abode or circumstance will not perceptibly alter the mysteriously-persistent entity. The eager British or other critic sums up the inhabitants living in five hundred different ways as typical colonists. 'The Australian' (saith he) 'does this, or looks like that, dislikes formality, or abhors uniformity. He is quick, but not persevering; he is not so profound, so long enduring, so "thorough" as the Englishman.' Such reasoners surely assume that all Australians 'to the manner born' were hewn out of one primeval eucalyptus log, instead of, as I had the honour to remark before, possessing in full abundance the endless differentiations and divergences from the parent type, and from each other, so noticeable in Great Britain.