In Bad Company and other stories

WALKS ABROAD

Only a month to midsummer – A.D. 1883 – when on this verge of the great north-western plain-ocean we fall across a section of the railway to Bourke in course of construction. Nature is here hard beset by Art. What a mighty avenue has the contractor's army cut through the primeval forest! The close-ranked trees taper, apparently, to nothingness until the horizon is reached. In the twelve miles that your sight reaches, there is not the smallest curve – no departure from the mathematically straight line. If you could see a hundred and twenty miles, you would find none greater than is visible now; for this avenue is something over that length, and is said by railway men to be one of the longest 'pieces of straight' in the world.

The still incompleted work is even now being ministered to with the strong, skilled hands of hundreds of men. All the same, the inspecting overseer is a necessary personage in the interests of the State. He it is who descries 'a bit of slumming,' however minute; who arrests progress, lest bolts be driven instead of screwed; who compels 'packing' and other minute but important details upon which the safety of the travelling public depends.

How efficiently is man aided by his humbler fellow-creatures, whom, for all that, he does by no means adequately respect or pity. See those two noble horses on their way to be hooked-on to a line of trucks! They are grand specimens of the Australian Clydesdale – immense creatures, highly fed, well groomed, and, it would appear, well trained.

They have no blinkers, and from the easy way in which, unled, they step along the edge of the embankment, where there is but a foot-wide path, lounging through the navvies without pausing or knocking against anybody, they seem fully to comprehend the peculiarities of railway life. They are attached by chains hooked to the axles of two of the six trucks, weighing some fifty or sixty tons, which require to be moved. Once in motion, of course, the draught is light, but the incline is against them, and the dead pull required to start the great weight is no joke. At the word they go into their collars with a will, the near horse, a magnificent dark bay, almost on his knees, and making the earth and metal fly at the side of the rails in his tremendous struggle to move the load. He strains every muscle in his powerful frame gallantly, unflinchingly, as if his life depended upon the task being performed and all at a word; he is neither touched nor guided.

He knew his duty a dead sure thing,And went for it then and there.

His comrade lacks apparently the same high tone of feeling, for his efforts are stimulated by an unjustifiable expression on the part of the driver, and a bang on the ribs with a stout wattle. The line of trucks moves, however; then glides easily along the rails. When the end of the 'tip' is reached both horses stop, are released, walk forward a few paces, and stand ready for the next feat of strength and handiness. This happens to be pay-day on the line, which agreeable performance takes place monthly. The manner of personal remuneration I observe to be this: the paymaster and his assistant, with portentous, ruled pay-sheets, take their seats in a trench. The executive official carries a black leather bag, out of which he produces a number of sealed envelopes variously endorsed.

Different sections are visited, and the men are called up one by one. Small delay is there in handing over the indispensable cash. 91. William Jones, £9: 12s.; 90. Thomas Robinson, £9: 4s., one day; 89. John Smith, £8: 16s., two days. Smith acquiesces with a nod, signifying that he is aware that the two days during which he was, let us say, indisposed after the last pay-day have been recorded against him, and the wage deducted. There is no question apparently as to accuracy of account. The envelopes are stuffed into trouser-pockets, mostly without being opened. A few only inspect their contents, and gaze for a second upon the crisp bank-notes and handful of silver. Some of the sums thus paid are not small – gangers and other minor officials receiving as much as twelve and thirteen shillings a day; the ordinary pick and shovel men, eight. Overtime is paid for extra, which swells the amount received. One payment for fencing subcontractors exceeded eighty pounds. Sixteen hundred pounds, all in cash, came out of the superintendent's wallet that day.

I noticed the men for the most part to be under thirty, many of them almost boyish in appearance. They were cleanly in person, well dressed and neat for the work they have to do, well fed, and not uncomfortably lodged considering the mildness of the climate. One and all they show grand 'condition,' as is evidenced by the spread of shoulder, the development of muscle, with the lightness of flank observable in all. As to nationality they are pretty evenly divided; the majority are British, but an increasing proportion of native-born Australians is observable, I am told. With regard to pre-eminence in strength and staying power the home-bred English navvy chiefly bears the palm, though I also hear that the 'ringer' in the pick and shovel brigade is a Hawkesbury man, of Cornish parents, a total abstainer, and an exemplary workman.

With such a monthly outflow of hard cash over a restricted area, it may be imagined what a trade is driven by boarding-house keepers and owners of small stores. The single men take their meals at these rude restaurants, paying from 18s. to £1 per week. The married men live in tents or roughly-constructed huts in the 'camps' nearest to their work.

I fear me that on the day following pay-day, and perhaps some others, there is gambling and often hard drinking. The money earned by strenuous labour and strict self-denial during the month is often dissipated in forty-eight hours. The boarding-house keepers are popularly accused, rightly or wrongly, of illegally selling spirits. Doubtless in many instances they do so, to the injury of public morals and the impoverishment of the families of those who are unable to resist the temptation. A heavy penalty is always enforced when proof is afforded to the satisfaction of justice; but reliable evidence of this peculiar infraction of the law is difficult to obtain, the men generally combining to shield the culprits and outswear the informer.

A few miles rearward is the terminus of this iron road that is stretching so swiftly across the 'lone Chorasmian waste.' Here converge caravans from the inmost deserts. Hence depart waggon-trains bearing merchandise in many different directions. What a medley of all the necessaries, luxuries, and superfluities of that unresting, insatiable toiler, man! They lie strewed upon the platform, or heaped in huge mounds and pyramids under the lofty goods sheds. Tea and sugar, flour and grain, hay and corn, chaff and bran, machines of a dark and doubtful character connected with dam-making and well-sinking; coils of wire, cans of nails, hogsheads of spirits, casks of wine, tar, paint, oil, clothing, books, rope, tools, windlasses, drums of winding gear, waggons, carts, and buggies all new and redolent of paint and varnish; also timber and woolpacks, and, as the auctioneer says, hundreds of articles too numerous to mention. What a good customer Mr. Squatter is, to be sure, while there is even the hope of grass, for to him are most of these miscellaneous values consigned, and by him or through him will they be paid for.

We are now outside of agriculture. The farmer, as such, has no abiding-place here. That broad, dusty trail leads, among other destinations, to the 'Never Never' country, where ploughs are not, and the husbandman is as impossible as the dodo.

Perhaps we are a little hasty in assuming that everything we see at the compendious depôt is pastorally requisitioned. That waggon that creaks wailingly as it slowly approaches, with ten horses, heavy laden though apparently empty, proclaims yet another important industry. Look into the bottom and you will see it covered with dark red bricks, a little different in shape from the ordinary article. On a closer view they have a metallic tinge. They are ingots of copper, of which some hundreds of tons come weekly from the three mines which send their output here. As for pastoral products, the line of high-piled, wool-loaded waggons is almost continuous. As they arrive they are swiftly unloaded into trucks, and sent along a special side-line reserved for their use. Flocks of fat sheep and droves of beeves, wildly staring and paralysed by the first blast of the steam-whistle, arrive, weary and wayworn. At break of day they are beguiled into trucks, and within six-and-thirty hours have their first (and last) sight of the metropolis.

In the meantime herds of team-horses, bell-adorned, make ceaseless, not inharmonious jangling; sunburnt, bearded teamsters, drovers, shepherds, mingled with navvies, travellers, trim officials, tradesfolk, and the usual horde of camp-followers, male and female, give one the idea of an annual fair held upon the border of an ancient kingdom before civilisation had rubbed the edges from humanity's coinage, and obliterated so much that was characteristic in the process.

I stood on the spot an hour before daybreak on the following morn. Hushed and voiceless was the great industrial host. Around and afar stretched the waste, broadly open to the moonbeams, which softened the harsh outline of forest thicket and arid plain. The stars, that mysterious array of the greater and the lesser lights of heaven, burned in the cloudless azure – each planet flashing and scintillating, each tiny point of light 'a patine of pure gold.' The low croon of the wild-fowl, as they swam and splashed in the river-reach, was the only sound that caught the ear. Glimmering watch-fires illumined the scattered encampment. For the moment one felt regretful that the grandeur of Night and Silence should be invaded by the vulgar turmoil of the coming day.

One of the aids to picturesque effect, though not generally regarded as artistic treatment, is the clearing and formation of roads through a highland district. Such a region is occasionally reached by me, and never traversed without admiration. The ways are surrounded by wooded hills, some of considerable altitude, on the sides and summits of which are high piled

rocks, confusedly hurled,The fragments of an earlier world.

But here the road-clearing, rarely supplemented by engineering disfigurement, produces the effect of a winding, thickly-grown avenue. On either side stand in close order the frenelas, casuarinas, and eucalypts of the forest primeval, with an occasional kurrajong or a red-foliaged, drought-slain callitris, 'like to a copper beech among the greens.' The floor of this forest-way is greenly carpeted with the thick-growing spring verdure, a stray tiny streamlet perhaps crossing at intervals, while leaflets of the severed saplings are bursting through in pink or dark-red bunches. In the far distance rises a dark-blue range, towering over the dim green ocean of forest, and marking the contrast sharply between the land of hill and dale and the monotonous levels of the lower country.

With all the capriciousness of Australian seasons the springtime of this year has shown a disposition to linger – waving back with grateful showers and dew-cooled nights and mornings the too impatient summer. Still is the grass brightly green of hue, the flower unfaded. The plague of dust has been stayed again and again by the welcome rainfall. There has never been more than one day when the winds have risen to a wintry bleakness. But who recks of so trifling a discomfort from such a cause, and will not King Sol be avenged upon us ere Christmastide be passed – ere the short, breezeless nights of January are ended?

What contrasts and discrepancies Dame Nature sanctions hereabouts in the formation of her feathered families! That soaring eagle, so far above us heavenward, in the blue empyrean, how true a monarch among birds is he! Now he stoops, circling lower and yet lower still, with moveless outstretched pinion and searching gaze that blenches not before the sun's fiercest rays. The tiny blue-throated wren perches fearlessly near, and hops with delicate feet from stone to stone amid the sheltering ferns. That downy white-breasted diver, a ball of feathers in the clear pool of the mountain streamlet, now with a ripple become invisible – the devoted pelican, with sword-like beak and pouch of portentous dimensions. Lo! there sits he with his fellows by the edge of a shallowing anabranch, or revels with them in the evil days of drought upon the dying fish which in hundreds are cast upon the shore. As I tread the homeward path, the skylark springs upward from the waving grass; trilling his simple lay, he mounts higher and yet higher, no unworthy congener, though inferior as a songster to his British namesake. In the adjacent leafless trees is a flight of gaunt, dark-hued, sickle-beaked birds. Travellers and pilgrims they, relatives of earth's oldest, most sacred bird races. Behold a company of the ibis from far far wilds. Their presence here is ominous and boding. They are popularly supposed to migrate coastwards only when the great lakes of the interior begin to fail. This, however, is not an unfailing test of a dry season, as in long-dead summers I have had occasion to note. They are not too dignified, in despite of their quasi-sacred hierophantic traditions, to eat grasshoppers. As these enemies alike of farmers and squatters are now despoiling every green thing, let us hope that the ibis contingent may have appetites proportioned to the length of their bills and the duration of their journey. A white variety of the species is occasionally noted, but he is rare in comparison with the darker kind.

By the creek bank, in the early morn, the well-remembered note of the kingfisher, so closely associated with our youth, sounds close and clear. Yonder he sits upon the dead limb of the overhanging tree – greenish blue, purple-breasted as of yore. Stonelike he plunges into the deep pool, reappearing with a small fish or allied water-dweller. More beautiful is his relative the lesser kingfisher, metallic in sheen, with crimson breast – flashing like a feathered gem through the river shades, or burning like a flame spot against the mouldering log on which he sits. Of palest fawn colour, with long black filament at the back of his head, that graceful heron, the 'nankeen bird' of the colonist, is also of the company; the white-necked, dark-blue crane, and that black-robed river pirate the cormorant. While on the bird question, surely none are more delicately bright, more exquisitely neat of plumage and flawless of tone, than the Columba tribe. Ancient of birth are they as 'the doves from the rocks,' and principally for their conjugal fidelity have been honoured, by the choice of Mr. Darwin, as exemplars in working out experiments connected with the origin of species. In western wanderings I find five varieties of the pigeon proper. The beautiful bronze-wing, the squatter, and the crested pigeon. Besides these, two varieties of the dove are among the most exquisitely lovely of feathered creatures. Both are very small – one scarcely larger than a sparrow. The 'bronze-wing' is too well known to need description. The 'squatter pigeon' is a plainer likeness, with a spot of white on either cheek, and, as its name implies, is unwilling to fly up, being struck down occasionally with the whip or a short throwing stick in the act of rising. The crested pigeon, the most graceful and attractive of the family, is from its tameness and extreme cleanliness of habit most suitable for the aviary. In colouring, the breast is a delicate slate-grey tinged with faintest pink as it rises towards the wing muscles, the front wings barred with dark, pencilled cross-lines, the larger feathers of the extremities a burnished green, and the last row having feathers of a vivid dark pink or crimson. A crest and elongated pointed tail give character and piquancy to the whole appearance. As they fly up, a whirring noise, not unlike that of the partridge, is heard. When the male bird swells his chest and lowers his wings in defiance or ostentation, he produces a sound not unlike that of his long-civilised congener. They will lay and hatch in captivity, and I observed in an aviary one of the females sitting on her eggs complacently in a herring tin.

FROM TUMUT TO TUMBERUMBA

It was rather too far to walk this time; besides, the days are shortening. From Tumut to Tumberumba is forty-five miles all out, and a bad road. At breakfast-time we had no earthly idea of how or where to get a horse. A friend in need tided over that difficulty. So, mounted upon a clever mountain-bred hackney, we cleared the town about 9.30 A.M., and headed for the Khyber Pass (in a small way), up which the road winds south-easterly. The time was short, but we meant going steadily, if not fast, all through, and trusted, as we have done 'with a squeeze' full many a time and oft before, to 'save the light.'

Buggies are comfortable vehicles when roads are good and horses fresh. You can carry your 'things' with you, and, in cases of entertainments, come out with more grandeur and effect than if on horseback. But give me the saddle, 'haud juventutis immemor.' It brings back old times; and certainly for people whose appearance is in danger of being compromised by a tendency to increased weight, riding is the more healthful exercise. Besides, one always feels as if adventures were possible to cavaliers. Wheels circumscribe one too narrowly. You must start early. You had better not drive late. Your stopping-places must be marked and labelled as it were. You are affiché, for good or evil.

Now, once started on a fine morning, on a good horse, a 'lazy ally' feeling seems to pervade the surroundings and the landscape. If you meet wayside flowers, you may linger to gather them. You may avail yourself of chance invitations, secure that you can 'pull up time' late or early. As you sail away, if your horse walks well and canters easily (as does this one), you insensibly think of 'A day's ride, a life's romance.' Is that romance yet over? It may be. We are 'old enough to know better.' But still we were quite sure when we started that we should meet with an adventure or two.

First of all, we saw two young people in a buggy, driving towards the mountain land which lay eastward in a cloud-world. There was something in the expression of their backs as they passed us which suggested an early stage of the Great Experiment. The bride was fair, with, of course, a delicate complexion – that goes without saying in this part of the world. The bridegroom was stalwart and manly looking. Presently we were overtaken by another young lady of prepossessing appearance, with two attendant cavaliers, well mounted and evidently belonging to the same party. Bound for some miles along the same lonely but picturesque road, we asked permission to join the party, and fared on amicably. Together we breasted the 'Six-Mile Hill,' and at length emerged upon the alpine plateau, which for many miles lies between the towns before mentioned.

Here the scene changed – the climate, the soil, the timber, the atmosphere. Eastward lay the darkly-brooding Titans of Kiandra, snow-capped and dazzling, the peaks contrasting with their darksome rugged sides, the blue and cloudless sky. Beneath our feet, beside and around us, lay the partially-thawed snow of Saturday's fall, in quantities which would have delighted the hearts of certain children of our acquaintance.

Snow in the abstract, 'beautiful snow,' is a lovely nature-wonder, concerning which many things have been sweetly sung and said. But in the concrete, after a forty-eight hours' thaw, it is injurious to roads, in that it causes them to be 'sloppy' and in a sense dangerous to horse and rider. Given a red, soapy soil, somewhat stony, sticky, and irregularly saturated, it must be a very clever steed, the ascents, descents, and sidelings being continuous, that doesn't make a mistake or two. All the same, the girl on the well-bred chestnut horse kept sailing away, up hill, down hill, and along sidelings steep as the roof of a house; the whole thing (to quote Whyte-Melville) 'done with the graceful ease of a person who is playing upon a favourite instrument while seated in an armchair.' We kept in sight the second detachment, coming up in time to bid farewell as they turned off to the residence of the bride's family, where there was to be a dance in celebration of the auspicious event. We separated with my unspoken benison upon so promising a pair.

The wedding guests having departed, we paced on for half-a-dozen miles until a break in the solemn forest, like a Canadian clearing, disclosed the welcome outline of the half-way hostelry. Here were there distinct traces of the austerity of the patriarch Winter, so mild of mien on the lower levels. Half a foot of snow lay on the roofs of barn and stable, while the remnant of a gigantic snow-image, reduced to the appearance of a quartz boulder, lay in front of the house.

A bare half-hour for refection was all that could be spared here, and as our steed ate his corn with apparently the same zest that characterised our consumption of lunch, it was time well spent. Boot and saddle again.

'But first, good mine host, what is the exact distance? The sun is low; the road indifferent rough; the night unfriendly for camping out.'

'Fifteen mile if you take the "cut"; eighteen by the road, every yard of it.'

'We mistrust short "cuts,"' say we, consulting the watch, which indicates 3.30 P.M.; 'they have lured us into difficulties ere now. But three miles make a tempting deduction from the weary end of the journey. We cannot miss it. Thanks; of that I am aware. Turn to the left, opposite the second house, cross the creek, turn to the right, and follow straight on.'

Of course. Just so. The old formula. How many a time have we cursed it and the well-intentioned giver, by all our gods, when stumbling, hours after, trackless, over an unknown country in darkness and despair. Reflected that by merely following the high road we should have been warmly housed, cheered, and fed long before. However, unusual enterprise or the mountain air induces us to try the short cut aforesaid; only this time, of course, we turn to the left, and immediately perceive ('facilis descensus Averni') that the path leads into a tremendous glen, with sides like the roof of a house. We dismount, as should all prudent riders not after cattle, and lead down our active steed. At the foot of the cañon is a hurrying, yellow-stained mountain stream. Dark-red bluffs, undermined and washed to the gravel, exposed in all directions. 'Worked and abandoned' is plainly visible to the eye of the initiated upon the greater portion of the locality; but still lingering last are miners' cottages and a garden here and there. Children, of course. Ruddy of hue and sturdy, they abound like the fruits of a colder clime in these sequestered vales.

'What is the name of this – place?' say we guardedly to a blue-eyed boy, good-humouredly nursing a fractious baby.

'Upper Tumberumba,' he returns answer proudly.

'And the road to the town?'

'Cross the creek and follow down for six mile, and there you are.'

The road on the far side of the violent little creek follows that watercourse, and is fairly made. Bridges are the main consideration, for there seem to be trois cent milles water-races, some too deep to fall into scathless; and 'beauty born of murmuring sound' must be plentiful, judging from the rushing, gushing, leaping, and tumbling waters before and around us.

This is a land of sluices, of head-races and tail-races, evidently, where 'first water' and 'second,' dam sites, and creek claims, with all the unintelligible phraseology of 'water diverted from its natural course for gold-mining purposes,' were once in high fashion and acceptance. As the short winter day darkens without warning, we trust that the bridges are sound, more especially as we have just cantered over one with a hole in it as big as a frying-pan.

One advantage secured by our adoption of the 'cut' is patently that of drier footing, the which causes our steed to amble with cheerfulness and alacrity. The night comes on apace, but there is still sufficient light to distinguish the roadway from obstacles and pitfalls. When the well-known sound of the water-mill breaks the stillness, light and voices betray the proximity of a township, and Tumberumba proper is reached.

When we quit Tumberumba in the early morn for the return journey to Tumut, the air is charged with vapour, the mists lie heavily upon the hills. The low grey sky, the drizzle and the damp which pervade all nature, suggest 'The Lewis' or other Hebridean region. One can fully realise the sort of weather chiefly prevailing when the King of Bora uttered his pathetic farewell 'to his little Sheilah,' returning to his desolate dwelling alone, to distract himself as best he might with the company of the simple (but not vulgar) fishermen and a reasonable consumption of alcohol.