While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson (best value ebook reader .txt) 📕

darned fools; the country never belonged to them, but to the speculators, the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs of thieves⁠—the men the patriotic fools starve and fight for⁠—their masters. Ba-a!”

The opposition collapsed.

The coach had climbed the terraces on the south side of the river, and was bowling along on a level stretch of road across the elevated flat.

“What trees are those?” asked the stranger, breaking the aggressive silence which followed his unpatriotic argument, and pointing to a grove ahead by the roadside. “They look as if they’ve been planted there. There ain’t been a forest here surely?”

“Oh, they’re some trees the Government imported,” said the bagman, whose knowledge on the subject was limited. “Our own bush won’t grow in this soil.”

“But it looks as if anything else would⁠—”

Here the stranger sniffed once by accident, and then several times with interest.

It was a warm morning after rain. He fixed his eyes on those trees.

They didn’t look like Australian gums; they tapered to the tops, the branches were pretty regular, and the boughs hung in shipshape fashion. There was not the Australian heat to twist the branches and turn the leaves.

“Why!” exclaimed the stranger, still staring and sniffing hard. “Why, dang me if they ain’t (sniff) Australian gums!”

“Yes,” said the driver, flicking his horses, “they are.”

“Blanky (sniff) blanky old Australian gums!” exclaimed the ex-Australian, with strange enthusiasm.

“They’re not old,” said the driver; “they’re only young trees. But they say they don’t grow like that in Australia⁠—’count of the difference in the climate. I always thought⁠—”

But the other did not appear to hear him; he kept staring hard at the trees they were passing. They had been planted in rows and cross-rows, and were coming on grandly.

There was a rabbit trapper’s camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum-leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile’s nose, and brought a wave of memories with it.

“Good day, mate!” he shouted suddenly to the rabbit trapper, and to the astonishment of his fellow passengers.

“Good day, mate!” The answer came back like an echo⁠—it seemed to him⁠—from the past.

Presently he caught sight of a few trees which had evidently been planted before the others⁠—as an experiment, perhaps⁠—and, somehow, one of them had grown after its own erratic native fashion⁠—gnarled and twisted and ragged, and could not be mistaken for anything else but an Australian gum.

“A thunderin’ old blue-gum!” ejaculated the traveller, regarding the tree with great interest.

He screwed his neck to get a last glimpse, and then sat silently smoking and gazing straight ahead, as if the past lay before him⁠—and it was before him.

“Ah, well!” he said, in explanation of a long meditative silence on his part; “ah, well⁠—them saplings⁠—the smell of them gum-leaves set me thinking.” And he thought some more.

“Well, for my part,” said a tourist in the coach, presently, in a condescending tone, “I can’t see much in Australia. The bally colonies are⁠—”

“Oh, that be damned!” snarled the Australian-born⁠—they had finished the second flask of whisky. “What do you Britishers know about Australia? She’s as good as England, anyway.”

“Well, I suppose you’ll go straight back to the States as soon as you’ve done your business in Christchurch,” said the bagman, when near their journey’s end they had become confidential.

“Well, I dunno. I reckon I’ll just take a run over to Australia first. There’s an old mate of mine in business in Sydney, and I’d like to have a yarn with him.”

A Day on a Selection

The scene is a small New South Wales western selection, the holder whereof is native-English. His wife is native-Irish. Time, Sunday, about 8 a.m. A used-up looking woman comes from the slab-and-bark house, turns her face towards the hillside, and shrieks:

“T-o-o-m-may!”

No response, and presently she draws a long breath and screams again:

“Tom-m-a-a-y!”

A faint echo comes from far up the siding where Tommy’s presence is vaguely indicated by half a dozen cows moving slowly⁠—very slowly⁠—down towards the cow-yard.

The woman retires. Ten minutes later she comes out again and screams:

“Tommy!”

“Y-e-e-a-a-s-s!” very passionately and shrilly.

“Ain’t you goin’ to bring those cows down today?”

“Y-e-e-a-a-s-s-s!⁠—carn’t yer see I’m comin’?”

A boy is seen to run wildly along the siding and hurl a missile at a feeding cow; the cow runs forward a short distance through the trees, and then stops to graze again while the boy stirs up another milker.

An hour goes by.

The rising Australian generation is represented by a thin, lanky youth of about fifteen. He is milking. The cow-yard is next the house, and is mostly ankle-deep in slush. The boy drives a dusty, discouraged-looking cow into the bail, and pins her head there; then he gets tackle on to her right hind leg, hauls it back, and makes it fast to the fence. There are eleven cows, but not one of them can be milked out of the bail⁠—chiefly because their teats are sore. The selector does not know what makes the teats sore, but he has an unquestioning faith in a certain ointment, recommended to him by a man who knows less about cows than he does himself, which he causes to be applied at irregular intervals⁠—leaving the mode of application to the discretion of his son. Meanwhile the teats remain sore.

Having made the cow fast, the youngster cautiously takes hold of the least sore teat, yanks it suddenly, and dodges the cow’s hock. When he gets enough milk to dip his dirty hands in, he moistens the teats, and things go on more smoothly. Now and then he relieves the monotony of his occupation by squirting at the eye of a calf which is dozing in the adjacent pen. Other times he milks into his mouth. Every time the cow kicks, a burr or a grass-seed or a bit of something else falls into the milk, and the boy drowns these things with a well-directed stream⁠—on the principle that what’s out of sight