Such Is Life

Introduction

Contrary to usage, these memoirs are published, not “in compliance with the entreaties of friends” but in direct opposition thereto. It has been pointed out to me that the prizes of civilisation—Municipal dignity, Churchwardenship, the Honorary Bench, and so forth—do not wait upon avowed comradeship with people who can by no management of hyperbole be called respectable. But there is a grim, fakir-like pleasure in any renunciation of desirable things, when the line of least resistance leads in a contrary direction; and, in my own case, the impulse of reminiscence, fatally governed by an inveterate truthfulness, is wayward enough to overbear all hope of local pre-eminence, as well as all sense of literary propriety. Hence these pages.

I

Unemployed at last!

Scientifically, such a contingency can never have befallen of itself. According to one theory of the Universe, the momentum of Original Impress has been tending toward this far-off, divine event ever since a scrap of fire-mist flew from the solar centre to form our planet. Not this event alone, of course; but every occurrence, past and present, from the fall of captured Troy to the fall of a captured insect. According to another theory, I hold an independent diploma as one of the architects of our Social System, with a commission to use my own judgment, and take my own risks, like any other unit of humanity. This theory, unlike the first, entails frequent hitches and cross-purposes; and to some malign operation of these I should owe my present holiday.

Orthodoxly, we are reduced to one assumption: namely, that my indomitable old Adversary has suddenly called to mind Dr. Watts’s friendly hint respecting the easy enlistment of idle hands.

Good. If either of the two first hypotheses be correct, my enforced furlough tacitly conveys the responsibility of extending a ray of information, however narrow and feeble, across the path of such fellow-pilgrims as have led lives more sedentary than my own—particularly as I have enough money to frank myself in a frugal way for some weeks, as well as to purchase the few requisites of authorship.

If, on the other hand, my supposed safeguard of drudgery has been cut off at the meter by that amusingly shortsighted old Conspirator, it will be only fair to notify him that his age and experience, even his captivating habits and well-known hospitality, will be treated with scorn, rather than respect, in the paragraphs which he virtually forces me to write; and he is hereby invited to view his own feather on the fatal dart.

Whilst a peculiar defect—which I scarcely like to call an oversight in mental construction—shuts me out from the flowery pathway of the romancer, a coordinate requital endows me, I trust, with the more sterling, if less ornamental qualities of the chronicler. This fairly equitable compensation embraces, I have been told, three distinct attributes: an intuition which reads men like signboards; a limpid veracity; and a memory which habitually stereotypes all impressions except those relating to personal injuries.

Submitting, then, to the constitutional interdict already glanced at, and availing myself of the implied license to utilise that homely talent of which I am the bailee, I purpose taking certain entries from my diary, and amplifying these to the minutest detail of occurrence or conversation. This will afford to the observant reader a fair picture of Life, as that engaging problem has presented itself to me.

Twenty-two consecutive editions of Lett’s Pocket Diary, with one week in each opening, lie on the table before me; all filled up, and in a decent state of preservation. I think I shall undertake the annotation of a week’s record. A man might, if he were of a fearful heart, stagger in this attempt; but I shut my eyes, and take up one of the little volumes. It proves to be the edition of 1883. Again I shut my eyes while I open the book at random. It is the week beginning with Sunday, the 9th of September.

Sun. Sept. 9. Thomp. Coop. etc. 10-Mile Pines. Cleo. Duff. Selec.

The fore part of the day was altogether devoid of interest or event. Overhead, the sun blazing wastefully and thanklessly through a rarefied atmosphere; underfoot the hot, black clay, thirsting for spring rain, and bare except for inedible roley-poleys, coarse tussocks, and the woody stubble of close-eaten salt-bush; between sky and earth, a solitary wayfarer, wisely lapt in philosophic torpor. Ten yards behind the grey saddle-horse follows a black packhorse, lightly loaded; and three yards behind the packhorse ambles listlessly a tall, slate-coloured kangaroo dog, furnished with the usual poison muzzle—a light wire basket, worn after the manner of a nosebag.

Mile after mile we go at a good walk, till the dark boundary of the scrub country disappears northward in the glassy haze, and in front, southward, the level black-soil plains of Riverina Proper mark a straight skyline, broken here and there by a monumental clump or pine-ridge. And away beyond the horizon, southward still, the geodesic curve carries that monotony across the zone of salt-bush, myall, and swamp box; across the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee, and on to the Victorian border—say, two hundred and fifty miles.

Just about midday, the station track I was following intersected and joined the stock route; and against the background of a pine-ridge, a mile ahead, I saw some wool-teams. When I overtook them, they had stopped for dinner among the trees. One of the party was an intimate friend of mine, and three others were acquaintances; so, without any of the ceremony which prevails in more refined circles, I hooked Fancy’s rein on a pine branch, pulled the packsaddle off Bunyip, and sat down with the rest, to screen the tea through my teeth and flick the diligent little operatives out of the cold mutton with the point of my pocketknife.

There were five bullock-teams altogether: Thompson’s twenty; Cooper’s eighteen; Dixon’s eighteen; and Price’s two teams of fourteen each. Three of the wagons, in accordance with a fashion of the day, bore names painted along the board inside the guard irons. Thompson’s was the Wanderer; Cooper’s, the Hawkesbury; and Dixon’s, the Wombat. All were platform wagons, except Cooper’s, which was the Sydney-side pattern.

To avoid the vulgarity of ushering this company into the presence of the punctilious reader without even the ceremony of a Bedouin introduction—(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be responsible for it): a form of introduction, by the way, too sweeping in its suretyship for prudent men to use in Riverina—I shall describe the group, severally, with such succinctness as may be compatible with my somewhat discursive style.

Steve Thompson was a Victorian. He was scarcely a typical bullock driver, since fifteen years of that occupation had not brutalised his temper, nor ensanguined his vocabulary, nor frayed the terminal g from his participles. I knew him well, for we had been partners in dogflesh and colleagues in larceny when we were, as poets feign, nearer to heaven than in maturer life. And, wide as Riverina is, we often encountered fortuitously, and were always glad to fraternise. Physically, Thompson was tall and lazy, as bullock drivers ought to be.

Cooper was an entire stranger to me, but as he stoutly contended that Hay and Deniliquin were in Port Phillip, I inferred him to be a citizen of the mother colony. Four months before, he had happened to strike the very first consignment of goods delivered at Nyngan by rail, for the Western country. He had chanced seven tons of this, for Kenilworth; had there met Thompson, delivering salt from Hay; and now the two, freighted with Kenilworth wool, were making the trip to Hay together. Kenilworth was on the commercial divide, having a choice of two evils—the long, uninviting track southward to the Murrumbidgee, and the badly watered route eastward to the Bogan. This was Cooper’s first experience of Riverina, and he swore in no apprentice style that it would be his last. A correlative proof of the honest fellow’s Eastern extraction lay in the fact that he was three inches taller, three stone heavier, and thirty degrees lazier, than Thompson.

I had known Dixon for many years. He was a magnificent specimen of crude humanity; strong, lithe, graceful, and not too big—just such a man as your novelist would picture as the nurse-swapped offspring of some rotund or rickety aristocrat. But being, for my own part, as I plainly stated at the outset, incapable of such romancing, I must register Dixon as one whose ignoble blood had crept through scoundrels since the Flood. Though, when you come to look at it leisurely, this wouldn’t interfere with aristocratic, or even regal, descent—rather the reverse.

Old Price had carted goods from Melbourne to Bendigo in ’52; a hundred miles, for £100 per ton. He had had two teams at that time, and, being a man of prudence and sagacity, had two teams still, and was able to pay his way. I had known him since I was about the height of this table; he was Old Price then; he is Old Price still; and he will probably be Old Price when my head is dredged with the white flour of a blameless life, and I am pottering about with a stick, hating young fellows, and making myself generally disagreeable. Price’s second team was driven by his son Mosey, a tight little fellow, whose body was about five-and-twenty, but whose head, according to the ancient adage, had worn out many a good pair of shoulders.

Willoughby, who was travelling loose with Thompson and Cooper, was a whaler. Not owing to any inherent incapacity, for he had taken his B.A. at an English university, and was, notwithstanding his rags and dirt, a remarkably fine-looking man; bearing a striking resemblance to Dixon, even in features. But as the wives of Napoleon’s generals could never learn to walk on a carpet, so the aimless popinjay of adult age can never learn to take a man’s place among rough-and-ready workers. Even in spite of Willoughby’s personal resemblance to Dixon, there was a suggestion of latent physical force and leathery durability in the bullock driver, altogether lacking in the whaler, and equiponderated only by a certain air of refinement. How could it be otherwise? Willoughby, of course, had no horse—in fact, like Bassanio, all the wealth he had ran in his veins; he was a gentleman. Well for the world if all representatives of his order were as harmless, as inexpensive, and as unobtrusive as this poor fellow, now situated like that most capricious poet, honest Ovid, among the Goths.

One generally feels a sort of diffidence in introducing one’s self; but I may remark that I was at that time a Government official, of the ninth class; paid rather according to my grade than my merit, and not by any means in proportion to the loafing I had to do. Candidly, I was only a Deputy-Assistant-Sub-Inspector, but with the reversion of the Assistant-Sub-Inspectorship itself when it should please Atropos to snip the thread of my superior officer.

The repast being concluded, the drivers went into committee on the subject of grass—a vital question in ’83, as you may remember.

“It’s this way,” said Mosey imperatively, and deftly weaving into his address the thin red line of puissant adjective; “You dunno what you’re doin’ when you’re foolin’ with this run. She’s hair-trigger at the best o’ times, an’ she’s on full cock this year. Best watched station on the track. It’s risk whatever way you take it. We’re middlin’ safe to be collared in the selection, an’ we’re jist as safe to be collared in the ram-paddick. Choice between the divil an’ the dam. An’ there’s too big a township o’ wagons together. Two’s enough, an’ three’s a glutton, for sich a season as this.”

“I think Cooper and I had better push on to the ram-paddock,” suggested Thompson. “You three can work on the selection. Division of labour’s the secret of success, they say.”

“Secret of England’s greatness,” mused Dixon. “I forgit what the (irrelevant expletive) that is.”

“The true secret of England’s greatness lies in her dependencies, Mr. Dixon,” replied Willoughby handsomely; and straightway the serene, appreciative expression of the bullock driver’s face, rightly interpreted, showed that his mind was engaged in a Graeco-Roman conflict with the polysyllable, the latter being uppermost.

“Well, no,” said Mosey, replying to Thompson; “no use separatin’ now; it’s on’y spreadin’ the risk; we should ’a’ separated yesterday. I wouldn’t misdoubt the selection, on’y Cunningham told me the other day, Magomery’s shiftin’ somebody to live there. If that’s so, it’s up a tree, straight. The ram-paddick’s always a risk—too near the station.”

“The hut on the selection was empty a week ago,” I remarked. “I know it, for I camped there one night.”

“Good grass?” inquired a chorus of voices.

“About the best I’ve had this season.”

“We’ll chance the selection,” said Mosey decidedly. “Somebody can ride on ahead, an’ see the coast clear. But they won’t watch a bit of a paddick in the thick o’ the shearin’, when there’s nobody livin’ in it.”