T is an hour after sundown at Murdaro station. A few lights twinkle here and there about the dusky quadrangle of low-roofed buildings, ere shadow and silence bring to a close another workday.
The giant curlew screeches impatiently to his dilatory mate at intervals from the bush hard by; the dingoes wail mournful signals on the distant sandstone ridges; and at the other side of the star-reflecting water-hole, beneath the dark group of Deadfinish gum-trees, the native station-hands and fat house-gins, their labours over for the day, can be heard crooning out their evening chants.
In the drawing-room of “Government House” the blinds and curtains have been drawn across the windows, and the light of a couple of silver-plated oil lamps shows that the apartment boasts of an amount of fine art decoration and luxurious furniture quite unusual, even in the salon aux dames of a “large” squatter’s household.
Wealth has joined hands with taste under the direction of a graceful female mind, and beneath the shaggy, rush-thatched roof of the station building, that is really little better in external appearance than an English barn, an oasis of elegance, a “holy of holies” of refined surroundings, has arisen in the desert.
Give a cultivated human mind carte blanche to furnish a room after its own ideas of beauty and fitness, and it is marvellous how a picture of itself will presently be reflected in the polished completeness of the undertaking.
Character can be read in the furnishing of a room as easily, perhaps easier, than by means of handwriting. Any trained upholsterer of long experience will tell you this. A tradesman in this walk of life knows almost intuitively, after conversing with you for a few minutes, what kind of “fixings” you will most affect. Of course where “the coat must be cut according to the cloth” these remarks do not apply in such force, any more than a Napoleonic mind would discover itself to the expert in reading-character-by-hand-writing in an epistle scratched with the stiff, unexpressive point of a needle.
Göethe intimates that a man’s true character can be capitally tested by ascertaining what are the things which he considers ridiculous; and perhaps it will assist us to understand Miss Mundella’s if, bearing this rule in mind, we note the appearance of the station drawing-room, late “parlour,” which she has so charmingly transformed since taking over the keys of her uncle’s establishment. She was not the kind of young lady to follow the absurdities of those ephemeral fashions that, from time to time, appear as plague spots to desecrate the refined interiors of even the best houses in Melbourne and Sydney. No absurd “fallals” in the shape of dusty, velvet-covered soup-ladles, forks, gridirons, rolling-pins, and the like, hung upon the walls of this young lady’s audience chamber.
This latest of fashion’s most offensive follies is much in vogue, as we write, in modern Australian houses, and the practice of dragging the kitchen into the drawing-room is surely to be deplored.
Doubtless the practical mind of our fellow-colonists found it useful in some cases, hence its origin. These silken effigies of culinary utensils were doubtless originally found to be fitting surroundings for the central point of attraction,—the red-faced female, likewise clothed in velvet, squatting upon the sofa; which lady’s antecedents have been more associated with frying fat than burning midnight oil, and who plays her modern part of “missus” or “me lady” before company with less nervousness than she would otherwise do, were she not surrounded by the fetishes of her past career.