“Oh, that’s an old trick,” remarks the new manager of Epsom; “they always used it about Kimberley when I was through there with horses before the rush.”
“Ain’t you station folk a bit rough on the niggers about here?” inquires one of the two burly individuals that we have already introduced to our readers as mining speculators. “I’ve had a good all-round experience with ’em, as you may guess, when I tell you I’m the original prospector of the Mount Walker. Now I’ve had to shoot one nigger in my time, but only one; and I was living amongst them, you might say, for about twenty years, till I made my rise at the Mount.”
“Oh, ah!” drawls the storekeeper, bestowing an insolently pitying smile upon the simple-minded individual who thus dares to find fault with one of the pet institutions of the “squattah” nobles of the country. “But you must remember there’s a deuced lot of difference between wunning a wun and wunning a mine, Mr. Walker.” This remark smells so strongly of a sneer that the black Cornish eyes flash angrily across the table, till, observing that the storekeeper is a foe that is hardly worthy of his steel, Mr. Walker calms down again.
“Maybe, maybe,” he goes on, “but I’m a practical man, and I look at everything in a practical way. I don’t blame you gentlemen for potting a nigger for cattle spearing. I’d as lief shoot a man as a dog black or white, if he tried robbing me too often. You mustn’t think, gentlemen,” Mr. Walker goes on, as he observes that he has decidedly not got “the house with him,” “you mustn’t think I’m presuming to teach you anything about how you ought to manage your own affairs. But it’s always been a good stout argument of mine that it’s waste of good bone and muscle, as the country can’t well spare, all this shooting business.”
“What would you do with the cussed vermin? Can you tell me that, eh?” asks the Epsom manager, winking at Mr. Browne with the intention of attracting his attention to the observations he is about to make. “You’d go in for making miners of them, would you? It strikes me somehow that you miners ain’t very fond of coloured men knocking round the diggings. Look here, Mr. Walker, the miners played it pretty low down on both the niggers and the chinkies at the Palmer rush, for one place, and you know as well as I do that it was near as a toucher that the Johns (Chinamen) didn’t get kicked off Croydon last year. Look at the Kimberley rush, too; the niggers ain’t learnt to fall in love with what they’ve had from the diggers there.”
Mr. Walker knows that these accusations are correct, but is not going to be led into an argument as to whether miners or cattle-men are the “roughest” on the native population, so he answers the last speaker as follows,—“I’m not arguing whether it’s right to shoot the blacks or not, but whether, looking at the thing fair and square, in a practical, common-sense, business way, it’s a sensible thing to do.”
“Yes, that’s the talk,” remarks his mate of chintz sofa notoriety, who has hitherto refrained from argument.
“But,” continues Mr. Walker, “as this gentleman here has got hold of the Chinese Question, I’ll tell him that, talking as a miner, I think you’ll find most of us think this way.” The speaker whilst arguing takes a pencil from his pocket, and from the force of old associations makes as if to draw the plan of an imaginary mine upon the table-cover. “We’d let the aboriginals mine if they like to; it’s their country after all, and they’ve a right to do that, at any rate. In fact, lots of them have done mining; the first big nugget got in Queensland was found by a nigger at the Calyope. But foreign coloured men is different altogether.”
“Ah, but these niggers are a useless lot of devils, and they won’t work unless you make ’em,” observes the drover.
“Well, mate,” Walker says, laughing, “they suffer from the same complaint as many whites do if they won’t work unless they’re driven to it; that’s all I can say about that. But as to their being no use, I don’t know how you’d be able to get on without the ‘boys’ to muster, track, and drove. And I’ve seen blacks near Adelaide who’ve become farmers, and they’re just as good as lots of the Europeans farming near them. And on the Russell diggings we couldn’t have kept going if we hadn’t trained our ‘boys’ to bring us tucker from the township. I’ve got a couple of ‘boys’ with me now as can carry a two-hundred of flour for a mile without resting. Now there ain’t a man in this room could do the same. I’m open to bet on it.” Mr. Walker, like most modern Hercules, is much given to judging of a man’s value by the amount of physical power he has at his command; and this rule of the one time miner is not a bad one to go by, for as a general thing the most practically useful members of society are those strongest in wind and limb. Mens sana in corpore sano.