Once there, his active brain and stalwart arms send the stunted forest reeling with flashing axe-strokes. The mushroom village of blue-gum bark and branches springs up in a purple-brown crop around the red and yellow trenches, and “whips” and “poppet heads” rise in due course.
Geologist, mineralogist, carpenter, blacksmith, hunter, surgeon, and cook, the true prospecting and working miner, who has “followed the diggings” since the Canoona rush or the Palmer field excited the mining world, is a veritable Admirable Crichton. He is a true, iron-bound, walking edition of practical receipts. Open-handed when “on a patch;” frugal and level-headed when a “slide” or “fault” has taken his golden “leader” out of sight; quick to take offence at an intentional insult, and as quick to “Put your hand there, pard,” if in the wrong,—this character may be summed up in the expressive words used by a miner to us, when describing a brother of the pick: “He’d lend you a fiver if you harsked him, and he’d fight you for a bob if he thought it b’longed to him.”
The “towneys,” as I have hinted, muster very strong at Ulysses, and as a consequence the rowdy element swamps the steady miners, such as we have just described, right out of sight. The Warden of the new field has only just arrived, and is toiling night and day to arrange affairs into workable form out of the chaos of matters before him.
He is “underhanded,” to use a nautical expression, as is always the case, and is powerless to act, as he could and would act, were he not—besides being Police Magistrate, Warden, Senior-constable Surveyor, Clerk of Petty Sessions, etc., etc.—also general adviser to the field upon every conceivable subject.
Let me draw you a rough outline sketch, in black and white, of a “pay-day Saturday night” at Ulysses.
The long, straggling collection of dwellings, that has not yet crystallized into a town proper, and which is now emerging from the “bark-humpy” to the “iron” age, begins to look more lively than ever, as evening with its lighted windows and moving lanterns shows that business is commencing with the influx of miners from the surrounding claims. Troops of “larrikins,” who think, because they wear muddy clothes and get drunk, they must be rough-and-ready miners, begin to perambulate the muddy street, in a state of body more or less bordering upon intoxication. Crowds of picturesquely-rough characters now collect round the gaming-tables, shooting-tables, and other attractions, over and around which flare great oil lamps, minus shade or glass. Every shot, every throw of the dice, every action of every actor upon the busy scene, gives rise to strings of filthy oaths,—so profane, so disgusting, that to any one but a man long acclimatised to them a feeling of extreme nausea would result.
Darker grows the evening and larger the crowd; oaths, blasphemy, and yells that would make a Red Indian blush with envy hurtle through the hot, close night air.
Wilder grows the feverish excitement, born of bad whisky and worse beer, till, words growing tame, blows are resorted to. A curious and interesting if disgusting spectacle is Ulysses on a Saturday night.
All around are wretched creatures wallowing in the much-trampled mud, like so many spirit-preserved beings,—half hog, half man. From the open door and windows of the foul-smelling, brilliantly-lighted “shanty” just at hand, a Babel of filthy and excited language roars and roars, as if an opening to “the murky pit” were close by, and the voices of the damned had reached our ears.
Crowds of men and boys jostle each other as they pass amidst the flaring lights and dusky shadows of the much-peopled ways, and near us a couple of tipsy, blear-eyed rowdies are doing the only useful thing they have done this day, in attempting to destroy each other with fist, foot, and teeth. Round them a vile crowd, mostly composed of lanky, big-piped, beardless, weakly-looking, youthful, would-be miners are exchanging bets, in language as idiotic as obscene.