The Australian bush is the most melancholy place in the world to brood over sorrows. The music of most of the bush birds has a prophetic note in it—they wail away as though foretelling dire disaster; after sunset myriads of frogs and locusts start to chant and chirrup mournfully; over the solitude comes at long intervals the wail of the dingo, and often like the phantom of some lost dead child from the gullies a wailful scream from a bird that no one ever sees. I have often lain in my bunk by night and looked through the little window hole and watched the migrating cranes and other birds with long outstretched necks pass under the moon, bound southward; they looked just like skeletons on wings, their bones tinkling together as they passed swiftly across the moonlit sky right overhead. I devoted a good deal of my time to music and violin-playing in those quiet bush nights, and some of the very melodies which are in the strains of my military band solos were composed at that period.
William and I became close friends, linked together by the sorrow over our dead comrade, and eventually we gave notice to our employers and both went off “on the Wallaby” and “humped the bluey,” as they say in the bush.
We followed that life for a long time and became real “sundowners.” The atmosphere of that roving life has never wholly left my mind; the songs of the birds in the gums and the winds moaning and bending the leafy clump tips overhead during the nights, as we slept below, still echo through my memories. He and I were happy together, and I found him a beautiful friend. I can see his sky-blue eyes now, as he wondered and listened to me when I told him of my adventures in the South Sea Islands. Night after night we would sit by our camp fire and stare, side by side, into the glowing embers as overhead sang some sweet night bird, serenading our memories as we dreamed of home. My chum had a quiet earnest voice and would sit there and sing wild sea chanteys as I played an accompaniment on the violin.
And often in the night I hear,
Above the wind and rain,
My old chum singing in the hills
Those wild sea songs again.
He had an old bent-up cornet in his swag, and I took a few lessons from him, and while I practised the scales in the silence of the night the very hills seemed astonished as the echoes answered one another and died away across the solitude, and away the frightened bush animals scampered as though the devil was after them! And sometimes in the daytime as the parrots passed overhead across the blinding sky they would hear those notes and croak dismally and hurry faster on their skyward voyage.
One evening, just as we were camping for the night, we sighted over the slope a genuine old bushman tramping along with his swag on his back. We invited him to stay the night; it took a long time to wake him up, but we succeeded, and his scrubby sunburnt face lit up with delight as my comrade sang and I played the fiddle. I never before or since saw such a dried-up old relic as he was. He had a big broken nose and black teeth through chewing tobacco plug for many years. I never saw him spit; he swallowed the juice. We managed to draw a few remarks out of him, and I remember him saying that he had known Ned Kelly the bushranger in the early days and mumbled a deal about how the times had changed and the meanness of the station bosses, for he seemed to get his living by cadging at the stations as he tramped along from day to day and month by month, looking for work. He seemed very methodical in his habits, for as we sat by the fire talking, and darkness came swiftly across the slopes, he at once carefully took his boots off—he did not wear socks—and, placing them side by side under his dirty blanket swag, put his feet toward the camp fire, laid flat on his back, bit a large bit of black tobacco plug off, and chewing the end fell asleep.
He left us in the morning at daybreak, went across the scrub with his swag on his back and disappeared under the gums and never looked back once.