Lost in the Bush—The Drought—We find dead Comrades together—Horse and Rider
It was my luck to be on the lonely track humping the swag when a great drought swept its burning wave across the whole of Australia. On the borders of Queensland I had been with two more English emigrants working on a selector’s ranch at “Sunrise Creek.” Dorrell was the boss’s name and he had a splendid stock of sheep and many acres of land under cultivation. He proved a fine man to us lads and treated us as though we were his own sons. I taught his daughter to play the violin and he was so proud when she was first able to play “Home, Sweet Home” that he smacked me on the back and gave me a week’s holiday. But life in a selector’s homestead is extremely monotonous, and after staying there six months I bade them all farewell, and with a kindred spirit started off to tramp to Maranoa with the idea of getting across to Queensland and into more lively surroundings.
Modern Sheep-shearers
It was on that tramp that the great drought struck the country; forests that were green shrivelled to grey and then to brown, as the fiery blast from the white hot sun day after day crept over the sky as we tramped along. The wind blew like the hot blasts from some volcano; the swamps and creeks and pools soon became baked and cracked shallows, wherein the very frogs stuck in the dry ooze, died and stank. While we passed by, half dead ourselves, searching for water, overhead across the cloudless blue passed swarms of parrots. As my comrade and I staggered along we heard the dismal mutterings of those birds as they sped away overhead and faded away leaving a greater loneliness after they disappeared, tiny specks on the Southern skyline. To the south-west of us rose some hills, and at nightfall we came across a pool of water at the bottom of a deep gully. It was hot-fevered stuff, but we knelt side by side and drank it as on the scorched blue gums the carrion crows wept, and yet, with that same hope that springs eternally in the human breast, sharpened up their beaks with the forlorn hope that we might yet die and our rotting carcasses supply them with food. By the swamp we slept that night, and once more at daybreak started off. Over us on the eucalyptus trees the carrion crows had slept and over our heads they croaked and flapped lazily along, following us, and often they would stay by the trackless track to feed on the dead birds in the mulga-scrub, birds that had fallen from their perch during the night, dead through the want of water. For miles and miles the bush lay around us, nothing but a leafless, waterless drought-stricken ocean, and often as the migrating birds passed over, some would half fall from the blazing sky and settle on the tree-tops to die, just the same as swallows do far out at sea as the stragglers fly to the rigging of the lonely ship, and fall dead on the deck during the night through hunger.
My comrade was English, and was a splendid friend; he was three or four years older than I, and when we sat down together and shared out the food we had in our swag, we would almost quarrel because he would deny himself and give me the largest share. He was uneducated, but that did not matter. God had amply repaid him in the making for all that his education might lack when he was a man, and twelve months after, when I read in a newspaper that I had been drowned at sea on the schooner Alice that was lost with all hands, I felt terribly upset. I had given him one of my “Very good” discharges so that he could secure a berth; he got the berth, and my name being on his discharge he had to sail under my name, and died bearing my name. Many beautiful things were said of me when my old acquaintances also read the account, and thought it was I who was drowned; but when the truth came out, and I appeared and was once more known to be living in common flesh, I became commonplace, and the beautiful things that only survive in the memory for those who are dead, faded and my sins once more awoke and peeped through my good reputation like the slit-mouths of those frogs that protrude among the pure white lilies of a crystal lake. But I must return to that tramp across those drought-stricken plains.
I think it was three weeks before we reached civilisation again, though we were not more than two hundred miles from Warrego. I sprained my ankle while crossing a gully, and found it a terrible job to get along, but Ned Shipley, my comrade, made me lean on his shoulder as he staggered along with the swag, which was nearly empty. We had thrown all the blankets away and kept just one small rug to wrap our little remaining food in. Several times I gave in and told him to go on and take care of himself, but he was not made that way and simply lifted me up and dragged me along. Just when we were both nearly roasted up to dried skin and bone and despairing, we came across a deep cleft in a gully, and in its shaded glooms we found dozens of juicy prickly pears growing on the huge boughs. I lay at full length on my back utterly exhausted as Ned knocked the prickles off the rind with his boots and placed the crimson fruit in my parched mouth. That night was the first night that we really slept soundly, and when we awoke the sun had already fired the eastern sky with blood-red streaks. As we lay on our backs under the tall dried-up blood-wood trees, we saw the flocks of cockatoos and migrating spoonbills pass in hurrying fleets across the sky. All was hushed on the slopes around us, excepting for the chanting noise of the locusts and the surviving tree-frogs. I remember well that particular morning; the long sleep had considerably refreshed us both, and my comrade even started to sing and I to dream of home and England. I lay by his side and I seemed to realise with a deeper intensity all that had happened. And as the scent of the parched sea-scrub blew in whiffs around my nostrils, and my chum stood up and gazed dreamily across the plains with his hand arched over his sky-blue eyes, I felt the atmosphere of wild romance come over me. Notwithstanding all the misery of that tramp and my helplessness, the spirit of adventure seemed to thrill me with a strange happiness. Even now after all the years I can still see the rolling plains around us, our homeless camp under the blood-wood trees, and the big bird that fluttered just overhead, with crimson underwings and one of its legs hanging down as though it was broken, as it gave a lonely wail and passed away. On we tramped that day and towards nightfall, by the side of a dried-up creek, we both stood and gazed on one of the saddest sights of loneliness and helplessness that I ever saw or may ever see again. There by a dead stunted palm on the desert lay the skeleton of a horse; the bones were bleached white and so was the relic of humanity beside it, and as we both gazed on that sad sight, we instinctively drew closer to each other.
The last lone ride I live it again,
Lost, alone on the drought-swept plain,
The grey-green gone from the scattered scrub;