I felt so proud the first night I camped in it that I couldn't sleep, and got up several times to walk round and admire the shanty in the moonlight. On one of these peregrinations (I clad in an airy costume of a single shirt), I suddenly felt something cold and wriggley under my foot. I must have jumped about fifteen feet. Turning round, I saw a black snake squirming about. I must have stepped on his neck. Otherwise, I don't know how I escaped a bite. I got a stick and finished the little devil. Nobody seems to pay much attention to black snakes up here. They always whip out of the way, and don't attack unless actually interfered with, and they're easily killed with a light stick.
About this time I got a small brushing job from a mean person who gave me ten shillings an acre to cut four acres thickly grown with the accursed stinging tree. I found afterwards that thirty shillings an acre is little enough for tackling this dreadful stuff. However, I got it done, and was laid up for a week in consequence. No sleep through the pain, and blood coming from nose and ears while working in it. There must be a frightfully deadly poison in the plant. The bare inhalation of the smell of the fresh-cut stalks makes you vomit, and brings blood from the nose in a few minutes, while the least touch on any part by the bush causes agonising pain, which lasts for weeks sometimes. There is no palliative.
I then got a job from a neighbouring selector to brush twenty acres, so I shouldered "Matilda" and went to camp with him. It's the devil's own job "Matilda-ing" in the Rainy Season. The tracks are knee deep in mud, and the paddocks, what with logs and interlaced seed stems on the grass, are nearly impassable. I don't know of anything so tiring as trying to wade through a paspalum paddock in seed. I anticipated being a month or so with this chap, Barker. He was a bachelor, young, fair-haired, rather shifty blue-grey eyes, a quick and uncertain temper, and as sarcastic as the devil. Although twenty-four, he was practically illiterate, owing to having had to milk cows from about six years of age, there being therefore no time for schooling. As is always the case, this misfortune had bred in him a suspicion of anyone educated, and a disposition to try and take him down a peg, to show that he was as smart as the other, in spite of lack of education. This sort of thing is inevitable.
I must give him his due though—he had "made good." He cleared out from the cow-slavery when he was fifteen years old and started for himself; told a fib about his age, got a selection, and felled most of the scrub himself. When twenty-one he sold out for £800, and took a partly improved place further out, going in for fattening "beefers." A dry spell nearly ruined the game youngster, so, sickening of the South, he sold out, came up with a wad, got a block here, and started in to fall all the scrub as before. He had about a fifteen-acre paddock with a house on it when I made his acquaintance. His place is worth £1000 easily now.
His mate was an Irish-Tasmanian named Paddy (of course); middle-aged, tall, lank and dark, with a long melancholy face like a cow, and very weather-beaten. Quite uneducated, but an absolute glutton for work, and with a very decided weakness for beer—lots of it for choice. He was an artist with the axe, putting a scarf in a tree as neat as a saw cut. Good-tempered, he had a quiet humour that floored Snappy Barker every time, as thus:—
Barker: "Hey, Paddy! I was down at Blogg's yes'day, and they was runnin' yer down summat crool."
Paddy: "Was they? Well, why dinyer stop 'em? Yer could, easy."
Barker: "'Ow could I?"
Paddy: "Oh! Don't you start runnin' me down to 'em. Then they won't git startit."
The three of us were to tucker together, and as they had ordered a big stock, which had been left at a house three miles off, the first job we did was to hump the stuff out. It was raining hard—as it did almost every day of the six weeks I was with them. We had an old pack-horse. My road was bad enough, Lord knows; but Barker's was literally waist deep in mud in places, covered with a repulsive green slime and bubbling with foul-smelling gas when disturbed. There was a whole cask of salt beef among other things, and this was the first thing we tackled. We emptied the meat into corn sacks, and loaded the old horse and Paddy with that, while Barker and I slung the cask, with about five gallons of salt pickle in it, on a pole between us, and started out home. We struggled up the first slippery hill.