More Improvements—Bullockys.
The weather had fined up and remained so for months. Beautiful warm sun, tempered by the cool breeze by day, and cold, sometimes frosty, nights. It was ideal weather for work; and Len and I worked well, ate well, slept well, and for the first time I started to throw off the effects of all that worry and nerve-strain I had undergone at sea.
Those glorious days! We would be off just after daybreak, red-nosed and shivering, clad in thick garments and heavy coats, with perhaps a frost on the grass. Ten minutes with the axe and off came the coat. Another ten, and the extra pair of pants followed suit, and by half-past eight the benignant sunshine reduced one to pants and shirt. How you could work! and when lunch-time came, eat!! It was good to be alive, life was rosy, and every lungful of the glorious crisp bush-scented air put fresh manhood into us.
Then the still more enchanting moonlit nights. Small print could be read with ease by the moonlight, and with the air so still the howl of a lonely dog three miles off came clear and distinct. From the hut we could see mile on mile of rolling scrub, sombre and still, and in the distance a long line of scrub-clad hills, clear cut against the star-strewn, ink-blue sky. The spirit of the romance of pioneering took possession of us. We were the only inhabitants of a new-found beautiful world; we were shipwrecked on an unspoiled pre-Adamite island; we were, well—just a couple of enthusiastic bush-lovers, with some ability to appreciate the beauty of old mother Nature.
Len was a good mate, and time passed on winged feet. On Sundays we tramped in for tucker and spent best part of the day at the open house his hospitable parents kept. We had whips of vegetables from my garden, until Braun in an unlucky hour gave Ellison permission to turn a few cows into his paddock. Now my cabbage garden was down on the creek at a place where several big trees had come down, the spaces between being filled up with smaller timber. This formed a barrier that I thought no mortal cow could ever get over. I didn't know cows.
At 8 p.m. one night three thousand beautiful cabbages and about a quarter of an acre of other green stuff formed a patch of cultivation to gladden the eye. At 7 a.m. next day I, newly-arisen, came to the door of the hut just in time to see the last of a line of ten dropsical, bloated cows see-saw over the impregnable logs out of a trampled muddy waste that had been a garden. I rushed down. Too late by hours. Absolutely nothing remained, save a few mangled stalks. Oh! my cabbages! that were to have paid the storekeeper's bill, rent, rates, and left a few pounds in hand. Gone! all gone! With murder in my heart and profanity on my lips, I chased the horrible wretches, who, grunting with distension and, I fondly hope, suffering pangs of indigestion, could hardly get up a slow trot. The tangled grass tripped me up, and I could only stand swearing impotently, and throw a few futile sticks at the brutes waddling heavily across the creek, where they lined up on the opposite bank, turned round and grinned—grinned at me. Ever see a cow grin? Wait till they manage to crawl into your cultivation patch, or land a hefty kick home when you're putting the leg-rope on, and then you'll find out. I know now why the conventional devil has horns and hoofs. The monks of old who first pictured him kept cows. That's why.
I swore at them until my breath failed, while the light breeze gently waved the frosted grass against my bare legs and turned my nose blue, then scurried back to the house. Len laughed unfeelingly, told me to put a secure fence up, and grow some more. He gave me a hand with the fence on Sunday. We always put off play-time jobs like that till Sunday.
Terry O'Gorman had come back to his place by this time, doing a bit more falling, and it was quite like old times again, for, of course, the three of us camped together. Terry was great on springboard work. A springboard is a six-inch by one-inch board four feet long, with a horse-shoe bolted on one end point up. You cut a notch two inches deep in a tree, insert the board, and stand on it to chop, the point of the shoe being driven by your weight into the upper edge of the notch and holding firm. Terry would go up three "lifts" (twelve to fifteen feet) without nervousness. The advantage is that the higher you go the easier it is to chop, the grain of the wood being straighter. When the tree goes, you scuttle away as best you can. I have heard it described as chopping with one foot in the grave and other on a bit of orange peel; but it's not quite that bad.
About a month after we commenced falling I actually got a "divvy" out of my place. A local bullocky had an order for "some small Kauri pine," and some on my block were the handiest, so I got £5 for about 12,000 super feet (worth over £200 in Sydney, I suppose), and I thought myself lucky to get that.
Pardy, the bullocky, was a big, rough, dark-complexioned bloke, with a shambling walk, a rough tongue and a heavy hand. He absolutely didn't care a damn for anybody or anything. The only way we could get the timber out was across a steep gully with a little muddy ditch at the bottom. It was hard work for the bullocks to come up dragging the empty jinker, but going down! Pardy would snig his log to the brow, then—whish! The whip sent skin and hair flying, and the poor brutes took the descent at a canter, the log behind skidding from side to side, while Pardy would stand on the brink cracking that awful whip, yelling, "Go it! you —— sons of ——! Head over turkey; I thot she wud," as they brought up all standing in the little creek, bullocks in an untidy mob, log broadside on, and the polers down. How on earth he didn't kill half his team every time, I don't know. The place is known as "Pardy's jump-up" to this day.