On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

Every year, however, the number of truly wild animals of Australia is—sad to say—lessening as surely as are the aborigines, though, perhaps, more slowly. In a book about Victoria, written by the old colonist, modestly hiding his identity under the pseudonym of “A Pioneer,” we are told of the immense numbers of the kangaroos, which in the old days were a source of serious worry and loss to the squatter, who used to gather together parties of his neighbours—anyone within a hundred miles coming under that heading—and, forming a cordon, drive them into some enclosed place and then shoot them. The scene is described in stilted Early Victorian phraseology, but yet brings to our mind the most vivid picture of the intense excitement of such a drive. On one station of 100,000 acres some 5,000 kangaroos were killed by driving them into a specially prepared cul-de-sac, ending with a great pit at the far end of a blind fence, as many as 500 a day having been destroyed, while as the animals began to realize that some awful danger was overtaking those in front of them, their efforts to escape, says “A Pioneer,” both by creeping under the horses and leaping over them, became little short of frantic.

When “A Pioneer” first landed in Melbourne in 1840, there was, where Port Melbourne now stands, one “mean, solitary cottage on the beach, boasting the name of Liardet’s Hotel”—rather an ominous combination of syllables, one might imagine. But the owner of it, Captain Liardet, seems to have been a very good fellow, and, meeting the newcomer at the ship, rowed him up the river, thick with wild duck and black swan, to the city of tents and shanties, where the entire space now occupied by Government buildings was one dense scrub. Later on he writes of his experiences at the time of the gold rush, when he and his partner drove a mob of cattle to Melbourne, and found there neither butchers, slaughterers, nor buyers.

He tells, too, of the annoyance that the “cocky” farmers even then were to the more settled colonists; how, on paying one pound an acre, or five shillings down and promising the rest, they could pick out the very best bits from the run; often ruining the squatter by taking the entire river frontage or water-holes, till the banks came forward, and in some measure checked the evil by advancing money to the squatters on the security of their leases, to a sufficient extent to enable them to buy the land.

Mrs. Frank Madden—the Speaker’s wife—once told me a very amusing story of the biter being bit by overreaching himself. A “cocky” had picked out a very fine slice of an estate on the Murrumbidgee, at the river-edge, as he thought. The squatter and his wife had been as kind as possible to the man and his wife, and the kindness of the people in the country districts in Australia is something worth having. But the new-comers, a common, mean, little Glasgow man and his wife, had been bitterly jealous of the comfort and refinement of their neighbours’ home—in which, by-the-by, they had been staying while their own was building—and, once settled, they determined on equalling matters up. They had picked out and fenced a long narrow strip along the water-edge, and absolutely refused to let the squatter’s sheep be driven through it to drink, so that the poor beasts had to trail many miles before they could reach the water, many actually dying of thirst on the way, for, as the whole estate had originally run along the river-edge, no water-holes had been dug.

In vain the squatter and his wife remonstrated and pleaded, and offered money; the mean little wretch’s envy and spite proved even greater than his rapacity, and he absolutely refused to concede an iota of his right.

The squatter might well have been driven distracted, but for one thing. He knew that it was only a matter of time. Before the “cocky” had taken up the land there had been heavy rains, and the river had swollen, and flooded fully a mile of the land at either side, and along the edge of that flood the stranger had pegged out his claim. Gradually it began to seem to him that the water—day by day, inch by inch—was slipping away from his border. Then, as the whole truth dawned on him, he drove off post-haste to the nearest town to buy up the rest of the land between himself and what he had begun to suspect was the true river-bank. But he was too late; the squatter had been there before him and already completed the purchase; so that as the water sank back into the river-bed and the billabongs gradually dried up, the “cocky” found himself obliged to beg the same boon for himself as he had refused to his neighbour, which—as the squatter was a man, and not an archangel—was promptly and consistently refused, till there was no choice left for the interloper but to move on elsewhere.

In those days the “cockies” pegged out their claims and took the land for themselves; nowadays the Land Board takes it for them—not a bit here and there, as they did, but large areas of the very best part of the run—sometimes even the entire estate.

How deliciously Robert Louis Stevenson writes in his book “Travels with a Donkey,” of the delights of sleeping out of doors! I wish he could have spent even one such night in the Australian Bush.

There was a round pool, deep among the trees in one forest that I know of, and there at dusk the drama of the night—which is really the woodland day—used to begin with the ibis, that came each evening to bathe. I used to go into the wood and sit down under the trees just to watch and wait for them. Punctually, just as the sky changed from blue to pink and grey, they used to arrive—from some mysterious world of shades, I veritably believe—and, floating down silently from above the tree-trunks, step delicately into the water. It is lovely to see them fly; their necks arch back like the handle of some Ionic vase, purely Greek, though as they alight and stand in the water they are completely Egyptian in form, and with all the mystery of Egypt in their mien. They do not splash and flutter their wings in bathing, as other birds do, but, when they move at all, do so very slowly, lifting first one foot, then another, high out of the water; while they stare persistently, without the faintest trace of alarm at any intruder. All the other animals here are the remnant of the true wild, left far behind by the ages, uneasy, wistful, and half ashamed. But the ibis is the spirit of a civilization older than any other; and if it does not speak, it is only that it has learnt how futile are all words.

One very hot night I took a blanket with me and camped out beside that pool. But I did not sleep, simply because everyone else seemed awake, and all the time things were happening. The lories sat up far later than they ought to have done, chatting among themselves. Then, as the ibis all floated away over the tree-tops once more, a white sulphur-crested cockatoo came down to bathe with a most prodigious splashing and fuss.