It had been a hot, close night, and it ended in a suffocating sunrise. The free portion of the male population were in the habit of taking their blankets and sleeping out in “the Park,” or town square, in hot weather; the wives and daughters of the town slept, or tried to sleep, with bedroom windows and doors open, while husbands lay outside on the verandas. I camped in a corner of the park that night, and the sun woke me.
As I sat up I caught sight of a swagman coming along the white, dusty road from the direction of the bridge, where the cleared road ran across west and on, a hundred and thirty miles, through the barren, broiling mulga scrubs, to Hungerford, on the border of Sheol. I knew that swagman’s walk. It was John Merrick (Jack Moonlight), one-time Shearers’ Union secretary at Coonamble, and generally “Rep” (shearers’ representative) in any shed where he sheared. He was a “better-class shearer,” one of those quiet, thoughtful men of whom there are generally two or three in the roughest of rough sheds, who have great influence, and give the shed a good name from a Union point of view. Not quiet with the resentful or snobbish reserve of the educated Englishman, but with a sad or subdued sort of quietness that has force in it—as if they fully realized that their intelligence is much higher than the average, that they have suffered more real trouble and heartbreak than the majority of their mates, and that their mates couldn’t possibly understand them if they spoke as they felt and couldn’t see things as they do—yet men who understand and are intensely sympathetic in their loneliness and sensitive reserve.
I had worked in a shed with Jack Moonlight, and had met him in Sydney, and to be mates with a bushman for a few weeks is to know him well—anyway, I found it so. He had taken a trip to Sydney the Christmas before last, and when he came back there was something wanting. He became more silent, he drank more, and sometimes alone, and took to smoking heavily. He dropped his mates, took little or no interest in Union matters, and travelled alone, and at night.
The Australian bushman is born with a mate who sticks to him through life—like a mole. They may be hundreds of miles apart sometimes, and separated for years, yet they are mates for life. A bushman may have many mates in his roving, but there is always one his mate, “my mate;” and it is common to hear a bushman, who is, in every way, a true mate to the man he happens to be travelling with, speak of his mate’s mate—“Jack’s mate”—who might be in Klondyke or South Africa. A bushman has always a mate to comfort him and argue with him, and work and tramp and drink with him, and lend him quids when he’s hard up, and call him a b—— fool, and fight him sometimes; to abuse him to his face and defend his name behind his back; to bear false witness and perjure his soul for his sake; to lie to the girl for him if he’s single, and to his wife if he’s married; to secure a “pen” for him at a shed where he isn’t on the spot, or, if the mate is away in New Zealand or South Africa, to write and tell him if it’s any good coming over this way. And each would take the word of the other against all the world, and each believes that the other is the straightest chap that ever lived-“a white man!” And next best to your old mate is the man you’re tramping, riding, working, or drinking with.
About the first thing the cook asks you when you come along to a shearers’ hut is, “Where’s your mate?” I travelled alone for a while one time, and it seemed to me sometimes, by the tone of the inquiry concerning the whereabouts of my mate, that the bush had an idea that I might have done away with him and that the thing ought to be looked into.
When a man drops mateship altogether and takes to “hatting” in the bush, it’s a step towards a convenient tree and a couple of saddle-straps buckled together.
I had an idea that I, in a measure, took the place of Jack Moonlight’s mate about this time.
“’Ullo, Jack!” I hailed as he reached the corner of the park.
“Good morning, Harry!” said Jack, as if he’d seen me last yesterday evening instead of three months ago. “How are you getting on?”
We walked together towards the Union Office, where I had a camp in the skillion-room at the back. Jack was silent. But there’s no place in the world where a man’s silence is respected so much (within reasonable bounds) as in the Australian bush, where every man has a past more or less sad, and every man a ghost—perhaps from other lands that we know nothing of, and speaking in a foreign tongue. They say in the bush, “Oh, Jack’s only thinking!” And they let him think. Generally you want to think as much as your mate; and when you’ve been together some time it’s quite natural to travel all day without exchanging a word. In the morning Jim says, “Well, I think I made a bargain with that horse, Bill,” and some time late in the afternoon, say twenty miles farther on, it occurs to Bill to “rejoin,” “Well, I reckon the blank as sold it to you had yer proper!”