“I don't know,” she wailed, “I don't know. You're a man, and I'm a helpless girl. They turned me out! My mother's dead, and my brothers gone away. Look! Look here!” pointing to a bruise on her forehead. “The woman did that. My own father stood by and saw it done—said it served me right! Oh, my God!”
“What woman? Tell me all about it.”
“The woman father brought home!... I want to go away from the bush! Oh! for God's sake take me away from the bush!... Anything! anything!—you know!—only take me away from the bush!”
Bob and his mate—who had been roused—did their best to soothe her; but suddenly, without a moment's warning, she sprang to her feet and scrambled to the top of the rock overhanging the camp. She stood for a moment in the bright moonlight, gazing intently down the vacant road.
“Here they come!” she cried, pointing down the road. “Here they come—the troopers! I can see their cap-peaks glistening in the moonlight!... I'm going away! Mother's gone. I'm going now!—Good-bye!—Good-bye! I'm going away from the bush!”
Then she ran through the trees towards the foot of Long Gully. Bob and his mate followed; but, being unacquainted with the locality, they lost her.
She ran to the edge of a granite cliff on the higher side of the deepest of the rocky waterholes. There was a heavy splash, and three startled kangaroos, who had been drinking, leapt back and sped away, like three grey ghosts, up the ridge towards the moonlit peak.
Mitchell on the “Sex” and Other “Problems”
“I agree with 'T' in last week's 'Bulletin',” said Mitchell, after cogitating some time over the last drop of tea in his pannikin, held at various angles, “about what they call the 'Sex Problem'. There's no problem, really, except Creation, and that's not our affair; we can't solve it, and we've no right to make a problem out of it for ourselves to puzzle over, and waste the little time that is given us about. It's we that make the problems, not Creation. We make 'em, and they only smother us; they'll smother the world in the end if we don't look out. Anything that can be argued, for and against, from half a dozen different points of view—and most things that men argue over can be—and anything that has been argued about for thousands of years (as most things have) is worse than profitless; it wastes the world's time and ours, and often wrecks old mateships. Seems to me the deeper you read, think, talk, or write about things that end in ism, the less satisfactory the result; the more likely you are to get bushed and dissatisfied with the world. And the more you keep on the surface of plain things, the plainer the sailing—the more comfortable for you and everybody else. We've always got to come to the surface to breathe, in the end, in any case; we're meant to live on the surface, and we might as well stay there and look after it and ourselves for all the good we do diving down after fish that aren't there, except in our imagination. And some of 'em are very dead fish, too—the 'Sex Problem', for instance. When we fall off the surface of the earth it will be time enough to make a problem out of the fact that we couldn't stick on. I'm a Federal Pro-trader in this country; I'm a Federalist because I think Federation is the plain and natural course for Australia, and I'm a Free-tectionist because I'm in favour of sinking any question, or any two things, that enlightened people can argue and fight over, and try, one after the other, for fifty years without being able to come to a decision about, or prove which is best for the welfare of the country. It only wastes a young country's time, and keeps it off the right track. Federation isn't a problem—it's a plain fact—but they make a problem out of every panel they have to push down in the rotten old boundary fences.”