Just wasn’t there a supper at Wonga-Wonga that night! And didn’t Dick-a-Dick tuck into it? And didn’t Harry and Donald, between them, eat nearly half as much as he did?
VI.
AN AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT.
“What a set of crawlers you are in Jerry’s Town, Mr. Howe!” said Harry Lawson to me, one frizzlingly hot day. I was staying in Jerry’s Town then, and Harry had ridden in to meet the mail, and take back the Wonga-Wonga newspapers and letters. “I shouldn’t like,” Harry went on, “to live in a town. I should feel choked with such a lot of houses about me. Father talks about England sometimes, but I’m sure he likes the colony twenty times better. Houses everywhere, and all the little bush you’ve got left cut up into paddocks! I wouldn’t live in England if you paid me for it. You brag about your horses, but they can’t run against ours, when they do come out. I wonder they live out the voyage, from the way I’ve heard you coddle them. Look at our horses—they don’t want corn and cloths, just as if they were babies. You can ride them for a hundred miles, and turn them out to grass all in a sweat, and yet they’re as fresh as paint for another hundred miles next day—aren’t you, Cornstalk?” said Harry, proudly patting the damp neck of his favourite steed.
Harry was always very fond of “cracking up the colony,” but he was especially inclined to do so that forenoon, having had his temper somewhat irritated (although he protested that he was as cool as a water-melon) by the hot wind that had been blowing for three days. I have been in glassworks, and close by the mouths of blast-furnaces, but the heat of an Australian hot wind is worse than theirs. The perspiration it brings out does not cool, and the warm beads are licked up the instant they ooze out upon the forehead and the cheeks. If a vitrifying brick could feel, it would sympathize with a “new chum” in an Australian hot wind. When the “southerly buster” comes after the hot wind, rushing with the chill still on from the South Pole, I have seen people ripping open their shirts to let the cold breeze blow right round them. The hot wind, too, makes the eyes smart and itch dreadfully.
When Harry was talking to me that day—shamming that he did not feel the heat in the least—a good many people in Jerry’s Town had got “the blight.” Their eyes were bunged up just as if they had been fighting, though they did keep on dabbing rags dipped in alum-water up to them. And then, as if the blight was not bad enough, flies got into the corners of the eyes, and sucked away with their thirsty probosces. I have heard of a Frenchman who committed suicide because, as he left a letter to say, he was “so bothered by the flies that life was not worth keeping at such a price.” I think that foolish man must have been an Australian immigrant. The flies at the time I am telling you about were really a dreadful nuisance in Jerry’s Town. They buzzed about one’s head like swarming bees, they covered one’s back like a shirt of mail, at mealtimes they made the chops and steaks look as black as if they had been smothered in magnified peppercorns. It was hot then. The mercury stood at a good bit over 100° in the shade: it was almost impossible to find out what it stood at in the sun without getting a sunstroke. At every corner poor dogs were lying with their tongues out askew, panting like high-pressure steamboats just about to blow up.
For some time we had seen a few dark clouds on the hilly horizon, and heard the low rumble of distant thunder. Oh, how we hoped that the storm would work up our way, and drench us; but for months not a drop of rain had fallen in our parts. Even in Jerry’s Town we began to feel anxious about our water-supply; both the creek and the Kakadua had sunk so low—the creek had become a mere straggling chain of very shallow ponds—and so many bullocks, and sheep, and horses had been driven in, or had found their way, from long distances round, to drink up what water there was to be had.
The tall emu, with its hairy rusty-black feathers, is a shy bird, and, though Jerry’s Town was a very quiet little place, an emu had not been seen within a dozen miles of it for years; but during that long drought the emus stalked right through Macquarie Street in Jerry’s Town to get to the water. Some of them were shot; one of them was so very thirsty that it let itself be knocked on the head like a “booby,” through its anxiety to crook its long neck into the creek; but the poor birds were not nearly so fat as they generally are. They were half-starved as well as parched with thirst. Very little oil (emu oil is a Bush all-heal) was got out of them when they were put into the pot. I dare say you have often growled over wet English weather—especially when it put off a picnic or a cricket match—but, you see, people in Australia are not as ready as you are to say,
“Rain, rain, go away,
And come again some other day.”
Sunlight is a very beautiful thing, but when it threatens to kill one it does not seem so beautiful.