The first week they were in the township the weather was as hot as ever. Although the doors and windows were all wide open, we gasped for breath at church; and though the clergyman’s surplice looked cool, his face was so red that you could not help fancying that he wanted to pray and preach in unbuttoned shirt-sleeves. If he had been obliged to wear a thick black gown, I think he would have been suffocated. But when the boys’ second Sunday in Jerry’s Town came, a good bit of Jerry’s Town was under water, Jerry’s Flats were an inland sea, and some of the worshippers who had hung up their horses on the churchyard rails the Sunday before had had to take refuge in the township with scarcely a shirt or a gown that they could call their own.
On the Wednesday night after that first Sunday we had gone to bed as late as we could in Jerry’s Town, outside the bed-clothes, and with as little covering of any kind as was practicable. After tossing and tumbling about, and getting up every now and then to light pipes to “cool ourselves,” and drive away the humming, bloodthirsty mosquitoes, we had at last fallen asleep at the fag end of the “small hours” of Thursday morning. When we awoke, with a chill on, the rain was coming down as if it did not like its own business, but wanted to get it over, and let sunlight reign and roast once more. It had knocked off shingles, and was pouring into rooms in gallons. Imagine a shower-bath without a perforated bottom—the whole of the mysteriously upheld water coming down bodily the instant the string is touched—and then, if you imagine also that the shower-bath is constantly refilled for a week or so, and that you are obliged to stand under it all the time, you will get some faint notion of the suddenness and force of Australian rain. More “annual inches” of rain, I have read, fall in sunny Australia than in soppy Ireland, and therefore, when the Australians have learnt—perhaps from the Chinamen, whom they tried hard to keep out of their country, but to whom they are grudgingly grateful now for “summer cabbage,” &c., that they could not get from any British-blooded market-gardener—when they have learnt, I say, to wisely manage and husband their bountiful water supply, by damming rivers, and draining what would otherwise be flooded country into reservoirs, Australia will become, in many a part where it is now barren, one of the most fertile lands that the sun shines on. With such a reserve fund of water to use up, the hot Australian sunbeams will be a boon instead of a bane. In my time, however (and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Argus, things are not very different now), up-country Australia periodically suffered from a fast from water or a feast of it—the feast, in some respects, being even worse than the fast.
We were glad at first to hear, and see, and smell, and feel the rain, but when it steadily poured on we began to feel alarmed. Part of Jerry’s Town stood on a little rise, but more than half of it was nearly on a level with Jerry’s Flats; and those, according to black fellows’ tradition, had once been the bottom of a lake. There was good reason, therefore, to feel anxious when the rain kept coming down in an almost unbroken mass, and we could tell, from the rapid way in which the Kakadua and the creek rose, that up the country, too, the rain was falling in the same wholesale fashion. The people who lived in the huts on the Flats, and who had pitched their farmhouses along the river-banks for the sake of the rich alluvial soil, had still more reason to be anxious. By Thursday night there were great sheets of water, constantly getting closer to one another, out upon the Flats; the ferry-punt at the mouth of the creek had been swept away; and the muddy flood was washing up into the town. Mark Tapley would have found it hard work to be jolly on that Thursday night, if he had been in Jerry’s Town. The flooded-out people from the lower part of the township and the outlying huts came crowding up, like half-drowned rats, to shelter in the church or the Court House, the police-barracks or the inns, or wherever else they could find refuge; and the waters came after them at a rate that made it doubtful whether they had not merely postponed their doom. Dim lights twinkling far off over the waste of dimly-seen waters were only comforting for a minute. How long—you thought the next minute—will they be able to go on burning? In spite of the rush of the down-pouring rain, the wail of the wind, and the roar of the ever-rising flood, we heard every now and then the crack of an alarm gun, and fancied at any rate that we heard a wild “cooey” for help or a wilder woman’s scream.
Just as dawn broke on Friday the new bridge across the Kakadua went with a crash. (The flood had risen as high as the flooring, and eddied across it, the night before.) The swollen river dashed the big trees it had pulled up like radishes against the bridge like battering-rams. The middle of the roadway caved in; down dropped the arches above the roadway, taking suicidal “headers;” on rushed the heavily-laden river; and in a few minutes a momentary glimpse of a truncated bankside pile was all that was to be seen of the fine bridge which “the hon. member for the Kakadua” had made the Colonial Treasurer pay for in his “Budget.” The remembrance that they had not paid for it themselves comforted the Jerry’s Towners a little when the bridge was whirled away, but it had scarcely ceased to be visible before they began to denounce the Government for squandering the “people’s money” on scamped work like that, and the hon. member for Kakadua sank as rapidly in the opinion of his Jerry’s Town constituents as the Kakadua rose before their eyes. He was a “duffer,” after all, they said, and only shammed to look after the “estimates.”
But that was no time to go into politics. More than half of Jerry’s Town was under water; and Jerry’s Flats were a huge lake, with here and there a clump of trees, or a single tree-top, a chimney, a roof, a yard or two of fencing, or a tiny island of higher ground, showing above the troubled water. Dead horses, bullocks, sheep, pigs, poultry, and bush beasts and birds, little trees, big trees, rafts of branches and brushwood, great mats of withered grass and weeds, rushes and reeds, large clods of red earth, harness, furniture, bark roofs, slab and weather-board sides and fronts of huts and houses, verandah-posts, stray stacks, and wrecks of all kind, were everywhere tossing and jostling; but in the current of the river they were hurried on in such a grinding bumping mass that, even if the water had not run so rapidly, it would have been a most perilous task to pull a boat across the stream. A boat or two did manage to cross it, however, thanks to bold clever steering, although they were whisked along like chips for a mile or so before they could get out of the current. Every boat left unswamped in Jerry’s Town was out soon after daybreak on that Friday morning. The police-boat got away first, and it was queer to see it steering between the roofs that alone marked out the lower end of George Street, pulling right over the pound at the bottom of Pitt Street, and then giving a spurt into the open water across the drowned butcher’s paddock. All the boats had adventures that, I think, would interest you but, of course, you guess that Harry and Donald formed part of a rescue party, and therefore I will tell you their adventures, as I heard them, partly from the boys, and partly from the men they went with.
Harry and Donald had begun to despair of getting afloat, because, of course, when crews were made up, stronger arms than boys’ were picked, and the boats had no room for outward-bound passengers, every inch of room being needed for the poor people they were going to rescue. But the Doctor had a ramshackle old four-oared tub, in which he sometimes pottered about in the creek by himself. It was rowing under difficulties, for the Doctor found it hard work to lug the heavy old literal “torpid” along, and every now and then he had to stop pulling, and set to work at baling. For some reason, however, the Doctor was very proud of his tub; and, the instant the creek began to rise, he had her hauled up his garden, which sloped down to the creek, and laid up in ordinary in his verandah.
There she was lying when the boys came upon two men, who were looking at her somewhat disconsolately. One was the landlord of the “General Bourke,” and the other was the Jerry’s Town shoemaker.
“I doubt if she’d float, Tommy,” said the landlord; “and besides, she hain’t got ne’er a rudder.”
“Oh, we could stuff summat in here and there,” answered the shoemaker, “an’ we could steer her better with a oar, an’ some little cove will be game to bale.”
Harry and Donald at once offered their services, but just then the Doctor came out.