Before dawn Mr. Neuchamp was pacing his verandah, having darted out from his couch the very moment that he awoke. The temperature had sensibly fallen; so had the clouds, which were low and black; and still the rain streamed down more heavily than at first. There was apparently no alteration likely to take place during the day. The water commenced to flow in the small channels. The minor watercourses, the gullies, and creeks were filling. Wonder of wonders—it was a settled, set-in, hopelessly wet day! What a blessed and wonderful change from last week! Ernest had a colloquy with Charley Banks about things in general, and then permitted himself a whole day’s rest—reading a little, ciphering a little, and looking up his correspondence, which had fallen much into arrear. As the day wore on the rain commenced to show determination, heavily, hour after hour, with steady fall, saturating the darkened earth, no longer dusty, desolate, hopelessly barren. The gaping fissures were filled. The long disused ruts and gutters ran full and foaming down to their ultimate destination, the river. That great stream refused to acknowledge any immediate change of level from so inconsiderable a cause as a rainfall so far from its source. But, doubtless, as Charley Banks pointed out, in a week or more it would ‘come down’ in might and majesty, when the freshets at the head waters should have time to gather forces and swell the yellow tide. It was well if there was not then a regular flood, but that would do them no harm; might swamp out the Freemans, perhaps, but as long as Tottie wasn’t drowned, and the old woman, the rest of the family might be swept down to Adelaide for all he, Charley, cared. So let it rain till all was blue. There was no mistake this time. It was a general rain. We should have forty-eight hours of it before it stopped. Every hoof of stock was off the frontage now and away back, where there was good shelter and a trifle of feed. In a fortnight after this there would be good ‘bite’ all over Rainbar run. We should have a little comfort in our lives now. What a pull it was, that old Cottonbush had branded up those last stores before the rain came.
Thus Mr. Charles Banks, jubilantly prophetic, with the elasticity of youth, having thrown off at one effort all the annoyance and privation of the famine year, was fully prepared for an epoch of marvels and general prosperity.
The day ended as it had commenced. There was not a moment’s cessation from the soaking, pouring, saturating, dripping downpour of heaven’s precious rain. ‘As the shower upon the mown grass,’ saith the olden Scripture of the day of David the King. Doubtless the great City of Palaces was erst surrounded by shaven lawns, by irrigated fields and gardens. But on the skirts of the far-stretching yellow deserts, tenanted then as now by the wild tribes, to whom pasture for their camels and asses, and horses and sheep, was as the life-blood of their veins, doubtless there were thousands of leagues all barren, baked sterility, until the long-desired rain set in, when, as if by magic, herbs and waving grains and flowerets fair sprang up, and rejoiced the hearts of the tribe, from the silver-bearded sheik to the laughing child.
So it would be at Rainbar. Ernest knew this from many a conversation which he had had upon the subject with Jack Windsor and Charley Banks. In this warm, dry-soiled country, the growth of pasture under favourable circumstances is well-nigh incredible. Nature adapts herself to the most widely differing conditions of existence with amazing fertility of resource. In more temperate zones the partial heat which withers the flower and the green herb when cut down, slays the plant and destroys germination in the seed for evermore. Here, in the wild waste, when the fierce and burning blast revels over scorched brown prairies, and the whirlwind and the sand column dance together over heated sands, the plant life is well and truly adapted to the strange soil, the stranger clime. The tall grasses grow hard and gray, or faint yellow, under the daily desiccation which spares no tender growth; but they remain nutritive and life-sustaining for an incredible period, if but the necessary cloud water can be supplied at long intervals. Then the hard-pushed pastoral colonist, when he found that his flocks had bared to famine pitch the pastures within reach of the watercourses, which were his sole dependence in the earlier days, was compelled to resort to the most ancient practice of well-digging, of which he might have gained the idea from the familiar records of a hard-set pastoral people in the sandy wastes of Judea. Receding to the wide plains and waterless forests of the vast region which lay cruelly distant from any known stream or fountain, which was in summer regularly abandoned by the aboriginal denizens of the land, he sank, at much expense, wells of great depth—at first with uncertain result; but, though much of the water thus painfully obtained—for from three to five hundred pounds for two to three hundred feet sinking was no uncommon expense in a single well—was brackish, much salt, still progress was made. The stock was enabled in the midst of summer heat or protracted autumn drought to feed upon these previously locked-up pastures, upon the saline herbs and plants, the nutritious, aromatic shrubs peculiar to this land, where no white man had ever before seen stock except in winter.
By degrees it began to be asserted that ‘back country,’ i.e. the lands remote from all visible means of subsistence for flocks and herds, as far as water was concerned, paid the speculative pastoral occupier better than the ‘frontage,’ or land in the neighbourhood of permanent creeks, and of the few well-known rivers. There roamed that unconscionable beast of prey, the all-devouring free selector. He could select the choicest bends, the richest flats, the deepest river reaches, even where the squatter had fenced or enclosed. For were not the waters free to all? He naturally appropriated the best and most tempting conjunctions of ‘land and water.’ These were precisely those which were most profitable, most necessary, occasionally most indispensable to the proprietor of the run.
But it was not so with the back blocks. There capital yet retained much of its ancient supremacy. The wielder of that implement or weapon was enabled to cause his long-silent wilderness to blossom as the rose, by means of dams and wells. He was in a position also to drive off, keep out, and withstand the invading pseudo-grazier, with his sham purchases and his wrongful grass rights.
Thus, by a wise provision of the Land Act, all improvements of a value exceeding forty pounds sterling, when placed by the pastoral tenant upon the Crown lands which he was facetiously supposed to rent, protect the lands upon which they stand, or which, in the case of a well, they underlie; that is to say, a five-hundred-guinea well or a hundred-pound dam cannot be free-selected or taken cool possession of as a conditional purchase by the land marauder of the period. Some people might see a slight flavour of fairness in this provision which has not always in other colonies, Victoria notably, been granted by the democratic wolf to the conservative lamb. However the Government of New South Wales may have erred in other respects, it has in the main so far ruled the outnumbered pastoralists with a courtesy, fairness, and freedom from small greed such as might be expected from one body of gentlemen in responsible dealing with a class of similar social rank.
One successful well or dam, therefore, converted a block of country hitherto useless for nine months out of the twelve into a run capable of carrying ten thousand sheep all the year round. Of course, any portion of the Crown estate the conditional purchaser might ‘take up,’ or, without notice, occupy. But where was he to procure his water from? He had not often five hundred pounds, or if so, did not ‘believe’ in such solemn disbursement for ‘mere improvements.’ Therefore he still haunted, cormorant-like, the rivers and creeks—the ‘permanent water’ of the colonist. To the younger sons of ancient houses, scions of Howards, Somersets, and of the untitled nobility of Britain, he conceded the right to live like hermits in the Thebaid, upon their artificially and expensively watered back blocks.
A special peculiarity of the ocean-like plains of inmost Australia is the miraculous growth of vegetation after the profuse irrigation which invariably succeeds a drought. In the warm dry earth, now converted into a bed of red or black mud, saturated to its lowest inch, and rich for procreation of every green thing, lies a hoard of seeds of wondrous number and variety of species. Broad and green, in a few days, as the vivid growth from the aged, still fruitful bosom of mysterious Nile, along with the ordinary pasture appear the seed leaves of unknown, half-forgotten grasses, reeds, plants, flowers, never noticed except in an abnormally wet season. In cycles of ordinary moisture, the true degree of saturation not having been reached, they lie death-like year after year, until, aroused by Nature’s unerring signal, they arise and burst forth into full vitality. In such a time an astonishing variety of herbs, plants, and flowers is to be seen mingling with gigantic grasses, such as Charley Banks described to Mr. Neuchamp when he prophesied, after forty-eight hours of steady rain had fallen, that on the Back Lake Plains this year he would be able to tie the grass tops together before him, as he sat on horseback. Mr. Neuchamp had never before discovered his lieutenant in a wilful exaggeration; but on this occasion he felt mortified that he should still be supposed a fit subject upon which to foist humorous fabrications.
‘I see you don’t believe me,’ said Charley, rather put out in turn at not being credited. ‘Let’s call Jack. You ask him the height of the tallest grass he ever saw in this part of the country in a real wet season. There he goes. Here, Jack, Mr. Neuchamp wants to ask you a question.’