The unfailing flow of the new proprietor’s high spirits, his liberal ways, and frank manners, combined with exceptional straight going in the hunting-field, rendered him immensely popular, as indeed he had always contrived to be wherever fate and speculation led his roving steps. But it may be questioned whether his brother-colonist ever saw his old friend spinning by behind a blood team, or heard of his being among the select few in a ‘quick thing,’ without fulminating one of his choicest anathemas, comprehending at once the order to which he and Parklands had belonged, the country they had quitted, and the one in which they now sojourned.
Mr. Banks remained in the employment of Mr. Neuchamp at Rainbar until, having saved and acquired by guarded investment a moderate capital, he had a tempting offer of joining, as junior partner, in the purchase of a large station in new country. Always a good-looking, manly fellow, he managed to secure the affections of a niece of Mr. Middleton, whom he met on one of his rare trips to Sydney, and, before he left for the Tadmor Downs, Lower Barcoo, they were married.
Mr. Joe Freeman had employed some of the compulsory leisure time rendered necessary during his fulfilment of the residence clause for Mr. Levison, in an exhaustive study of the Crown Lands Alienation Act. From that important statute (20 Vic. No. 7, sec. 13) he discovered that, provided a man had children enough, there is but little limit to the quantity of the country’s soil that he can secure and occupy at a rate of expenditure singularly small and favourable to the speculative ‘landist’ of the period.
Thus Joe Freeman, after considerable ciphering, made out that he could ‘take up’ for himself and his three younger children a total of twelve hundred and eighty acres of first-class land! He had determined that as long as there was an alluvial flat in the colony his choice should not consist of bad land. Added to this would be a pre-emptive grazing right of three times the extent. This would come to three thousand eight hundred and forty acres, which, added to the freehold of twelve hundred and eighty acres, gave a total of five thousand one hundred and twenty acres. The entire use of this territory he could secure by a payment of five shillings per acre for the freehold portion only—say, three hundred and twenty pounds.
‘Of course his three children were compelled, by law, to reside on their selections. As two of these were under five years old, some difficulty in the carrying out of the apparently stringent section No. 18 might be anticipated.
This difficulty was utterly obliterated by building his cottage exactly upon the intersecting lines of the four half-sections, thus:
By this clever contrivance Mary Ellen, the baby, as well as Bob, aged three years, were ‘residing upon their selections’ when they were in bed at night, inasmuch as that haven of rest (for the other members of the family) was carefully placed across the south line which divided the estates.
Nor was this all. Bill Freeman took up a similar quantity of land in precisely the same way, locating it about a mile from his brother’s selection, so that as it was clearly not worth any other selector’s while to come between them, they would probably have the use of another section or two of land for nothing. The squatter on whose run this little sum was worked out was a struggling, burdened man, unable to buy out or borrow. He was ruined. But the individual, in all ages, has suffered for the State.
Mr. Neuchamp’s Australian career had now reached a point when life, however heroic, is generally conceded to be less adventurous. His end, in a literary sense, is near. We feel bound in honour, however, to add the information, that upon the assurance of Mr. Frankston that they could not leave New South Wales temporarily at a more prosperous time, Ernest Neuchamp resolved once more to tempt the main, and to taste the joy of revisiting, with his Australian bride, his ancestral home.