Jackson goes out with a very black countenance. He mutters, with an oath, that, if he'd known how he was going to be served 'he'd 'a "blocked" 'em a little more.' He is believed to have been served right, and he secures no sympathy whatever. Working-men of all classes in Australia are shrewd and fair judges generally. If an employer does his best to mete out justice, he is always appreciated and supported by the majority. These few instances will serve as a description of the whole process of settling with the shearers. The horses have been got in. Great catching and saddling-up has taken place all the morning. By the afternoon the whole party are dispersed to the four winds: some, like Abraham Lawson and his friends, to sheds 'higher up,' in a colder climate, where shearing necessarily commences later. From these they will pass to others, until the last flocks in the 'mountain runs' are shorn. Those who have not farms of their own then betake themselves to reaping. Billy May and Jack Windsor are quite as ready to back themselves against time in the wheat-field as on the shearing-floor. Harvest over, they find their pockets inconveniently full, so they commence to visit their friends and repay themselves for their toils by a liberal allowance of rest and recreation.
Old Ben and a few other specimens of the olden time get no further than the nearest public-house. Their cheques are handed to the landlord, and a 'sdubendous and derrible spree' sets in. At the end of a week or ten days, that worthy informs them that they have received liquor to the amount of their cheques—something over a hundred pounds—save the mark! They meekly acquiesce, as is their custom. The landlord generously presents them with a glass of grog each, and they take the road for the next shed.
The shearers being despatched, the sheep-washers, a smaller and less regarded force, file up. They number some forty men. Nothing more than fair bodily strength, willingness, and obedience being required in their case, they are more easy to get and replace than shearers. They are a varied and motley lot. That powerful and rather handsome man is a New Yorker, of Irish parentage. Next to him is a slight, neat, quiet individual. He had been a lieutenant in a line regiment. The lad in the rear was a Sandhurst cadet. Then came two navvies and a New Zealander, five Chinamen, a Frenchman, two Germans, Tin Pot, Jerry, and Wallaby—three aboriginal blacks. There are no invidious distinctions as to caste, colour, or nationality. Every one is a man and a brother at sheep-washing. Wage, one pound per week; wood, water, tents, and food provided. Their accounts are simple: so many weeks, so many pounds; store accounts, so much. Hospital? Well, five shillings. Cheque; good-morning.
The wool-pressers, the fleece-rollers, the fleece-pickers, the yardsmen, the washers' cooks, the hut cooks, the spare shepherds—all these and other supernumeraries, inevitable at shearing-time, having been paid off, the snowstorm of cheques which has been fluttering all day comes to an end. Mr. Gordon and the remaining sous-officiers go to rest that night with much of the mental strain removed, which has been telling on every waking moment for the last two months.
The long train of drays and waggons, with loads varying from twenty to forty-five bales, has been moving off in detachments since the commencement. In a day or two the last of them will have rolled heavily away. The 1400 bales, averaging three and a half hundredweight, are distributed, slow journeying, along the road, which they mark from afar, or standing huge and columnar, like guide tumuli, from Anabanco to the waters of the Murray. Between the two points, a hundred and fifty miles, there is neither a hill nor a stone. All is one vast monotonous sea of plain—at this season a prairie-meadow exuberant of vegetation; in the late summer, or in the occasional and dreaded phenomenon of a dry winter, dusty and herbless as a brickfield, for hundreds of miles.
Silence falls on the plains and waters of Anabanco for the next six months. The woolshed, the wash-pen, and all the huts connected with them are lone and voiceless as caravanserais in a city of the plague.
ANCIENT SYDNEY
Our good barque anchored in Launceston harbour in 1831—about the same year, by the way, in which Marcus Clarke's dream-ship, the Malabar, ended her eventful voyage to the same port. The writer's father owned and commanded the vessel. Our steerage passengers were of the same class as those of the Malabar, being a draft of convicts, in process of deportation to the strange South land, there to undergo experimental discipline, which to some meant probationary industry—the path to a prospective fortune; to others, a slave's dread life, a felon's shameful death.
Ruffians doubtless cursed and caballed among the two hundred prisoners which crowded the lower deck, but they were in a minority. A herd of luckless peasants constituted the main body; found guilty of rick-burning and machine-breaking only—crimes common enough in England, before the repeal of the corn-laws.
Their offences had been but the ignorant, instinctive protest of Labour against Capital; less dangerous far than the organised communism of the present day. Poachers and petty larcenists, with other humble criminals, completed the list. For the most part they were a timid and obedient company, cowed and unresisting, incapable of planning mutiny or revenge. Our family party consisted of two tiny sisters and myself, my mother, and our nursemaid—a resolute, sterling Englishwoman, destined in days to come to be the best friend our childhood could have found in the new world or the old. The ordinary military guard, so many rank and file, with their officers, together with the Surgeon-Superintendent, had been detailed for the duty of ensuring discipline and the safety of the ship.