Well remembered yet is the first typical Australian stock-rider I ever set eyes on—a schoolboy then out for a holiday. I was riding to Darlington, our Mount Macedon Run, early in the 'forties,' with a relative. From Howie's station a young man, detailed to show us a short cut, rode up, furnishing to my delighted vision the romantic presentment of a real stock-rider of the wild, such as I had longed to see. Tall, slight, neatly dressed, with spur and stockwhip, strapped trousers and cabbage-tree hat, 'accoutred proper,' he joined us, mounted upon a handsome three-parts bred mare, in top condition. She shied and plunged playfully as she came up.
'Now, Miss Bungate,' he said, with mock severity of tone, 'what are you up to?'
This was one of the mental photographs, little heeded at the time, which were of use in days to come. Tom or Jack, 'Howie's Joe' or 'Ebden's Bill'—the rider's name cannot be guaranteed by me, but that bay mare I never can forget. 'Wincing she went, as doth a wanton colt.' The summer leaves may fall, and that dreary season, the winter of age, come on apace, but Miss Bungate will be enshrined among the latest memories which Time permits this brain to register and recall.
The stock-riders of the past were a class of men to whom the earlier pastoralists were much indebted. Placed in positions of great trust and responsibility, they were, in the main, true to their salt and loyal to their employers. If they occasionally erred in the wild confusion of strayed cattle and unbranded yearlings, presumably the property of the Government (was there not a celebrity thus claiming all estrays humorously designated 'Unbranded Kelly'?), their temptations were great. Without their aid, living lonely lives on the remoter inland stations, the cattle herds, often menaced or decimated by the blacks, and roaming over vast areas of natural pasture, would never have enabled their owners to amass fortunes and create estates. They were, as a rule, fearless sons of the wilderness, having some of the vices but many of the virtues which have always honourably distinguished pioneers.
MOUNT MACEDON
In the later days of 1842 I paid my first visit to Macedon, beyond which mountain our sheep-station, Darlington, had been formed in 1838. The overseer, on a business visit to Melbourne, whether in recognition of personal merit, or as desiring to do the polite thing to his employer's son, invited me to return with him. I jumped at the proposal. The paternal permission being granted, the following day saw me mounted upon a clever cob named Budgeree, a survivor of the overland party from Sydney to Port Phillip in 1838, fully accoutred for my first journey into Bushland—the land of mystery, romance, and adventure, which I have well explored since that day—that Eldorado whence the once-eager traveller has returned war-worn and pecuniarily on a level with the majority of pilgrims and knights-errant.
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot on ground
That looked like Eldorado.