The 'big house,' the squire-proprietor's abode, rose, garden-and grove-encircled, amid the cottages and humbler homes which it protected—a mansion in close resemblance, allowing for altered conditions and more spacious surroundings, to homes of the Motherland, which all loved so well. At what cost of head and hand, of toil, and danger, and hardship, ay, even of blood, let the headstones in the little shaded graveyard tell! And now, when long years, the best years of early manhood, had been expended freely, ungrudgingly in the conflict with Nature, was the workman, the junior partner in the enterprise, well paid, well fed and housed during the doubtful campaign, the loss of which could smite to ruin the senior, to lay his rash destroying hand upon the beneficent structure he had helped to raise?
Pulling down in suicidal mania, at the bidding of a secret caucus, the industrial temple, which so surely would whelm him and his fellows in its ruins!
Ayrshire Downs woolshed followed suit. At Murweh, the roll of shearers was about to be called, and fifty thousand sheep were ready for the shears, when it was set on fire and burned—all the preparations for shearing rendered useless. A makeshift woolshed would probably be run up, which meant loss of time—hasty indifferent work, a few thousand pounds loss and damage inevitable. At Combe-Marten a station hand was shot, and several prisoners committed to take their trial at Rockhampton. The woolshed at Errangalla was burned to the ground.
The Netallie shed, with eighty thousand sheep in readiness, was attempted to be set on fire—kerosene having been profusely exhibited for the purpose—but, with all the goodwill (or rather bad) in the world, the plot miscarried. After a riot at Netallie a large force of Unionists attempted, but failed, to abduct the free labourers.
At Grasmere woolshed the police were compelled to use firearms. Shortly before 9 P.M. a hundred Unionists came to Grasmere, and gathered at the men's huts, saying that they were armed and determined to bring out the free labourers. Sergeant M'Donagh said they could not be allowed to do so. He was felled to the ground, and the door of the free labourers' hut smashed in with a battering-ram. Shots were exchanged between the police and the Unionists. Two of the latter were wounded. One free labourer fired with a revolver. The attacking party then retired, taking the wounded men with them.
The police overtook them, and, taking charge of the wounded men, conveyed them to Wilcannia Hospital in a buggy. One was shot in the left breast; the other near the same spot. The bullet travelled to the back, near the spine. From the size of the bullet it would appear to have been fired by a free labourer, the police navy revolvers carrying a larger bullet.
Unaware of the extreme length to which 'the ethics of war' (to use a phrase grandiloquently applied in one of Mr. Stead's harangues) had been pushed, Bill Hardwick and his comrades rode gay and unheeding 'down the river.'
They were within a dozen miles of Moorara, and had travelled late in order to get to the station that evening, as shearing had commenced. An unwonted sight presented itself. Before them lay a large encampment, from which many voices made themselves heard, and around which were fires in all directions. 'Hulloa!' said one of the men, 'what's all this? Have they moved the station up, or what is it? Have the men got to camp here because of the grass, and ride to Moorara and back, like boys going to school?'
'By Jove! it's a Union Camp,' said Bill; 'we'd better look out. They're a rough lot here by all accounts. They might go for us if they hear we've dropped the A.S.U.—for a bit.'
'I don't see as they can do much,' said a grey-haired man, one of the best shearers in the shed. 'We've come last from a Union shed. We've no call to say more nor that till we get to Moorara.'