The heavy herbage and rich soil of the West tended lamentably to foot-rot. The flocks seemed to be in a state of chronic lameness. The malady either reduced wool increase and condition to a point considerably below zero, or necessitated the employment of such a number of hands in applying bluestone and butyr of antimony (the remedies of the period), that the shearing subsidy was considerably encroached on.
Then there was "Scab"—word of dread and hatefulness, herald of ruin and loss, of endless torment to all concerned, of medicated dippings, dressings, deaths and destructions innumerable; the dreadful multiplication of station hands, who assisted with cheerful but perfunctory effort, patently disbelieving in "any species of cure," and looking on the whole affair—disease, dressing, and dipping—as a manifest dispensation of Providence for the sustentation of the "poor man."
When all had been done that could be done by the proprietor in his desperate need, a single sheep straying among the straggling flocks, or reintroduced by a careless or malignant station hand (and the latter crime is alleged to have been more than once committed), was sufficient to undo a year's labour. Then the distracting, expensive task had to be commenced de novo.
In those days, too, when fencing was not; when the shepherds comprised, perhaps, the very worst class of labour in the colonies, it may be guessed how hard and anxious a life was that of the western Victorian sheepowner.
His neighbour, too, was but too often his natural enemy. A careless flockholder might supply a nucleus of contagion from which a whole district would suffer. This state of matters continued until the gold discoveries, when the shepherds having mostly withdrawn themselves, and a compulsory admixture of flocks taking place, scab spread throughout the length and breadth of Victoria. What its cost to the Government and to private persons was before it was finally stamped out would be difficult, very difficult, to find out—so large a sum that it would have paid all concerned ten times, a hundred times over, to have purchased all infected stock at, say, £5 per head, only to have cut the throats of and cremated the lot.
"Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth" is a scriptural aphorism strictly applicable to acarian development. Many a well-to-do sheepholder was burnt out of house and home by the quick-spreading ovine leprosy which germinated at a friend's carelessly-ordered establishment. So that it came to pass that the "Gallants of Westland" were loath to exchange the free roving lives of cattle-tending caballeros for the restricted, "pokey," worrying round of duties to which the sheepholders seemed doomed. At one of our gatherings, at which—the majority being cattle-men—a toast involving a little indirect self-laudation was duly honoured, a pioneer squatter from a distance remarked gravely, "How little you fellows can realise what a life we have been leading in our district the last year or two!" He had just finished "cleaning" his flocks, as had also his neighbours. He certainly looked, as the financial survivor of a drought expressed it once, as though he had "come through the Valley of the Shadow."
When we rubbed along thus jovially, deeming life to be "a great and glorious thing," fat cows were well sold at £2 per head, and bullocks at £3. Certainly you could buy stores (or, as they primevally called them, "lean cattle") at from 10s. to 16s., prices which left a margin. The Messrs. Manifold bought a large number of bullocks from the Shelleys, of Tumut, at the latter price, somewhere about the year 1845. How they fattened at Purrumbeet and Leura may be imagined! They fetched top prices, but were not thought to pay so well as the early ripening station-breds, on which the 3M brand was thenceforth chiefly placed.
I became possessed of a herd of a thousand head about the same time, which I took "on terms," as the arrangement was thus called—a convenient one for beginners with more country than capital, and vice versa. I was to have one-third of the increase, and to be paid ten per cent upon all sales of fat cattle. They were to be "personally conducted" by me from the Devil's River—a place uncanny sounding, but not otherwise objectionable. They were the property of Messrs. Curlewis and Campbell; the first-named gentleman arranged preliminaries with me in town, and in a few days I again started from Melbourne with high hopes and three stock-riders.
Our route lay over country that has since become historical. One half of the herd was located at Strathbogie, and through those forest-clothed solitudes and adown the steep shoulder of the leading range had we to drive our unwilling cattle. It was on that occasion that I made acquaintance with my good, warm-hearted friend Charles Ryan—then a gay young bachelor living at Kilfera, on the Broken River. We met at an extremely small, not to say dismal hut at Strathbogie, already inhabited by Messrs. Joe Simmons, Salter, and Hall, who, together with my men and myself, were constrained to abide therein till the cattle, weak and low after their drive from the head of the Abercrombie in New South Wales, were mustered.
"Come along over with me and let them muster the cattle themselves, you have only to take delivery," was his highly natural salutation (i.e. natural to Charles Ryan), and I came along accordingly.