The joint labours of my father and myself, assisted occasionally by hired service—for he could not endure the idea of having convicts about him—soon put a new and promising face on the farm.
We cleared, we drained, we enclosed, and we sowed and planted, until we left ourselves comparatively little to do—I mean in the way of hard labour—but to await the returns of our industry.
It was some time after we had got things into this state—that is, I think about three months after I had joined my father—that the latter received intelligence of a band of bushmen or bushrangers having been seen in the neighbourhood. He was assured that they were skulking in the adjoining forest, and that we might every night expect our house to be attacked, robbed, and ourselves, in all probability, murdered.
This information threw us into a most dreadful state of alarm; these bushrangers, as the reader probably knows, being runaway convicts, men of the most desperate characters, who take to the woods, and subsist by plundering the settlers—a crime to which they do not hesitate to add murder—many instances of fearful atrocities of this kind having occurred.
For some time we were quite at a loss what to do; for although we had firearms and ammunition in the house, there were only four men of us—my father, myself, and two servant lads—while the bushrangers, as we had been told, were at least ten or twelve in number. To have thought then of repelling them by force, was out of the question; it could only have ended in the murder of us all.
Under these circumstances, my father determined on applying to the authorities for constabulary or military protection; and with this view went to Liverpool, where the district magistrate resided.
On stating the case to the latter, he at once gave my father a note to the commanding officer of the garrison, enjoining him to send a small party of military along with him,—these to remain with us for our protection as long as circumstances should render it necessary, and, in the meanwhile, to employ themselves in scouring the adjoining woods, with a view to the apprehension of the bushrangers, and to fire on them without hesitation in all cases where they could not be captured.
The result was, that a party of twelve men, commanded by a sergeant, were immediately turned out, and marched off with my father.
I was sitting on an eminence close by the house, and which commanded a view of the road leading to and from Liverpool, looking out for my father's return, when the party came in sight.
As they neared, I recognised the men, from certain particulars in their uniform, a party of the—th, the regiment into which I had enlisted.