Perhaps it will be better understood now why we live in a shanty, and why the furniture of it is so unique in quality and restricted in quantity. How we have got on so well is a marvel, and shows what hard work will do in this country. A thousand pounds would have bought our station outright. But we had not a thousand pounds among us, or anything like it; and we had to reserve money to live on for the first year, to buy our axes and spades and milk-pans, and to buy the nucleus of our future herds and flocks and droves. We have done all we had to do, and now we are beginning to see that our joint work during all these years will eventually produce for us homes and comfort.
It is a hard and difficult thing to make money without capital to start with. It is as hard a thing to do in the colonies as it is at home, though people at home are apt to think differently. And it is always the early years of toil that are the worst.
Money is like an apple-tree. At first it grows but slowly, and there is no fruit. Then there come little scanty crops, increasing year by year, until at length the tree attains maturity. Then there are full crops, and you realize a handsome profit on your planting.
Our station—or, as you may choose to term it, our estate, selection, place, farm, location, homestead, or run—may be reckoned a choice bit of land.
The soil is not all of one character, it seldom is so on any one farm in this country, but it is all good class. Most of it is a rich black humus, resting on clay and mountain limestone. In configuration it is of the roughest, like the country generally, being an abrupt succession of ranges, gullies, and basins, in every variety of form and size.
When we took possession, nearly every inch of the property was covered with what is termed light bush. It might have been a slice out of the New Forest. The light bush is just as dense a wood of small trees, twenty to fifty feet in height, shrubs, creepers and undergrowth, as can well be conceived of. Where the thicket is thinner the trees are larger, and the smaller they are the denser the covert. If you wish to journey through this light bush, where there is no semblance of a track, it will take you perhaps two hours to make a single mile, so thick is it. To ride through it is, of course, impossible, unless a track has been cut.
Two or three miles back from the river—at our back, or behind us, as we say—the heavy bush begins. This is the primeval forest: endless miles of enormous timber-trees, girthing ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet, forty feet, and even more, and of startling height. People cannot make farms out of that; at least, not all at once. The timber is slowly encroached upon to feed the saw-mills. Then the land so denuded can be done something with. The stumps can be fired and left to rot, which they do in about twelve or fifteen years, or they can be stubbed up with infinite labour, or blown out with dynamite, the quickest and least expensive way.
We have not much big timber on our section. Here and there are groves of larger trees amidst the jungle, and most of this sort we shall leave standing, for it is not good to totally clear a large farm. Patches of bush are wanted for shade, for cover, and to keep up the supply of moisture. Settlers before us, who have inconsiderately made a clean sweep of everything, have found out their error, and are now planting out groves.
But when you get a slice out of miles and miles of pathless woods, and have to hew your future farm out of them, you are apt to forget the more distant future, and go at everything before you with axe and fire. You want to see grass-paddocks and plough-lands. Time enough to think of planting again, or of saving bits of bush.
Our first operation was to clear some twenty acres or so, as a primary clearing, wherein our shanty might be built, and a little grass provided to keep the milch-cows near home. We had two or three weeks chopping, then, in the height of the dry season, managed a successful burn of the fallen stuff, letting the fire run among the standing bush where it would, and which it would not to any great extent, as the undergrowth always keeps fresh on such rich soil. Thus we had a small clearing ready to be sown with grass-seed directly the rains should come. And then we were occupied with the erection of the shanty, as already described.