In crossing the divide between the Landsborough and Diamantina waters, we rode over virgin country which was infested with bush rats, and numbers of tiger snakes gorged after eating them.
In one place, which was 25 miles from water, the snakes were so numerous that we had a difficulty in getting our pack horses safely through them. Yet it is argued that snakes are never very far from water.
In 1880, Cobb and Co. bought up a number of mail services throughout Western Queensland, and the general regularity and convenience of their coaches served to open up the country. Cobb and Co. carried out its contracts under great difficulty in times of flood, but more frequently of droughts, and their record is one of which the company and its servants might well be proud. Their coaches are now practically of the past, but the time was when Cobb and Co.'s name was a synonym for efficiency and, when humanly possible, for punctuality. There were many less enjoyable ways of realising life than by, say, to be leaving Barcaldine for Aramac in the dark of an early morning on the box seat of a coach behind a spanking team of greys, driven by a master hand with the whip and ribbons. And then if one stayed the night at a stage, where two or more drivers met, and exchanged experiences of the trip, their horses, but more than all of their passengers, what an interesting time might be passed.
It was remarkable how observant of passengers the drivers would be, while the passenger all the time laboured under the impression that the driver's time was taken up with his horses.
The idiosyncracies of passengers would be discussed by drivers, and it more than once happened I have heard of the peculiarities of certain passengers at places hundreds of miles from where they came under observation.
Nearing Charleville, on a road I had not travelled before, I had a trip I had made from Normanton towards Croydon related to me by a driver whom I had never seen until then.
I learnt he was told the story by the driver of the Blackall coach, who had heard it in Barcaldine from Tommy Thompson, who was told it in Winton by Tommy Cahill, who received it at Hughenden from Martin Warneminde.
I was quite satisfied and did not inquire further.
Judging by the way they fulfilled the requests at different mail stages, these men must have been gifted with wonderful memories. At one stage a driver might be asked to call at Smith's, the storekeeper, and "tell him to give you a couple of pounds of tea and some potatoes for me;" at another to get a pair of boots, size three, for the missus; at Jones', to get a bottle of eye lotion, and so on. These orders would be faithfully given on arrival, and the goods obtained before the driver would attend to his own comfort or pleasure.
From personal knowledge of Cobb and Co.'s men, in fact to western mailmen generally, one might lift one's hat with respect as a tribute to honesty and faithfulness for work well done and duty honourably carried out.