Richard Rowe

“ Thin and melancholy voices faintly murmur through the gloom;
Voices only, lipless voices, and the fisherman turns pale,
As the mother greets her children, sisters landing brothers hail.
Lightened of its unseen burden, cork-like rides the rocking bark,
Fast the fisherman flies homewards o'er the billows deep and dark;
THAT boat needs no mortal's mooring – sad at heart he seeks his bed,
For his life henceforth is clouded – he hath piloted the Dead!
This work is in the public domain in Australia because it was created in Australia and the term of copyright has expired. ”

“ Harry was as courageous as Donald, but he was not as cool. He would have been smothered in the smoke into which he had heedlessly plunged, if Sydney had not dashed in to bring him out. Tall men as well as Harry were struck down by the heat of the fire and the heat of the sun combined. John Jones got a sunstroke that knocked him down as a butcher knocks down an ox. The horsebreaker took hold of poor John’s head, and the tutor took hold of poor John’s legs, and between them they dragged him off the blazing heap of maize-stalks on which he had fallen face downwards. ”

“ The sail was for ever flapping against the mast—taken aback, as the sailors say—or else the cot was poking her nose into the tea-tree scrub on one side of the creek or the other, as if she wanted to get out of the hot sunlight into the moist shade. Still, it would have been very pleasant, if there had not been quite so many mosquitoes; but they hummed over the water in restless clouds like fountain-spray. However there were native vines, with grapes like yellow currants, twining round the lanky tea trees and lacing them together ”

“ The creek, fringed with shea-oaks with dark long leaves like lanky tassels, wriggled about there like a snake. Long before the boys got to the camp, they heard the measured tramp of feet and fierce shouts, and when they got there they saw ever so many black fellows, streaked with ochre, dancing and brandishing their boomerangs and waddies, whilst the “gins” (that’s the women) in their ’possum cloaks and blankets, squatted on the ground beating time. ”

“ After a good many brushes in the scrub, the black fellows grew more used to fire-arms, and ventured down one night upon the station buildings. Fortunately it was moonlight, and Donald, who chanced to be awake and looking out of the window, could plainly distinguish the invaders as they crept out of a patch of scrub about a couple of hundred yards off, and came crouching towards the huts with their noses almost touching the moonlit grass.
“Sydney! Harry!” he shouted, “here come the blacks!” and snatching up his gun, he deliberately levelled it, and let fly at the foremost black fellow. ”

“ The big-headed laughing jackass is very fond, too, of stabbing snakes and breaking their backs with its strong beak. It seems to enjoy the jobbing job, as if it thought that it was only serving them out fairly for eating birds and birds’ eggs. One day Donald shot a snake that was climbing up a tree to a bird’s-nest; and another day he and Harry came upon one that was mesmerizing a lot of little diamond sparrows. Half of it was coiled up like a corkscrew, and the rest went backwards and forwards, like a boat’s tiller when no one has got hold of it ”

“ He felt in all his pockets, and Donald felt in all his pockets, but not a single match could they find. Then, at first, they did feel very much afraid, and I think you would have been afraid, too, however plucky you may be. The cave was pitch-dark where they had got to. They could hear water dripping and dashing and running all round about them—some of it a long way down. When they moved, they were forced to tap about with the stick like a blind man, and to slide their feet along the ground at a snail’s pace, for fear of suddenly tumbling down some deep pit or into a well-like water-hole. ”

“ A pretty flower-garden sloped down to the lagoon, and the verandah of the snug one-storey house of brick and weather-board was smothered in passion-flower. The Captain had furnished the house as comfortably as he could for his wife, and altogether it seemed a much smarter, livelier place than the dark old house in the dull, grass-grown side-street of the little Norfolk town where she had been economizing whilst her husband was first doing military duty, and afterwards building this snug nest in New South Wales. ”

“ Imagine a shower-bath without a perforated bottom—the whole of the mysteriously upheld water coming down bodily the instant the string is touched—and then, if you imagine also that the shower-bath is constantly refilled for a week or so, and that you are obliged to stand under it all the time, you will get some faint notion of the suddenness and force of Australian rain. ”

“ He and his mother had been left in charge of the station, whilst his father took a mob of cattle overland to Port Phillip. Sydney was very proud of having the key of the store, counting in the sheep, peppering mangled calves with strychnine to poison the native dogs that had mangled them, and riding about all day cracking his stock-whip, heading back store-bullocks that seemed inclined to make a rush at him, looking after the men, and when meat was wanted, driving the beast into the stock-yard himself, and shooting it with his own gun. ”

“ When Sydney Lawson left home to take up new country for himself, there happened to be no tutor at Wonga-Wonga, and so Harry and Donald were allowed to go with the young squatter, both to keep them out of mischief and to enlarge their “colonial experience.” Besides, they would be of as much use as, at least, a man and a half. The boys were away for months, but they never grew tired of their long holiday, although they often had to work hard enough in it. It was the thought that they were doing real man’s work, and yet holiday-making at the same time, that made the holiday so jolly. ”

“ The note that Sydney had received caused a good deal of excitement at the Wonga-Wonga tea-table. Miss Smith, who helped Mrs. Lawson in the house, and taught Sydney’s sisters and his brother Harry, had not long come out from London, and was in a great fright.
“Oh, pray send him the horse, Master Sydney,” she cried, “or we shall all be murdered in our beds. You’ve got so many horses, one can’t make any difference.” ”

“ Singed kangaroos and wallabies bounded over the garden fence. Dingoes, looking more cowardly than ever, but cowed into tameness, put their tails between their legs and slunk into the barn. Snakes wriggled along half roasted. Mobs of horses and cattle went by like a whirlwind and an earthquake in a mad stampede. Poor stupid sheep, their small brains quite addled by terror, ran hither and thither purposelessly, stood stock-still to let the flames catch them, or plunged right into the flames. ”

“ I am sorry to say that is not only the young barbarians who behave very brutally to Chinamen in Australia.
All the way from Jerry’s Town to Jim Crow Creek the road, that used to look even more solitary than Highgate Archway Road looks during the greater part of the year, was every here and there almost as crowded as Highgate Archway Road during the time of Barnet Fair. Men on horseback, with saddle-bags and pistols peeping from their holsters, were ambling and cantering along, singly and in couples, and in threes and fours. ”

“ Then leaving the store door unlocked, and the flour-cask just behind it, all the pioneers left the buildings; the boys, however, returning by a roundabout route, and “planting” in some scrub not far off to witness what might happen. They had to wait some time, but at last the blacks made their appearance. Even their keen eyes detecting no trace of the presence of any whites, they soon swarmed up boldly to the store. Jooragong, bravest of the brave when there was nothing to be feared, rolled out the cask that stood so conveniently near and open, and began to scoop out the flour with both hands. ”

“ Tarpaulined drays ground along in a long line, monotonously jingling the pots and pannikins slung beneath.
“MEN ON HORSEBACK, WITH SADDLE-BAGS AND PISTOLS.”
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Here and there a dray had broken down, and the driver was fussing about as angry as a wasp, or smoking in sulky idleness, because he could not get any one to stop to help him right his cargo. Every public was crammed with rowdy-looking, bronzed, bearded fellows, shouting for nobblers, spiders, and stone-fences. ”

“ One day Harry and Donald had been sent a good way from home to drive in a small mob of cattle, to swell the large one which Mr. Lawson was mustering at Wonga-Wonga for another overland trip to Port Phillip. The shortest cut to where they expected to find the cattle was over a high ridge—so high that on the crest there were very few trees, and those very little ones, sheltering in hollows like sentries in their boxes. ”

“ John Jones and his wife piled their boxes against their room-door, and then crept under the bed. Miss Smith went into hysterics, and Gertrude and her sisters couldn’t help looking as white as their night-dresses, though they tried hard to show Miss Smith how much braver native girls were than English, even if they did not know so much French, and Use of the Globes, and Mangnall’s Questions. Mrs. Lawson had fired off her blunderbuss, but it had only broken two panes of the parlour-window, and riddled the verandah-posts; so Wonga-Wonga was at the bushrangers’ mercy. ”

“ Perhaps you have tried to walk right across a common in a fog, and have come out not far from the place you started from: well, Donald and Harry had discovered that making short cuts in the pitch-dark Cave of the Red Hand was like that, and so they tapped along the edge of the step until they came to the cave’s wall once more, and then followed that—running up against rocks, and floundering into mud and water as before—until they got to the foot of the next step. ”

“ Soon after his adventures with Warrigal, Harry Lawson had a tutor to teach him instead of Miss Smith, and when Harry was twelve, his cousin, Donald M‘Intyre, who was about his own age, came to live at Wonga-Wonga to share the tutor’s instructions. Harry considered this a very jolly arrangement. Like most Australian boys, he was a very quick little fellow, but he was inclined to be rather lazy over his lessons; and Donald helped him in his Latin and French exercises, and made his sums come right for him, and yet was just as ready for a spree out of school as Harry was. ”

“ Sunlight is a very beautiful thing, but when it threatens to kill one it does not seem so beautiful.
When Harry made the polite speech to me I quoted at starting, I was lounging, smoking, in a rocking-chair on a verandah, and could not help feeling that I must look very much like “a crawler” to the upright little fellow who looked down on me from the top of Cornstalk, with his leather letter-bag strapped across his grass-cloth jumper. ”

“ Great flocks of cockatoos were circling round their roosting-trees like English rooks, and parrots and lories—their fine green, and red, and blue, and yellow feathers beginning to look very dull and ragged, because moulting-time was near—were taking their evening bath in the shallow water by the banks, splashing it over their heads and wings, and chattering as if they were saying, “Isn’t this prime fun?” ”

“ And if they could find their way back to the great steps they had come down, it would be very hard to find the proper places to ascend, and to scramble up them in the dark. It had not been easy scrambling down them, even with a lantern. No wonder Donald and Harry felt frightened. But funking, they knew, would do no good. If they sat down scared in a corner, there they would have to starve, most likely; for no one at Wonga-Wonga knew that they had started for the cave. ”

“ I was staying in Jerry’s Town then, and Harry had ridden in to meet the mail, and take back the Wonga-Wonga newspapers and letters. “I shouldn’t like,” Harry went on, “to live in a town. I should feel choked with such a lot of houses about me. Father talks about England sometimes, but I’m sure he likes the colony twenty times better. Houses everywhere, and all the little bush you’ve got left cut up into paddocks! I wouldn’t live in England if you paid me for it. You brag about your horses, but they can’t run against ours, when they do come out. ”

“ After Harry’s escape the blacks again made very audacious descents on the station buildings. For one thing, they wanted to recapture the son of Kaludie; for another, they wanted to kill the white wizard, who, instead of having been speared by Jooragong, had made the braggart dodge from tree to tree before his gun. For a third thing the black fellows had a great relish for the white fellows’ stores, to which every now and then they found a scrambling chance of helping themselves. More fighting took place, and every now and then a black was shot. Still the blacks came down upon the homestead. ”

“ They had the cattle to look up, and a camping-place to pick, because they were not going back to Wonga-Wonga until next day. But when they sat by their fire in the evening, with the weird night-wind moaning in the bush and sighing through the scrub around them, their thoughts went back to the bush grave.
“A ROUGH WOODEN CROSS SHOWED THEM A BUSH GRAVE.”
“We may die some day like that, Donald,” said Harry, “without a soul to know where we’re buried. ”

“ Poor Miss Smith was half wild with fear, and Mrs. Lawson and her girls, although they did not show their fear so much, were really more frightened at heart, perhaps, because they understood better what their fate would be if from one quarter or another a roaring bush-fire rushed down right upon them. Not much breakfast was eaten at Wonga-Wonga next morning: haggard, pale faces looked anxiously across the table at one another.
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Thicker and thicker the smoke rolled in; the heat every moment grew hotter. The head-station sheep were still in their hurdles, gasping for breath. ”