Thomas Wallace Knox

“ I have heard what a terrible thing it is to be lost in the scrub. I can well understand that it is terrible, and can also understand how easily such a calamity could be brought about. One mile of scrub is exactly like another mile, or so very nearly like it that it is next to impossible to tell the difference. I have heard that people who stepped only a few yards from the side of the road have wandered for days before finding their way again, or have been sought for by many people before they were found. ”

“ Whenever we get a new chum that is a green hand, we have a jolly time seeing him work. He goes inside with one of the black boys, and between them they manage to get a horse off into a corner. Then the new chum takes his bridle over his arm and approaches the horse, talking to him all the time. Australian horses don’t understand that sort of thing, and you might as well talk to the surf on the sea-coast as to one of them. Just as the new chum gets up to within about four feet of the horse’s neck, the beast spins around on his hind legs, and is off like a shot. ”

“ It is not considered polite in Australia to ask a man born in the country who his father was, or how he happened to emigrate from England. That is a subject that is ignored in polite society, and, in fact, in society of all kinds. In political life, a man may abuse his opponent as much as he pleases in all ways, except that should he venture in the anger of debate to intimate that his opponent’s father came to Australia as an involuntary emigrant, he renders himself liable to heavy damages. ”

“ They always pretend to be searching for employment, but whenever employment is offered, it is not the kind that they want. They are like an American tramp I heard of once, who was always looking in winter for a job at hay-making, and in summer he wanted to find employment at cutting ice. When one of these fellows gets to a sheep station, he says he knows nothing about sheep, but understands everything about cattle; at the cattle station he reverses his story, and wants a job at shepherding. ”

“ From all over Australia people flocked to the new El Dorado. Mechanics of all kinds left their employments; shepherds deserted their flocks; merchants and clerks fled from their counting-houses; farmers quit their fields and gardens, doctors and lawyers their offices, and the whole country seemed to have gone mad about gold. ”

“ By ‘others’ I don’t mean other settlers, altogether, though I do mean free people. By that time a good many convicts had served out their sentences and become free. They were known as ‘emancipists,’ and consequently there were three kinds of people in the colony,—emancipists, convicts, and free settlers. The free settlers would not associate with the emancipists, and they in turn would not associate with the convicts. The free settlers wanted the emancipists to be deprived of all civil rights and kept practically in the same position as the convicts. ”

“ You know that innocent and very acceptable plant called the watercress, which is sold in great quantities for table use in London, New York, and other English and American cities. Well, we brought the watercress to the Australian colonies, and it grew and thrived wonderfully. It grew altogether too well and thrived a great deal more than we could have wished, as it has choked our rivers, and caused freshets and floods which have devastated farms and fields to a large extent, and on several occasions have been destructive to human life. ”

“ There are several diseases peculiar to sheep which carry them off in great numbers, and they are affected by drought quite as much as cattle are. A sheep run can be started with a small capital, and you might almost say with no capital at all. For instance, a man with very little money, or practically with none at all, can find a location and squat upon it, and then go to one of the cities, and if he is known to be a respectable, honest, and industrious man and free from vicious habits, he can find somebody who will supply the capital for buying a few hundred sheep. ”

“ From the gum forest we passed into a stretch of scrub, and then entered a valley, through which ran a small stream. The banks of the stream were fringed with trees, and the open parts of it were thickly covered with grass. A mob of some fifty or sixty cattle was grazing in this valley, and by the orders of our host, the black fellow rode in among them, cracking his whip loudly, and starting them off with heads and tails in the air. ”

“ Persons who are entire strangers to us are always civil, ready to answer any question we ask, and every one of them seems quite willing to go out of his way to serve us. We have made the acquaintance of men in railway trains and around the hotels, or elsewhere, who have ended up a brief conversation by inviting us to visit their country places, their sheep or cattle stations, if they have any, or their business establishments in the city, and this, too, without knowing anything about us other than that we are strangers in Australia. ”

“ It is so much the fashion, that it has become obligatory for the well-to-do citizen to have a town residence and a country one, and his establishment is considered incomplete unless he possesses both. A good many people occupy their country homes for the greater part of the year, going back and forth by railway according to the requirements of their business. It is the same in New York, London, and other great cities all over the world. Melbourne considers itself just as important as any other city, and I believe it claims to be the tenth city of the world in point of population. ”

“ Wonderful stories have been told of the use of this weapon in war,—how the black fellow will launch it two or three hundred yards, and have it kill one or more of his enemies, and then come back to his feet. A moment’s thought will convince any one that the two things together are impossible. In order to return to the place whence it started, the boomerang must not encounter or even touch anything in its way. When it is used for killing men, or wild animals, it does not come back to the ground of its thrower. ”

“ The railway out of Melbourne runs through a picturesque country, as it ascends the slope of the dividing range of mountains in the neighborhood of the city. There are many country residences of gentlemen concerned in business in Melbourne, and the country has a prosperous appearance. Further away on the slope of the range, our friends passed through large wheat fields, sheep and cattle runs, occasional patches of forest, and not infrequently crossed small rivers flowing on their way to the sea. ”

“ Nearly every shepherd has a sheep dog, partly for the sake of companionship and partly for assistance. A good sheep dog is a very useful and valuable animal. He aids the shepherd in keeping the flock together whenever any of them show a disposition to straggle, and the sheep speedily learn to know him and regard him as their friend. He never injures them, though he frequently makes a great pretense of doing so. Sometimes he takes a refractory sheep by the ear, or seizes it by the wool on his neck, but the case is exceedingly rare where he perpetrates an actual bite. ”

“ Nothing so delights the owner of a large farm in Australia as to learn of a gold discovery a few miles from his place. He knows that it will give him a good market for all he has to sell, though there may be occasional thefts from his horse or cattle paddocks. Traders of all kinds get an enormous profit at the mines, and as for the brokers and bankers, there is no doubt of their ability to take care of themselves.
When Harry made the remark contained in the foregoing paragraph, Ned said that it reminded him of a story. ”

“ Sometimes the price of wool is so low that it leaves very little profit to the sheep farmer after paying for shepherds, shearers, and other employees, and the expense of taking his wool to the sea-coast.”
Their host remarked, in conclusion, that he was afraid the good days of cattle and sheep farming had gone and would never come again. “Land has become dear,” he said, “and labor unions compel us to pay high prices for stockmen and shearers, especially the latter, and the prices of wool are not as good as they used to be. The wool market of the world is low, and so is the cattle market. ”

“ The youths were impressed with the size and extent of the wool shed belonging to the establishment, and Ned remarked that they must have a very active time during the shearing season.
“It is our most active time,” was the reply; “the busiest of all the year. Ordinarily the life on a sheep run is quiet and humdrum, but when shearing time begins everything is lively. We engage the shearers as they come along, in parties or gangs. They are a difficult lot of men to deal with, as they have a very powerful trade union which stands by its members, with little regard to right or wrong. ”

“ The hostility to Chinese labor in Australia is similar to that on the Pacific coast of the United States, and in the States of the Rocky Mountain region. It will doubtless increase as time goes on, as it increased in the United States, until it culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of a few years ago. Eventually, the Chinese in Australia will be shut out from all occupations, and expelled or excluded from the country. A good many intelligent Australians deprecate the hostility to the Chinese, but when it comes to voting, this class of citizens is in the minority. ”

“ Of course, when population is mentioned, the whole of the suburbs should be included, and the inhabitants claim, with a great deal of reason, that within a radius of ten miles from the city hall, there are fully four hundred thousand people residing.”
“That is certainly a very rapid growth,” said one of the youths. “All that population since 1835! It is the most rapid growth of any city that I know of, is it not?”
“Yes, I think it is,” replied the doctor. “Neither San Francisco nor Chicago can show a growth equal to that of Melbourne in the first fifty years of its existence. ”

“ Many a man has come to grief in the cattle business owing to his bad selection of a location.
“A man who takes a large area of ground in this way is called a ‘squatter.’ You can put this down in your notebooks, young men, that a squatter in Australia is just the reverse of the same individual in America. In your country, the squatter is a man who lives upon a small tract of land which he cultivates himself, while here he is a man, as I said before, who takes a large area of ground for pastoral purposes. ”

“ Whitney that all the coast of the Bight of Benin, into which the Niger empties by its various mouths, was quite as unhealthy as Bonny. “We don’t expect anybody to live more than three or four years after taking up his residence here,” the gentleman remarked, “and very often one or two years are sufficient to carry him off. The climate is bad enough, but it isn’t the climate that is to blame for all the mortality, by any means. The great curse of the whole region is the habit of drinking. Everybody drinks, and drinks like a fish, too. ”

“ We have got the business down so fine now that we understand all the various processes of breeding, rearing, herding, feeding, plucking, and sorting. We buy and sell ostriches just as we do sheep. We fence in our flocks, stable them, grow crops for them, study their habits, and cut their feathers as matters of business. We don’t send the eggs to market along with our butter and cheese, as they are altogether too dear for consumption. It is true that an ostrich egg will make a meal for three or four 31persons; but at five dollars an egg, which is the usual price, the meal would be a dear one. ”

“ We have very few rivers, and none of them come from far in the interior. Most of them are low in summer or altogether dried up. There is only one river, the Murray, that can be relied upon to have any reasonable depth of water in it throughout the entire year. The other rivers dwindle almost to nothing, and, as I have said, entirely disappear. The greater part of the country is absolutely without trees, and the dense forests which you have in America are practically unknown. We have summer when you have winter, and we have night when you have day. ”

“ The coast towns of Queensland are pretty much all alike. They have from one to two thousand inhabitants each, and though they’re pretentiously laid out, they consist of little more than a single street. On the streets, other than the principal one, there are scattered houses, where the owners of land have endeavored to increase the value of their property by putting up buildings, but generally with poor success. For pavement the natural earth is obliged to answer, as most of these towns are too poor to afford anything better. ”

“ The blacks are the only people that can stand it, and as for the Australian blacks, they’re no good. There are not enough of them anyway, and even if there were, we couldn’t rely upon them. An Australian black will never stay in 315one place for any length of time, as you have doubtless learned already. He is liable to quit at any moment, and that sort of thing we can’t stand on a sugar plantation. We must have men to work steadily, and the only way we can get them is by hiring them under contract from some of the Pacific Islands. ”

“ Every little while there is an excitement over a new discovery, companies are formed for working the mines, and their stock is placed on the market. It is safe to say that, in the majority of instances, more money is made by shrewd speculators in Melbourne and Sydney manipulating the stock than is taken from the mines. A few years ago there was a wild speculation in mines in what is called the ‘Broken Hill’ district of Victoria, and at present there is an excitement about gold discoveries in Western Australia. ”