The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories Read online

  The post-office is in New South Wales, and the police-barracks in Bananaland. The police cannot do anything if there’s a row going on across the street in New South Wales, except to send to Brisbane and have an extradition warrant applied for; and they don’t do much if there’s a row in Queensland. Most of the rows are across the border, where the pubs are.

  At least, I believe that’s how it is, though the man who told me might have been a liar. Another man said he was a liar, but then he might have been a liar himself – a third person said he was one. I heard that there was a fight over it, but the man who told me about the fight might not have been telling the truth.

  One part of the town swears at Brisbane when things go wrong, and the other part curses Sydney.

  The country looks as though a great ash-heap had been spread out there, and mulga scrub and firewood planted – and neglected. The country looks just as bad for a hundred miles round Hungerford, and beyond that it gets worse – a blasted, barren wilderness that doesn’t even howl. If it howled it would be a relief.

  I believe that Burke and Wills found Hungerford, and it’s a pity they did; but, if I ever stand by the graves of the men who first travelled through this country, when there were neither roads nor stations, nor tanks, nor bores, nor pubs, I’ll – I’ll take my hat off. There were brave men in the land in those days.

  It is said that the explorers gave the district its name chiefly because of the hunger they found there, which has remained there ever since. I don’t know where the ford comes in – there’s nothing to ford, except in flood-time. Hungerthirst would have been better. The town is supposed to be situated on the banks of a river called the Paroo, but we saw no water there, except what passed for it in a tank. The goats and sheep and dogs and the rest of the population drink there. It is dangerous to take too much of that water in a raw state.

  Except in flood-time you couldn’t find the bed of the river without the aid of a spirit level and a long straight-edge. There is a Customhouse against the fence on the northern side. A pound of tea often costs six shillings on that side, and you can get a common lead pencil for fourpence at the rival store across the street in the mother province. Also, a small loaf of sour bread sells for a shilling at the humpy aforementioned. Only about sixty per cent of the sugar will melt.

  We saw one of the storekeepers give a deadbeat swagman five shillings’ worth of rations to take him on into Queensland. The storekeepers often do this, and put it down on the loss side of their books. I hope the recording angel listens, and puts it down on the right side of his book.

  We camped on the Queensland side of the fence, and after tea had a yarn with an old man who was minding a mixed flock of goats and sheep; and we asked him whether he thought Queensland was better than New South Wales, or the other way about.

  He scratched the back of his head, and thought awhile, and hesitated like a stranger who is going to do you a favour at some personal inconvenience.

  At last, with the bored air of a man who has gone through the same performance too often before, he stepped deliberately up to the fence and spat over it into New South Wales. After which he got leisurely through and spat back on Queensland.

  ‘That’s what I think of the blanky colonies!’ he said.

  He gave us time to become sufficiently impressed; then he said:

  ‘And if I was at the Victorian and South Australian border I’d do the same thing.’

  He let that soak into our minds, and added: ‘And the same with West Australia – and – and Tasmania.’ Then he went away.

  The last would have been a long spit – and he forgot Maoriland.

  We heard afterwards that his name was Clancy, and he had that day been offered a job droving at ‘twenty-five shillings a week and find your own horse’. Also find your own horse-feed and tobacco and soap and other luxuries, at station prices. Moreover, if you lost your own horse you would have to find another, and if that died or went astray you would have to find a third – or forfeit your pay and return on foot. The boss drover agreed to provide flour and mutton – when such things were procurable.

  Consequently, Clancy’s decidedly unfavourable opinion of the colonies.

  My mate and I sat down on our swags against the fence to talk things over. One of us was very deaf. Presently a black tracker went past and looked at us, and returned to the pub. Then a trooper in Queensland uniform came along and asked us what the trouble was about, and where we came from and were going, and where we camped. We said we were discussing private business, and he explained that he thought it was a row, and came over to see. Then he left us, and later on we saw him sitting with the rest of the population on a bench under the hotel veranda. Next morning we rolled up our swags and left Hungerford to the North-West.

  III

  ‘RATS’

  AN OLD MATE OF YOUR FATHER’S

  MITCHELL: A CHARACTER SKETCH

  ON THE EDGE OF A PLAIN

  ‘SOME DAY’

  SHOOTING THE MOON

  OUR PIPES

  BILL, THE VENTRILOQUIAL ROOSTER

  ‘RATS’

  ‘WHY, there’s two of them, and they’re having a fight! Come on.’

  It seemed a strange place for a fight – that hot, lonely, cotton-bush plain. And yet not more than half-a-mile ahead there were apparently two men struggling together on the track.

  The three travellers postponed their smoke-oh! and hurried on. They were shearers – a little man and a big man, known respectively as ‘Sunlight’ and ‘Macquarie’, and a tall, thin, young jackeroo whom they called ‘Milky’.

  ‘I wonder where the other man sprang from? I didn’t see him before,’ said Sunlight.

  ‘He muster bin layin’ down in the bushes,’ said Macquarie. ‘They’re goin’ at it proper, too. Come on! Hurry up and see the fun!’

  They hurried on.

  ‘It’s a funny-lookin’ feller, the other feller,’ panted Milky. ‘He don’t seem to have no head. Look! he’s down – they’re both down! They must ha’ clinched on the ground. No! they’re up an’ at it again … Why, good Lord! I think the other’s a woman!’

  ‘My oath! so it is!’ yelled Sunlight. ‘Look! the brute’s got her down again! He’s kickin’ her! Come on, chaps; come on, or he’ll do for her!’

  They dropped swags, water-bags and all, and raced forward; but presently Sunlight, who had the best eyes, slackened his pace and dropped behind. His mates glanced back at his face, saw a peculiar expression there, looked ahead again, and then dropped into a walk.

  They reached the scene of the trouble, and there stood a little withered old man by the track, with his arms folded close up under his chin; he was dressed mostly in calico patches; and half-a-dozen corks, suspended on bits of string from the brim of his hat, dangled before his bleared optics to scare away the flies. He was scowling malignantly at a stout, dumpy swag which lay in the middle of the track.

  ‘Well, old Rats, what’s the trouble,’ asked Sunlight.

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ answered the old man, without looking round. ‘I fell out with my swag, that’s all. He knocked me down, but I’ve settled him.’

  ‘But look here,’ said Sunlight, winking at his mates, ‘we saw you jump on him when he was down. That ain’t fair, you know.’

  ‘But you didn’t see it all,’ cried Rats, getting excited. ‘He hit me down first! And, look here, I’ll fight him again for nothing, and you can see fair play.’

  They talked awhile; then Sunlight proposed to second the swag, while his mate supported the old man, and after some persuasion, Milky agreed, for the sake of the lark, to act as time-keeper and referee.

  Rats entered into the spirit of the thing; he stripped to the waist, and while he was getting ready the travellers pretended to bet on the result.

  Macquarie took his place behind the old man, and Sunlight up-ended the swag. Rats shaped and danced round; then he rushed, feinted, ducked, retreated, darted in once more, and suddenly went down like a shot o
n the broad of his back. No actor could have done it better; he went down from that imaginary blow as if a cannon-ball had struck him in the forehead.

  Milky called time, and the old man came up, looking shaky. However, he got in a tremendous blow which knocked the swag into the bushes.

  Several rounds followed with varying success.

  The men pretended to get more and more excited, and betted freely; and Rats did his best. At last they got tired of the fun, Sunlight let the swag lie after Milky called time, and the jackeroo awarded the fight to Rats. They pretended to hand over the stakes, and then went back for their swags, while the old man put on his shirt.

  Then he calmed down, carried his swag to the side of the track, sat down on it and talked rationally about bush matters for awhile; but presently he grew silent and began to feel his muscles and smile idiotically.

  ‘Can you len’ us a bit o’ meat?’ said he suddenly.

  They spared him half-a-pound; but he said he didn’t want it all, and cut off about an ounce, which he laid on the end of his swag. Then he took the lid off his billy and produced a fishing-line. He baited the hook, threw the line across the track, and waited for a bite. Soon he got deeply interested in the line, jerked it once or twice, and drew it in rapidly. The bait had been rubbed off in the grass. The old man regarded the hook disgustedly.

  ‘Look at that!’ he cried, ‘I had him, only I was in such a hurry. I should ha’ played him a little more.’

  Next time he was more careful, he drew the line in warily, grabbed an imaginary fish and laid it down on the grass. Sunlight and Co. were greatly interested by this time.

  ‘Wot yer think o’ that?’ asked Rats. ‘It weighs thirty pound if it weighs an ounce! Wot yer think o’ that for a cod?’ The hook’s half-way down his blessed gullet?’

  He caught several cod and a bream while they were there, and invited them to camp and have tea with him. But they wished to reach a certain shed next day, so – after the ancient had borrowed about a pound of meat for bait – they went on, and left him fishing contentedly.

  But first Sunlight went down into his pocket and came up with half-a-crown, which he gave to the old man, along with some tucker. ‘You’d best push on to the water before dark, old chap,’ he said, kindly.

  When they turned their heads again, Rats was still fishing: but when they looked back for the last time before entering the timber, he was having another row with his swag; and Sunlight reckoned that the trouble arose out of some lies which the swag had been telling about the bigger fish it caught.

  AN OLD MATE OF YOUR FATHER’S

  YOU remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as, ‘An old mate of your father’s on the diggings, Johnny.’ And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls – as the case may have been – and that we had our father’s nose but our mother’s eyes, or the other way about; and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother, and then add, for father’s benefit: ‘But yet he’s like you, Tom.’ It did seem strange to the children to hear him address the old man by his Christian name – considering that the mother always referred to him as ‘Father’. She called the old mate Mr So-and-so, and father called him Bill, or something to that effect.

  Occasionally the old mate would come dressed in the latest city fashion, and at other times in a new suit of reach-me-downs, and yet again he would turn up in clean white moleskins, washed tweed coat, Crimean shirt, blucher boots, soft felt hat, with a fresh-looking speckled handkerchief round his neck. But his face was mostly round and brown and jolly, his hands were always horny, and his beard grey. Sometimes he might have seemed strange and uncouth to us at first, but the old man never appeared the least surprised at anything he said or did – they understood each other so well – and we would soon take to this relic of our father’s past, who would have fruit or lollies for us – strange that he always remembered them – and would surreptitiously slip ‘shilluns’ into our dirty little hands, and tell us stories about the old days, ‘when me an’ yer father was on the diggin’s, an’ you wasn’t thought of, my boy.’

  Sometimes the old mate would stay over Sunday, and in the forenoon or after dinner he and father would take a walk amongst the deserted shafts of Sapling Gully or along Quartz Ridge, and criticise old ground, and talk of past diggers’ mistakes, and second bottoms, and feelers, and dips, and leads – also outcrops – and absently pick up pieces of quartz and slate, rub them on their sleeves, look at them in an abstracted manner, and drop them again; and they would talk of some old lead they had worked on: ‘Hogan’s party was here on one side of us, Macintosh was here on the other, Mac was getting good gold and so was Hogan, and now, why the blanky blank weren’t we on gold?’ And the mate would always agree that there was ‘gold in them ridges and gullies yet, if a man only had the money behind him to git at it.’ And then perhaps the guv’nor would show him a spot where he intended to put down a shaft some day – the old man was always thinking of putting down a shaft. And these two old ’Fifty-Niners would mooch round and sit on their heels on the sunny mullock heaps and break clay lumps between their hands, and lay plans for the putting down of shafts, and smoke, till an urchin was sent to ‘look for his father and Mr So-and-so, and tell ’em to come to their dinner.’

  And again – mostly in the fresh of the morning – they would hang about the fences on the selection and review the live stock: five dusty skeletons of cows, a hollow-sided calf or two, and one shocking piece of equine scenery – which, by the way, the old mate always praised. But the selector’s heart was not in farming nor on selections – it was far away with the last new rush in West Australia or Queensland, or perhaps buried in the worked-out ground of Tambaroora, Married Man’s Creek, or Araluen; and by-and-by the memory of some half-forgotten reef or lead or ‘Last Chance’, ‘Nil Desperandum’, or ‘Brown Snake’ claim would take their thoughts far back and away from the dusty patch of sods and struggling sprouts called the crop, or the few discouraged, half-dead slips which comprised the orchard. Then their conversation would be pointed with many Golden Points, Baikery Hills, Deep Creeks, Maitland Bars, Specimen Flats, and Chinamen’s Gullies. And so they’d yarn till the youngster came to tell them that ‘Mother sez the breakfus is gettin’ cold,’ and then the old mate would rouse himself and stretch and say, ‘Well, we mustn’t keep the missus waitin’, Tom!’

  And, after tea, they would sit on a log of the wood-heap, or the edge of the veranda – that is, in warm weather – and yarn about Ballarat and Bendigo – of the days when we spoke of being ‘on’ a place oftener than ‘at’ it; on Ballarat, on Gulgong, on Lambing Flat, on Creswick – and they would use the definite article before the names, as: ‘on The Turon; The Lachlan; The Home Rule; The Canadian Lead.’ Then again they’d yarn of old mates, such as Tom Brook, Jack Henright, and poor Martin Ratcliffe – who was killed in his golden hole – and of other men whom they didn’t seem to have known much about, and who went by the names of ‘Adelaide Adolphus’, ‘Corney George’, and other names which might have been more or less applicable.

  And sometimes they’d get talking, low and mysterious like, about ‘Th’ Eureka Stockade’; and if we didn’t understand and asked questions, ‘What was the Eureka Stockade?’ or ‘What did they do it for?’ father’d say: ‘Now, run away, sonny, and don’t bother; me and Mr So-and-so want to talk.’ Father had the mark of a hole on his leg, which he said he got through a gun accident when a boy, and a scar on his side, that we saw when he was in swimming with us; he said he got that in an accident in a quartz-crushing machine. Mr. So-and-so had a big scar on the side of his forehead that was caused by a pick accidentally slipping out of a loop in the rope, and falling down a shaft where he was working. But how was it they talked low, and their eyes brightened up, and they didn’t look at each other, but away over sunset, and had to get up and walk about, and take
a stroll in the cool of the evening when they talked about Eureka?

  And, again they’d talk lower and more mysterious like, and perhaps mother would be passing the wood-heap and catch a word, and ask:

  ‘Who was she, Tom?’

  And Tom – father – would say:

  ‘Oh, you didn’t know her, Mary; she belonged to a family Bill knew at home.’

  And Bill would look solemn till mother had gone, and then they would smile a quiet smile, and stretch and say, ‘Ah, well!’ and start something else.

  They had yarns for the fireside, too, some of those old mates of our father’s, and one of them would often tell how a girl – a queen of the diggings – was married, and had her wedding-ring made out of the gold of that field; and how the diggers weighed their gold with the new wedding-ring – for luck – by hanging the ring on the hook of the scales and attaching their chamois-leather gold bags to it (whereupon she boasted that four hundred ounces of the precious metal passed through her wedding-ring); and how they lowered the young bride, blindfolded, down a golden hole in a big bucket, and got her to point out the drive from which the gold came that her ring was made out of. The point of this story seems to have been lost – or else we forgot it – but it was characteristic. Had the girl been lowered down a duffer, and asked to point out the way to the gold, and had she done so successfully, there would have been some sense in it.

  And they would talk of King, and Maggie Oliver, and G. V. Brooke, and others, and remember how the diggers went five miles out to meet the coach that brought the girl actress, and took the horses out and brought her in in triumph, and worshipped her, and sent her off in glory, and threw nuggets into her lap. And how she stood upon the box-seat and tore her sailor hat to pieces, and threw the fragments amongst the crowd; and how the diggers fought for the bits and thrust them inside their shirt bosoms; and how she broke down and cried, and could in her turn have worshipped those men – loved them, every one. They were boys all, and gentlemen all. There were college men, artists, poets, musicians, journalists – Bohemians all. Men from all the lands and one. They understood art – and poverty was dead.