by Samuel Sidney (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.2 #29 (12 Oct 1850).
A bachelor's station in the Bush, or even a bachelor's farm, is generally a wretched place. Founded to make money and nothing else, decency and comfort are little cultivated. A rude bark-covered hut for the overseer or master; another, still ruder, for the servants; the ground bare beaten with the feet of cattle, not a vestige of garden, although the soil be ever so fertile. A stockyard, ankle deep in dust, are the usual characteristics. The head of the station being a young man, who may often be found, dirty, barefooted, in his shirt sleeves, sitting alone, in melancholy state, on an old tea-chest, with a mess of salt meat and tea without milk before him, longing for a visit from a neighbour or traveller, without books or newspapers, obliged, if he would keep up his authority, to hold very little communication with his men.
As for the men, harassed and haggard looking, ragged, unshaven, unwashed, they crowd together in an evening, perhaps fifteen or twenty in number, smoking, and swearing, and jabbering with two or three black gins, their only female companions, purchased, stolen, or strayed from a neighbouring tribe. But on the stations of married squatters, or where small settlers of a good sort have settled either on grants or purchases, as dairy and grain-growing farmers, a very different sight is presented,—wives and gardens, children and green vegetables, improve the fare, the scenery, and the society. Thank heaven, every day fixity of tenure is making its way, and in a few years there is no reason why pastoral Australia, with immense advantages of climate, should not resemble that pastoral Scotland whose domestic virtues have afforded so many exquisite pictures for poets and romancists.
When I first landed in the Colony, agriculture was reckoned very low, the Highland spirit of contempt for rural toil had descended on our nomadic aristocracy. Not being bred to it, I could not share the feeling; and after months of men-companions, and salt meat and damper fare, grateful to my eyes was the view of what I will call (to mention real names would not be fair) "Father Gabriel's Happy Valley." A bright oasis, that within the memory of the oldest settler had not been touched by drought; green, and corn-waving, when all around the other side of the range was brown and barren; cheerful and alive too, with fat children running and riding in play, for children with us ride almost as soon as they walk; handsome young wives, and nice tidy old women busy washing under the verandahs of their cottages, or in their gardens, or making cheese in the open air under a great tree, converted into part of a machine for cheese pressing.
From a great field of oaten hay, "The mowers' scythes sent back a nickeling silver sheen," where Father Gabriel, a hale old man, led the way before a long string of sons and sons-in-law, while the little ones followed and bound the sheaves. It was almost a home scene, beneath a brighter sun and clearer blue sky than is ever found in England.
Father Gabriel, having been one of the early free-farmer settlers, had obtained a grant in this favoured spot, and made the most of it by growing wheat in increasing quantities, which during a four years' drought, he sold at 14s. and 15s. a bushel. With the help of a long family he became really rich; but instead of turning "gentleman" after the vulgar colonial fashion, or entering into wild speculations, he had pursued his plain Yeoman style of life, collecting round him as many as possible of his neighbours from his native country, so that he had formed a sort of North-country settlement, cut off by barren land and rocky ranges, from near contact with smaller stations, until they pushed on beyond them. He and his friends had built a stone chapel, from which on Sundays the powerful voice of Father Gabriel might be heard expounding the Scriptures, something in the manner of a Presbyterian of Cromwell's day. He discontinued this practice when a dissenting minister reached the district a few years after my arrival. This chapel was very like a barn, roofed with wood slabs or shingles; being the only stone building in the district, it used to be very much admired. During service there were sometimes fifteen or twenty horses, with a fair share of side-saddles, tied up in waiting, belonging to families who had ridden ten and even twenty miles, to service. But they were seldom allowed to return any great distance without sharing the hospitality of the elders.
I made the acquaintance of one of the sons, (the old man had twelve children, and twice that number of grandchildren) at a Kangaroo hunt, and we became intimate, as he was always asking questions about England, English farming, English sports, and I was glad to learn Bushmanship, in which Kit Gabriel was a perfect master. One day he asked me over to a shearing feast. We had to cross a country, which I will describe, because it is a fair specimen of the grand but monotonous scenery of Australia. I love Australia; there I spent my happiest days, triumphing over the ill-fortune that drove me from England; there I found friends of the warmest and truest; there I quaffed deep the cup of hospitality, and found no dregs. With that bright land are associated the memory of cheerful days of toil and nights of harmless revelling, of delicious gallops over far rolling plains, of slow-pacing rides through miles of silent forest, of thought-inspiring reveries, within sight and sound of the broad calm waters of the Pacific. But although I can recal scenes of horrid grandeur, worthy of the pencil of Salvator, and of wild joyous beauty, to which even the imagination of a Turner or Danby could scarcely do justice, I must own that the sameness of the scenery for hundreds of miles, and, still more, the sameness of the evergreen foliage, except in the tropical zones, and the absence of perfect cultivation, renders the greater part of Ausstralia inferior in natural beauty, and the power of calling up pleasing associations, to the districts of England, where wild scenery and high cultivation may be viewed at one glance beneath a summer or autumnal sun. As, for instance, in Derbyshire, with its rose-covered cottages and wood-crowned hills; in Nottinghamshire, with its trim farms and forests of old oak; in Gloucestershire, with its green valleys streaked with silver streams, where even the fulling mill and the factory, become picturesque. And then, again, Australia has no Past:—but she has a Future, and it should be the endeavour of every colonist to make that Future read well.
But to return to my ride. Our way lay over a hard sand-track; on one side, a river, or rather chain of pools; on the other, steep hills (Colonially, ridges), covered with Australian Pine—a beautiful tree, with excellent qualities for working freely, with a colour and smell like sandal-wood, but useless for house use, as it breeds vermin. After an hour, we turned up stony ridges, thinly sprinkled with iron-barktrees for three miles, until the range broke off short, in sight of a broad creek, which we forded, and, leaving the river, rode over undulating ground, timbered with box and iron-bark; then over a thickly-wooded, sandy, scrubby ridge, at the end of which our course lay for a mile through an open box forest, beautifully grassed, like an English meadow, which opened upon a splendid plain, as thinly dotted with trees as a nobleman's park, which extended almost as far as the eye could reach, until, just on the horizon before us, appeared a dark boundary line, formed by a dense forest. But after riding several miles, during which we were constantly, but almost imperceptibly, descending, we came to a river never known to fail.
It was in a valley, intersected by this river, that Father Gabriel's settlement lay. Soon we could hear the lowing of the heifers, answered by their calves in the home-station pens; the swash-swashing of an oxen-driven threshing-machine, a recent investment of the patriarch's; and presently, amid other farmyard sounds, the shrill moaning of a fiddle. I don't know which was most pleasant and homelike. A lot of horses, still hot, with saddle-marks, in a paddock; two young fellows and a girl in a nankin habit, cantering in front of us; and a lot of men, washed, shaved, and in holiday costume, gave notice of the gathering.
A young Bushman, in his broad-leaved hat, with two yards of taffeta flying; his brown, intelligent face, hair, beard, and moustachios neatly trimmed; blue or red woollen shirt, loose trousers, broad belt; seated like a centaur on his half-bred Arab; is, perhaps, as picturesque a figure as you may see anywhere in a voyage round the world. On this afternoon, not one, but some dozen such, were at the gathering.
We passed the chapel, and came in sight of the house, planted on a declivity, in sight of the river, but out of reach of winter's floods: a composite building, which first consisted of a mere hut and garden; then grew, by addition, to a good, six-roomed, one-storied cottage, of sawn boards, with glazed windows, a verandah all round, covered with beautiful creepers, eventually increased by a large double room of stone, the work of the stone-mason colonist, who, having easy-working material within reach, thus paid off a debt to Father Gabriel. It was most comfortable, convenient, and capacious as a barrack; but, as a whole, I never saw anything like it, before or since.
From a detached kitchen, on the side of the original hut, with a monstrous chimney, came a delicious smell and flare of wood-fire, accounting clearly for the excessive warmth of the fat woman cook—a rare and blessed sight—who, surrounded by male and female assistants, was at that moment engaged in fanning herself with an old cabbage-tree hat.
A twinge of mortification shot through me as I looked down on my patched fustians, and regretted too late the snow-white ducks and sky-blue plaid shooting-jacket which lay neglected at the bottom of a sea-chest.
The shearing was concluded. The wool of twenty thousand head had been washed, clipped, sorted and packed, and the Clan Gabriel were gathered together with all friends and neighbours within seventy miles, who could spare time to celebrate a feast at the house with the best garden on that side the Blue Mountains. Father Gabriel towered even among the tall Australians, but one could distinguish at a glance the British from the Colonial born of his family; slight, fair, and small-featured were the younger brood as compared with the elder. Father Gabriel had one of those faces and forms you often see in the wolds of Yorkshire; powerful, large limbed, broad chested, with rather high cheek bones, a ruddy complexion, which the Australian sun had not been able to burn out; a bold hooked nose, eyes grey, and rather larger and less cunning in expression than most men of the same stamp; hair, whiskers, and eyebrows almost grey; a bold, capacious forehead gave benevolence to a countenance which would otherwise have been chiefly distinguished, like his fellow countrymen, by acuteness. Hard work and the climate seemed to have melted every ounce of fat out of a frame that, at his age, we commonly find full and fleshy, if not unwieldy. His wife was delightful; little, plump, active, of middle age, perfectly fair, without wrinkle, and with smooth, auburn hair without a touch of grey, that kind of hair that never gets grey, and a mouth full of unspecked teeth, an advantage which several of her married daughters could not boast. A better looking lot I never saw. The women were all clustering round a stranger cousin from England; the men, I grieve to own, just as they do in England, were gathered all together discussing stock, the merits of their horses, and the price of wool. Two little boys, the eldest not ten years of age, who had been tailing cattle all day, gallopped up after us, Bushmen in miniature.
As dusk came on, the room, which went clear up to the roof, rough and unfinished, was lighted with home-made dips, stuck in bottles and bark sconces.
Presently the tuning I had heard on arrival recommenced from a corner. Mr. Budge, blacksmith and clerk, the universal genius of the settlement, took up his beloved bass, which unglued and flat, had travelled all the way from "the North Countrie," and recommenced the concert our presence had interrupted. Polly Gabriel, his god-child and favourite, a sweet little thing in the bloom of fifteen, tucked a violin under her chin. Bob Grundy, bootmaker and shepherd, blew away on the flageolet, while Jack Rackrow, an evergreen veteran pensioner of engineers, farmer and joiner, drew shrill notes from a home-made tin instrument, a cross between a penny-whistle and piccolo flute.
One, two, three, four, reels were formed, and off we went in double quick time, for by instinct I soon joined, as by degrees did a good many, without distinction of age or station; Mother Gabriel, as active as any; Dora O'Grady, the red-headed maiden, in a red and yellow gown without shoes or stockings. Famously we jigged, thumped the floor, and snapped our fingers, and wonderful were the steps in toe-and-heel, and weave-the-blanket, there and then performed, amid due shouting, while at door and window, with large admiring eyes, the shepherds and other Bush servants looked on approvingly, as may be seen when polka is performed in some English manor-house; the balance of surprise and admiration being however with our Bushmen. Then we changed to country dances; up the middle and down again; and all the company, but two or three elders, including a little, lame, old man, with a crutch-handled stick, got in motion, and it did strike me that one or two of the outsiders joined in a sort of voluntary accompaniment at the door end of the room. When I pulled up in my turn, red and breathless, I was close to the musicians, rare birds in the Bush, and this lot right-down enthusiasts. Little Polly, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks glowing, her brown curls hanging all manner of ways, cuddled her fiddle as if she loved it, and ran up and down the strings with the taperest, if not the whitest fingers that ever patted butter,—lost to dances and admirers, everything but her own music,—but, while Budge sawed away as solemnly and earnestly as if he had been blowing his own bellows, and Grundy blew as if his life depended on his exertions, Jack Rackrow found time to admire his own performance and give directions as to the figures, to which no one paid the least attention. "I'me blessed," I heard one of the Stockmen say, "if I b'lieve the governor and the bishop have got such music." And all the bye-standers seemed of the same opinion, in which, indeed, I fully agreed.
All things must have an end, so did the dancing, from sheer exhaustion; then came supper: the table, sheets of bark laid on bushes, on which, ranged in glorious profusion, were mutton chops, boiled beef, honey, potatoes, melons, grapes, pumpkin pie, eels, parrot pie, figs, roast piglings, and dampers a yard in diameter, serving often for bread and plates too. Jorums of tea, strong and sweet; bowls of milk, and a cask of wine, home-made wine, formed the drinkables: rum, which on such occasions is usually introduced as a treat, being excluded by the scruples of our hosts. In compliment to me, as a stranger, a bottle of porter was uncorked, its cost exceeding old crusty Port at a Richmond dinner. When I add that every man pulled out his own clasp-knife, that only six forks could be mustered, and that no particular order was observed in the eating, I have said everything. Soon after supper, the ladies retired; the men took their smoke; those living near saddled up, the far away ones unrolled their blankets and stretched out on the floor. Before and since I have attended balls and suppers more refined, but never so enjoyable, because it was a real luxury, no other Bush-establishment having so much music or so many pretty girls for partners.
The next day a party set out to form a new station in the interior, which had been previously explored. The sheep, in two flocks of six hundred each, had gone forward two days previously. The young men having come up from Father Gabriel's out-stations, there was a great gathering. The head of the party was Harry Granby, husband of Polly Gabriel's sister Myra. The old folks had contributed fortunes for the young people in stock, and they had determined to push on quite outside the furthest stations on ground lately discovered.
Two bullock drays were loaded with everything needed for a station. The little old lame man, with the crutch-handled stick, came up riding a half-bred Timor pony, with a pair of draught bullocks, which he insisted on presenting to the young couple as regular "good uns," instead of a pair that seemed not quite steady. A mixed herd of six hundred head of cattle were collected in a stock-yard, to go forward under charge of Granby's brother, one of the young Gabriels, and an experienced stockman, with four volunteers; the other splitters and fencers and servants had gone with the sheep.
The strangest sight, and the prettiest, was Myra Granby on her grey mare, with a great yearling colt running alongside, all ready with blankets, tin pots, holster, and provision-bags, strapped on, to march into the interior. Contrary to all precedent, a shepherd's wife, riding on one of the drays, was the only other woman. This move of Myra's created a universal outcry, but she made no answer to the last words, except cracking her stock-whip: and, looking at her firm, though rosy, mouth, and very decided eyebrows, it was clear that when Myra made up her mind, Harry had nothing to do but give way.
Amid the prayers of the fathers and mothers, good wishes of the young ones, a volley of old shoes from Dora and Molly the maid-servants, the reports of the bullock-drivers' whips, the shouts of the stockmen, and the barking of the cattle-dogs,—the party moved off into the wilderness. To see them winding along in the distance, was almost a scene from the days of Abraham and Lot.
As the last straggler passed over the brow of the range, "There," said Father Gabriel, "there, young gentleman, that's the way we swarm off our young bees in this country. No landlord, no rent worth speaking of, no taxes. But come, let us mount and see my farm."
The skill and industry of a North-country farmer, with a large supply of labour in his own family, applied to fertile soil, ready for the plough without clearing, under a climate without winter and without droughts, had done wonders. The crops were splendid; but, to an eye accustomed to good Scotch or English farming, everything seemed rude, slovenly, and unfinished. But, as the old man truly observed, "Good, neat farming, don't pay in a colony: labour is dear, and land cheap. A crop might be got out of five acres while you were stumping one acre. For the same reason, no man can make a living as a farmer who cannot work with his own hands, and get help in his own family. Gentlemen like you, sir, should keep to squatting with sheep or cattle; and then, if you look after your men, you can do. Spend nothing you can help, and do all you can for yourself. That's the secret of Colonial success.
"I have spent more time and labour on my garden than is the custom in the colony, but then I wished to keep my family round me, and for years only hired two men; I with my sons did all the rest. We began our garden on the same day as our hut, and we eat our own cabbage and bacon the first year." Thus chatting, we reached an eminence, where I could look down on the wild and reclaimed land, "A lovely scene," I observed; "how bright and clear everything comes out under these cloudless skies."
"Why yes," said Father Gabriel, "it does look very pretty; and perhaps you might have liked it even better the first time I saw it; the grass breast high, full of kangaroos, and the water holes alive with black swans and pelicans: but pretty as it was, I can assure you it made my heart sore to think I had brought my family into such a wilderness, so lonely, surrounded by bloodthirsty savages, so far from help, and such a deal of new kind of work to do before I could make it anything like the place where we were all reared. If my old woman had not had a good heart, and the young ones been all such hard-bitten ones and hopeful, I think I should never have pulled through. There were not many immigrants in those days, and England seemed a great deal further off than it does now. But, thank God, I would not change places now with the owner of Brancepeth Castle."
"But," said I, "you speak so fondly of Old England; you seem so glad to welcome any English face, whether from the north or south; that I almost wonder you could ever find heart to leave home, especially as people were not crowding out as they are now, fancying fortunes are to be picked up on the beach?"
"Why, that's true, it was a wonder; I'm astonished, although I've never been sorry since my son Ralph helped me to fell the first tree; but the fact is, I came for the only reason that a man ever ought to leave his country, to my thinking—because I was going down hill fast, with a long family coming, and in an evening sitting over the fire, trying to make out what would be left after rent was paid, I used to think I could see a gaol or a workhouse in the hot coals."
The Patriarch then told me his story, which I will tell to the reader in another paper.