The Best Australian Bush Stories

by Jim Haynes

  He cleaned all the silt and leaves out of the guttering. The tank was choked up and the water polluted. Water had to be drawn from the creek until he had cleaned the tank. His wife complained. The garden was always sombre; only wilting things grew. The roots of the tree burst up under the house, and moved it slightly on its foundations.

  And in his bed at night Fingal heard the sonorous sound of the tree. He heard its repining satisfaction, and a horrible gloating. He thought of ruin. He thought of his schemes gone astray; the trouble and the worry.

  Well, he was not finished with it yet. He had done a lot to it; things that nothing else had done. Ferociously and tenaciously though it had killed and eaten, it could not domineer him. It could not break him. It could not oust his little house from its monarchal domain. But the tree was not done with him.

  * * *

  When he came in home that evening from the cornfield, thinking of supper, his wife, on edge, told him straight she was sick of everything and was going away. He knew she was not fooling or bluffing.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll get work in the city,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of it. They’re calling out for factory workers.’

  He was thinking who’d look after him; who’d cook his meals.

  ‘And what’s more, Jimmy will get a job . . . a decent job,’ she went on, determined. ‘If you had any sense you’d come, too. Do you good to get into a different job, anyway.’

  Fingal protested and persuaded, but there was no stopping her. The next day she left, the boy and the three-year-old baby with her. She had stood enough of that loneliness, and struggling and semi-starvation.

  After that Fingal did nothing. He let his beard grow. He ate any time and any thing. The house was eerie, even in the daytime. At night it was full of creaks and winds. The bed was cold. He missed his children.

  In an agony of hatred he cursed and swore at the tree. Always it was there, leaning over him in that goblin dwelling, sinister at night, glaring at him when he got out in the morning. His eyes squinted his hatred. His mouth showed bitter abomination, his clenched fists violence, his whole demeanour an aching revenge. He would kill it. He would chop it down if it took him years. He would spend every penny he had and dynamite it to bits. He would wipe the foul thing away forever.

  That night he was awakened into consciousness of the storm. He lay listening. He saw a blue flood of lightning, again and again. And he heard before the crash of thunder, a sizzling crackle and a terrible creak.

  Quickly, he ran outside. In the flashes of lightning he saw the tree riven in two. He shouted with relief of affrighted surprise, with joy, with triumph; his enemy at last destroyed.

  Then his eyes stretched. The tree trembled, toppled, and fell crashing across the house, smashing it flat.

  When they found Fingal his glazed eyes were still turned in terror, in numb fear and despair.

  THE CONQUERING BUSH

  EDWARD DYSON

  NED ‘PICKED UP’ HIS wife in Sydney. He had come down for a spell in town, and to relieve himself of the distress of riches—to melt the cheque accumulated slowly in toil and loneliness on a big station in the North.

  He was a stockrider, a slow, still man naturally, but easily moved by drink. When he first reached town he seemed to have with him some of the atmosphere of silence and desolation that surrounded him during the long months back there on the run. Ned was about thirty-four, and looked forty. He was tall and raw-boned, and that air of settled melancholy, which is the certain result of a solitary bush life, suggested some romantic sorrow to Mrs Black’s sentimental daughter.

  Darton, taught wisdom by experience, had on this occasion taken lodgings in a suburban private house. Mrs Black’s home was very small, but her daughter was her only child, and they found room for a ‘gentleman boarder’.

  Janet Black was a pleasant-faced, happy-hearted girl of twenty. She liked the new boarder from the start, she acknowledged to herself afterwards, but when by some fortunate chance he happened to be on hand to drag a half-blind and half-witted old woman from beneath the very hoofs of a runaway horse, somewhat at the risk of his own neck, she was enraptured, and in the enthusiasm of the moment she kissed the hand of the abashed hero, and left a tear glittering on the hard brown knuckles.

  This was a week after Ned Darton’s arrival in Sydney.

  Ned went straight to his room and sat perfectly still, and with even more than his usual gravity watched the tear fade away from the back of his hand. Either Janet’s little demonstration of artless feeling had awakened suggestions of some glorious possibility in Ned’s heart, or he desired to exercise economy for a change; he suddenly became very judicious in the selection of his drinks, and only took enough whisky to dispel his native moodiness and taciturnity and make him rather a pleasant acquisition to Mrs Black’s limited family circle.

  When Ned Darton returned to his pastoral duties in the murmuring wilds, he took Janet Black with him as his wife. That was their honeymoon.

  Darton did not pause to consider the possible results of the change he was introducing into the life of his bride—few men would. Janet was vivacious, and her heart yearned towards humanity. She was bright, cheerful and impressionable. The bush is sad, heavy, despairing; delightful for a month, perhaps, but terrible for a year.

  As she travelled towards her new home the young wife was effervescent with joy, aglow with health, childishly jubilant over numberless plans and projects; she returned to Sydney before the expiration of a year, a stranger to her mother in appearance and in spirit. She seemed taller now, her cheeks were thin, and her face had a new expression. She brought with her some of the brooding desolation of the bush—even in the turmoil of the city she seemed lost in the immensity of the wilderness. She answered her mother’s every question without a smile. She had nothing to complain of: Ned was a very good husband and very kind. She found the bush lonesome at first, but soon got used to it, and she didn’t mind now. She was quite sure she was used to it, and she never objected to returning.

  A baby was born, and Mrs Darton went back with her husband to their hut by the creek on the great run, to the companionship of bears, birds, ’possums, kangaroos, and the eternal trees. She hugged her baby on her breast, and rejoiced that the little mite would give her something more to do and something to think of that would keep the awful ring of the myriad locusts out of her ears.

  Man and wife settled down to their choking existence again as before, without comment. Ned was used to the bush—he had lived in it all his life—and though its influence was powerful upon him he knew it not. He was necessarily away from home a good deal, and when at home he was not companionable, in the sense that city dwellers know. Two bushmen will sit together by the fire for hours, smoking and mute, enjoying each other’s society; ‘in mute discourse’ two bushmen will ride for twenty miles through the most desolate or the most fruitful region.

  People who have lived in crowds want talk, laughter and song. Ned loved his wife, but he neither talked, laughed, nor sang.

  Summer came. The babe at Mrs Darton’s breast looked out on the world of trees with wide, unblinking, solemn eyes, and never smiled.

  ‘Ned,’ said Janet, one bright, moonlit night, ‘do you know that that ’possum in the big blue gum is crazy? She has two joeys, and she has gone mad.’

  Janet spent a lot of her time sitting in the shade of the hut on a candle-box, gazing into her baby’s large, still eyes, listening to the noises of the bush, and the babe too seemed to listen, and the mother fancied that their senses blended, and they both would some day hear something awful above the crooning of the insects and the chattering of the parrots. Sometimes she would start out of these humours with a shriek, feeling that the relentless trees which had been bending over and pressing down so long were crushing her at last beneath their weight.

  Presently she became satisfied that the laughing jackasses were mad. She had long suspected it. Why else should they flock together in the dim
evening and fill the bush with their crazy laughter? Why else should they sit so grave and still at other times, thinking and grieving?

  Yes, she was soon quite convinced that the animals and birds, even the insects that surrounded her, were mad, hopelessly mad, all of them.

  The country was now burnt brown, and the hills ached in the great heat, and the ghostly mirage floated in the hollows. In the daytime the birds and beasts merely chummered and muttered querulously from the deepest shades, but in the dusk of evening they raved and shrieked, and filled the ominous bush with mad laughter and fantastic wailings.

  It was at this time that Darton became impressed by the peculiar manner of his wife, and a great awe stole over him as he watched her gazing into her baby’s eyes with that strange look of frightened conjecture. He suddenly became very communicative; he talked a lot, and laughed, and strove to be merry, with an indefinable chill at his heart. He failed to interest his wife; she was absorbed in a terrible thought.

  The bush was peopled with mad things—the wide wilderness of trees, and the dull, dead grass, and the cowering hills instilled into every living thing that came under the influence of their ineffable gloom a madness of melancholy. The bears were mad, the ’possums, the shrieking cockatoos, the dull grey laughing jackasses with their devilish cackling, and the ugly yellow-throated lizards that panted at her from the rocks—all were mad. How, then, could her babe hope to escape the influence of the mighty bush and the great white plains beyond, with their heavy atmosphere of despair pressing down upon his defenceless head?

  Would he not presently escape from her arms, and turn and hiss at her from the grass like a vicious snake; or climb the trees, and, like a bear, cling in day-long torpor from a limb; or, worst of all, join the grey birds on the big dead gum, and mock at her sorrow with empty, joyless laughter?

  These were the fears that oppressed Janet as she watched her sad, silent baby at her breast. They grew upon her and strengthened day by day, and one afternoon they became an agonising conviction. She had been alone with the dumb child for two days, and she sat beside the hut door and watched the evening shadows thicken, with a shadow in her eyes that was more terrible than blackest night, and when a solitary mopoke began calling from the Bald Hill, and the jackasses set up a weird chorus of laughter, she rose, and clasping her baby tighter to her breast, and leaning over it to shield it from the surrounding evils, she hurried towards the creek.

  Janet was not in the hut when Ned returned home half an hour later. Attracted by the howling of his dog, he hastened to the waterhole under the great rock, and there in the shallow water he found the bodies of his wife and child and the dull grey birds were laughing insanely overhead.

  RATS

  HENRY LAWSON

  ‘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 cottonbush 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 smoko and hurried on.

  They were shearers—a little man and a big man, known respectively as ‘Sunlight’ and ‘Macquarie’, and a tall, thin, young jackaroo 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, waterbags 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 a while, 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 timekeeper 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 upended the swag. Rats shaped and danced round; then he rushed, feinted, ducked, retreated, darted in once more and suddenly went down like a shot on the broad of his back. No actor could have done it better; he went down from that imaginary blow as if a cannonball 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 jackaroo 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 a while; 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 halfway down his blessed gullet.’

  He caught several cod and 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.

&nbs
p; 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 the swag had been telling about the bigger fish it caught.

  ‘THE WIND THAT BURIES

  THE DEAD’

  ‘J.W. GORDON’

  (JIM GRAHAME)

  I spring from the land of the drifting sand,

  The wind that buries the dead;

  I cover the roads like a rippled beach

  Where the feet of the lost men tread;

  Old is the night when I take my rest;

  I sleep till the flaming noon.

  I ride to the height of the clouds at night

  As they’re scurrying past the moon.

  Famine and drought are my henchmen stout,

  My lover the wild bush fire;

  I will never shirk full share of work,

  And my lover he will not tire,

  As he’s soaring high where the grass is dry,

  With his wings, like a vulture’s, spread,

  The great trees fall at the crashing call

  Of the wind that buries the dead.

  He will strip the limbs of the tallest pine

  And gnaw through the knotted bole;

  Then he bites at the brush like a monster starved

  And snarls at a fallen pole.

  But the bones of the perished birds and beasts,

  When the grassless plains are red,

  Will be hidden deep by the restless sweep

  Of the wind that buries the dead.

  Half crazed with fears a woman peers

  For the sight of a child that strayed;

  The father has tramped and called all night

  While she cared for the rest and prayed.

  Two crusted furrows are on her cheeks—

  Dry salt of the tears she shed.

  Her tears may flow as the seasons go

  For the wind will bury the dead.