The Best Australian Bush Stories

by Jim Haynes

  He called on us daily, tied his horse to the paling fence beneath the shade of a sallie-tree in the backyard, and when mother was unable to see him he was content to yarn for an hour or two with Jane Haizelip, our servant-girl.

  Jane disliked Possum Gully as much as I did. Her feeling being much more defined, it was amusing to hear the flat-out opinions she expressed to Mr Blackshaw, whom, by the way, she termed ‘a mooching hen of a chap’.

  ‘I suppose, Jane, you like being here near Goulburn, better than that out-of-the-way place you came from,’ he said one morning as he comfortably settled himself on an old sofa in the kitchen.

  ‘No jolly fear. Out-of-the-way place! There was more life at Bruggabrong in a day than you crawlers ’ud see here all yer lives,’ she retorted with vigour, energetically pommelling a batch of bread which she was mixing.

  ‘Why, at Brugga it was as good as a show every week. On Saturday evening all the coves used to come in for their mail. They’d stay till Sunday evenin’. Splitters, boundary riders, dogtrappers—every manjack of ’em. Some of us wuz always good fer a toon on the concertina, and the rest would dance. We had fun to no end. A girl could have a fly round and a lark or two there I tell you; but here,’ and she emitted a snort of contempt, ‘there ain’t one bloomin’ feller to do a mash with. I’m full of the place. Only I promised to stick to the missus a while, I’d scoot tomorrer. It’s the dead-and-alivest hole I ever seen.’

  ‘You’ll git used to it by and by,’ said Blackshaw.

  ‘Used to it! A person ’ud hev to be brought up onder a hen to git used to the dullness of this hole.’

  ‘You wasn’t brought up under a hen, or it must have been a big Bramer Pooter, if you were,’ replied he, noting the liberal proportions of her figure as she hauled a couple of heavy pots off the fire. He did not offer to help her. Etiquette of that sort was beyond his ken.

  ‘You oughter go out more and then you wouldn’t find it so dull,’ he said, after she had placed the pots on the floor.

  ‘Go out! Where ’ud I go to, pray?’

  ‘Drop in an’ see my missus again when you git time. You’re always welcome.’

  ‘Thanks, but I had plenty of goin’ to see your missus last time.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Why, I wasn’t there harf an hour wen she had to strip off her clean duds an’ go an’ milk. I don’t think much of any of the men around here. They let the women work too hard. I never see such a tired wore-out set of women. Why, on Bruggabrong the women never had to do no outside work, only on a great pinch wen all the men were away at a fire or a muster. Down here they do everything. They do all the milkin’, and pig-feedin’, and poddy-rarin’. It makes me feel fit to retch. I don’t know whether it’s because the men is crawlers or whether it’s dairyin’. I don’t think much of dairyin’. It’s slavin’, an’ delvin’, an’ scrapin’ yer eyeballs out from mornin’ to night, and nothink to show for your pains; and now you’ll oblige me, Mr Blackshaw, if you’ll lollop somewhere else for a minute or two. I want to sweep under that sofer.’

  This had the effect of making him depart. He said good morning and went off, not sure whether he was most amused or insulted.

  * * *

  While mother, Jane Haizelip and I found the days long and life slow, father was enjoying himself immensely. He had embarked upon a lively career—that gambling trade known as dealing in stock.

  When he was not away in Riverina inspecting a flock of sheep, he was attending the Homebush Fat Stock Sales, rushing away out to Bourke, or tearing off down the Shoalhaven to buy some dairy heifers. He was a familiar figure at the Goulburn saleyards every Wednesday, always going into town the day before and not returning till a day, and often two days, afterwards.

  He was in great demand among drovers and auctioneers; and in the stock news his name was always mentioned in connection with all the principal sales in the colony.

  It takes an astute, clear-headed man to keep himself off shore in stock dealing. I never yet heard of a dealer who occasionally did not temporarily, if not totally, go to the wall.

  He need not necessarily be downright unscrupulous, but if he wishes to profit he must not be overburdened with niceties in the point of honour. That is where he fell through. He was crippled with too many Utopian ideas of honesty, and was too soft ever to come off anything but second-best in a deal. He might as well have attempted to make his fortune by scraping a fiddle up and down Auburn Street, Goulburn.

  His dealing career was short and merry. His vanity to be considered a socialistic fellow, who was as ready to take a glass with a swaggie as a swell, and the lavish shouting which this principle incurred, made great inroads on his means. Losing money every time he sold a beast, wasting stamps galore on letters to endless auctioneers, frequently remaining in town half a week at a stretch, and being hail-fellow to all the spongers to be found on the trail of such as he, quickly left him on the verge of bankruptcy. Some of his contemporaries say it was grog that did it all.

  Had he kept clear-headed he was a smart fellow, and gave promise of doing well, but his head would not stand alcohol, and by it he was undermined in no time. In considerably less than a twelve-month all the spare capital in his coffers from the disposal of Bruggabrong and the Bin Bins had been squandered. He had become so hard-up that to pay the drovers in his last venture he was forced to sell the calves of the few milch cows retained for household uses.

  At this time it came to my father’s knowledge that one of our bishops had money held in trust for the Church. On good security he was giving this out for usury, the same as condemned in the big Bible, out of which he took the text of the dry-hash sermons with which he bored his fashionable congregations in his cathedral on Sundays.

  Father took advantage of this Reverend’s inconsistency and mortgaged Possum Gully. With the money thus obtained he started once more and managed to make a scant livelihood and pay the interest on the bishop’s loan. In four or five years he had again reached loggerheads. The price of stock had fallen so that there was nothing to be made out of dealing in them.

  He resolved to live as those around him—start a dairy; run it with his family, who would also rear poultry for sale.

  As instruments of the dairying trade he procured fifty milch cows, the calves of which had to be ‘poddied’, and a hand cream-separator. I was in my fifteenth year when we began dairying; the twins Horace and Gertie were, as you already know, eleven months younger. Horace, had there been anyone to train him, contained the makings of a splendid man; but having no one to bring him up in the way he should go, he was a churlish and trying bully, and the issue of his character doubtful.

  Gertie milked thirteen cows, and I eighteen, morning and evening. Horace and mother, between them, milked the remaining seventeen.

  Among the dairying fraternity little toddlers, ere they are big enough to hold a bucket, learn to milk. Thus their hands become inured to the motion, and it does not affect them. With us it was different. Being almost full grown when we started to milk, and then plunging heavily into the exercise, it had a painful effect upon us. Our hands and arms, as far as the elbows, swelled, so that our sleep at night was often disturbed by pain.

  Mother made the butter. She had to rise at two and three o’clock in the morning, in order that it would be cool and firm enough to print for market.

  Jane Haizelip had left us a year previously, and we could afford no one to take her place. The heavy work told upon my gentle, refined mother. She grew thin and careworn, and often cross. My father’s share of the work was to break in the wild cows, separate the milk, and take the butter into town to the grocer’s establishment where we obtained our supplies.

  Dick Melvyn of Bruggabrong was not recognisable in Dick Melvyn, dairy farmer and cocky of Possum Gully. The former had been a man worthy of the name. The latter was a slave of drink, careless, even dirty and bedraggled in his personal appearance. He disregarded all manners, and had become far more plebeian and common than th
e most miserable specimen of humanity around him. The support of his family, yet not, its support. The head of his family, yet failing to fulfil the obligations demanded of one in that capacity. He seemed to lose all love and interest in his family, and grew cross and silent, utterly without pride and pluck. Formerly so kind and gentle with animals, now he was the reverse.

  His cruelty to the young cows and want of patience with them I can never forget. It has often brought upon me the threat of immediate extermination for volunteering scathing and undesired opinions on his conduct.

  The part of the dairying that he positively gloried in was going to town with the butter. He frequently remained in for two or three days, as often as not spending all the money he got for the butter in a drunken spree. Then he would return to curse his luck because his dairy did not pay as well as those of some of our neighbours.

  The curse of Eve being upon my poor mother in those days, she was unable to follow her husband. Pride forbade her appealing to her neighbours, so on me devolved the duty of tracking my father from one pub to another and bringing him home.

  Had I done justice to my mother’s training I would have honoured my paternal parent in spite of all this, but I am an individual ever doing things I oughtn’t at the time I shouldn’t.

  Coming home, often after midnight, with my drunken father talking maudlin conceited nonsense beside me, I developed curious ideas on the fifth commandment. Those journeys in the spring cart through the soft faint starlight were conducive to thought. My father, like most men when under the influence of liquor, would allow no one but himself to handle the reins, and he was often so incapable that he would keep turning the horse round and round in the one place. It is a marvel we never met with an accident. I was not nervous, but quite content to take whatever came, and our trusty old horse fulfilled his duty, ever faithfully taking us home along the gum tree-lined road.

  My mother had taught me from the Bible that I should honour my parents, whether they were deserving of honour or not.

  Dick Melvyn being my father did not blind me to the fact that he was a despicable, selfish, weak creature, and as such I despised him with the relentlessness of fifteen, which makes no allowance for human frailty and weakness. Disgust, not honour, was the feeling which possessed me when I studied the matter.

  Towards mother I felt differently. A woman is but the helpless tool of man—a creature of circumstances. Seeing my father beside me, and thinking of his infant with its mother, eating her heart out with anxiety at home, this was the reasoning which took possession of me.

  OLD HEINRICH AND THE

  LAMBING EWE

  E.O. SCHLUNKE

  YOUNG OTTO WEISMANN WAS riding over the farm, feeling for the first time since his father’s death that it really belonged to him. He had a good horse under him and two sheep dogs following, which caught up to him at each gate, generally dripping from some dam or waterhole they had come across, or panting extravagantly and giving him deceitfully pathetic glances because he was making the going so hard.

  At each gate Otto thought to himself, ‘Now I can shut this or leave it open, just as I please. I can put the wethers into the Big Grass or the Reefton wheat stubble. I can leave the ewes in the Clay Hill stubble or put them on the oats.’

  And then he was on his horse again, letting it have its head across the stubble paddock, while he felt the cool autumn air against his face and round his neck where it blew into his open shirt. He watched underfoot trying to see how the trefoil, ball clover, and self-sown wheat were lasting, feeling the softness of the soil under the horse’s hooves as an insurance that they would keep on growing for some weeks without further rain.

  Up he went over the gentle, rolling rise where the self-mulching red clay caused the horse to labour so that the dogs gained on him and made a hopeful burst as if they expected to catch him. But they quickly fell behind again when down the other side he galloped hard, shouting and waving his arms because a flock of about twenty crows had gathered round a prostrate ewe.

  The crows, which had kept so cautiously out of range yesterday when he had a gun, stayed insolently beside the sheep, walking round it with their long, sharp, black beaks stabbing the air with each step.

  One even settled on the sheep’s head to make a last attempt to maim it by pecking at its eye before Otto, shouting louder and swearing, arrived among them, then it flew away after the rest and settled in a nearby pine tree to watch, still insolent, as if it were confident that it was only a matter of time and it would have the ewe—first its eyes and tongue, then a hole in its chest to get at the heart and lungs, helping other crows to strip off the wool and skin bit by bit, quarrelling and fighting, and feasting so heavily each day that it would hardly be able to fly home.

  Otto dismounted and dropped the reins close to him on the ground, remembering that he’d have to keep half an eye on the horse or walk home.

  The sheep, which Otto had feared to be dead, so helplessly it had lain on its side on the ground while the crows were around it, now began to throw itself about violently, beating its head on the ground after each futile attempt to rise, so that it bled from the crow pecks around its eyes, and from its nostrils. Otto put his hand on it to quieten it and noticed that it was just about to lamb. It looked a strong, healthy ewe and Otto cursed the crows that took advantage of its temporary weakness.

  He rolled the ewe on her side, knowing that the wool underneath would be wet from lying on the damp ground all night, and so heavy that its weight had prevented the sheep from rising. The sheep seemed relieved and stretched its cramped legs. It made a few grunting noises and the lamb’s head appeared.

  Just then the two dogs arrived, panting demonstratively. Full of curiosity, they ran to the ewe and sniffed at it. The ewe thrashed about in terror, made a frantic effort, got to its feet and ran totteringly, leaning so far over towards its wet side that it ran in a circle, collapsing again a few yards from Otto.

  He swore at the dogs, but they refused to take him seriously and, confident in their virtue, came creeping against his legs, casting placatory glances at him while he walked to the sheep. The ewe began to struggle again as it saw the dogs, so Otto gave each a nicely weighed and measured kick, sufficient to convince them he wanted them out of the way, but not enough to send them home offended. He rolled the sheep over again so that the sun could dry its wet side, and looked at the lamb.

  It was still in the same position as before and, though the ewe strained and grunted, there was no progress. Otto began to realise that something was wrong. He hadn’t much experience with sheep, his father and old Heinrich attending to them in the few years since he’d been home from school, but he recalled a lecture at his agricultural college.

  The presentation should take place front feet foremost, with the head resting upon the legs. Clearly the silly lamb had made a mistake, what old Taylor called ‘malpresentation’. Otto watched the ewe’s struggles and pondered while his horse nibbled at the grass, trailing the bridle. The sheep dogs sat bolt upright a few yards further away, watching too, very bright of eye and knowing, ears pricked and giving little sideways nods with their heads, glancing at each other as if they were sure they could soon put things to rights if they were allowed to go about it their way. Meanwhile they were being very good, only edging a little bit nearer when Otto wasn’t watching, or when it seemed he wouldn’t mind.

  Otto was recollecting. You washed your hands and arms in disinfectant and smeared them with Vaseline. (But while you were away doing that the crows pecked out the eyes of both the ewe and the half-born lamb.) You returned the lamb’s head, fished out the front feet one at a time, allowed the head to advance again, pulled very gently and very carefully, and all would be well.

  But the ewe had no intention of allowing the lamb’s head to be returned; whatever strength she retained she concentrated on resisting retrogression, grunting most outrageously.

  Otto desisted. The thing was obviously hopeless; there was something wrong with eit
her the ewe or his instructions. It was a messy business, too, and the lamb looked as if it were dead. He didn’t know what he should do.

  He looked around, and the two dogs came shuffling up to him on their behinds, as if they could deceive him into thinking they were still sitting down.

  When he said nothing they leapt up with their paws on his chest, pushing their heads in front of his face to remind him that they were more important than a miserable half-dead sheep. When he pushed them away absent-mindedly they raced away in a wide circle, to stop suddenly, tails erect, hackles bristling, and bark at something half a mile away at the other end of the paddock—a bent old man in a sulky with a slow, quiet pony.

  That would be old Heinrich. Otto had told him this morning to go out and mend that fence.

  Otto gave a quick look around for his horse and caught it before it realised he was after it. He galloped across to the tree where the nearest crows were sitting and waved and shouted until they flew away, all except the most insolent one, who wouldn’t move though he shouted until the horse began to rear and the dogs retreated cowering.

  Otto dashed past the dogs, kicking his horse for more speed and looking back at the crows. The dogs leapt out of his way, looked at each for a moment wonderingly, decided that it was a lark, and went bounding after him in great glee.

  Old Heinrich was so absorbed in his fencing job that it took quite a while to make him understand that the morning’s order was being countermanded. He was a tall, thin old man with shoulders stooped from much hard work, mild, trustful blue eyes and a long, aquiline nose, that would probably have looked aristocratic if he’d had the etceteras to go with it. His face was long and furrowed and he had an Adam’s apple and a lot of loose wrinkled skin about the neck.

  When old Heinrich understood about the ewe he looked worried and began to stare about anxiously for the sheep with his shortsighted old eyes. Otto said, ‘Follow me,’ and was off, and after a few moments of hesitation the old man clambered into the sulky and flicked the pony into a sedate trot.