He gave up Bruggabrong, Bin Bin East, and Bin Bin West, bought Possum Gully—a small farm of one thousand acres—and brought us all to live near Goulburn. Here we arrived one autumn afternoon. Father, mother, and children packed in the buggy, myself and the one servant girl who had accompanied us, on horseback. The one man Father had retained in his service was awaiting our arrival. He had preceded us with a bullock-drayload of furniture and belongings, which was all Father had retained of his household property. Just sufficient for us to get along with, until he had time to settle and purchase more, he said. That was ten years ago, and that is the only furniture we possess yet—just enough to get along with.
My first impression of Possum Gully was bitter disappointment—an impression which time has failed to soften or wipe away.
How flat, common, and monotonous the scenery appeared after the rugged peaks of the Timlinbilly Range!
Our new house was a ten-roomed wooden structure, built on a barren hillside. Crooked, stunted gums and stringybarks, with a thick underscrub of wild cherry, hop, and hybrid wattle, clothed the spurs which ran up from the back of the detached kitchen. Away from the front of the house were flats, bearing evidence of cultivation, but a drop of water was nowhere to be seen. Later, we discovered a few round, deep, weedy waterholes down on the flat, which in rainy weather swelled to a stream which swept all before it. Possum Gully is one of the best-watered spots in the district, and in that respect has stood to its guns in the bitterest drought. Use and knowledge have taught us the full value of its fairly clear and beautifully soft water. Just then, however, coming from the mountains where every gully had its limpid creek, we turned in disgust from the idea of having to drink this water.
I felt cramped on our new run. It was only three miles wide at its broadest point. Was I always, always, always to live here, and never, never, never to go back to Bruggabrong? That was the burden of the grief with which I sobbed myself to sleep on the first night after our arrival.
Mother felt dubious of her husband’s ability to make a living off a thousand acres, half of which were fit to run nothing but wallabies, but Father was full of plans, and very sanguine concerning his future. He was not going to squat henlike on his place as the cockies around him did. He meant to deal in stock, making Possum Gully merely a depot on which to run some of his bargains until reselling.
Dear, oh dear! It was terrible to think he had wasted the greater part of his life among the hills where the mail came but once a week, and where the nearest town, of 650 inhabitants, was forty-six miles distant. And the road had been impassable for vehicles. Here, only seventeen miles from a city like Goulburn, with splendid roads, mail thrice weekly, and a railway platform only eight miles away, why, man, my fortune is made! Such were the sentiments to which he gave birth out of the fullness of his hopeful heart.
Ere the diggings had broken out on Bruggabrong, our nearest neighbor, excepting, of course, boundary riders, was seventeen miles distant. Possum Gully was a thickly populated district, and here we were surrounded by homes ranging from half a mile to two and three miles away. This was a new experience for us, and it took us some time to become accustomed to the advantage and disadvantage of the situation. Did we require an article, we found it handy, but decidedly the reverse when our neighbors borrowed from us, and, in the greater percentage of cases, failed to return the loan.
CHAPTER THREE
A Lifeless Life
Possum Gully was stagnant—stagnant with the narrow stagnation prevalent in all old country places.
Its residents were principally married folk and children under sixteen. The boys, as they attained manhood, drifted outback to shear, drove, or to take up land. They found it too slow at home, and besides there was not room enough for them there when they passed childhood.
Nothing ever happened there. Time was no object, and the days slid quietly into the river of years, distinguished one from another by name alone. An occasional birth or death was a big event, and the biggest event of all was the advent of a new resident.
When such a thing occurred it was customary for all the male heads of families to pay a visit of inspection, to judge if the newcomers were worthy of admittance into the bosom of the society of the neighborhood. Should their report prove favorable, then their wives finished the ceremony of inauguration by paying a friendly visit.
After his arrival at Possum Gully Father was much away on business, and so on my mother fell the ordeal of receiving the callers, male and female.
The men were honest, good-natured, respectable, common bushmen farmers. Too friendly to pay a short call, they came and sat for hours, yarning about nothing in particular. This bored my gentle mother excessively. She attempted to entertain them with conversation of current literature and subjects of the day, but her efforts fell flat. She might as well have spoken in French.
They conversed for hours and hours about dairying, interspersed with pointless anecdotes of the man who had lived there before us. I found them very tame.
After graphic descriptions of life on big stations outback; and the dashing snake yarns told by our kitchen folk at Bruggabrong; and the anecdotes of African hunting, travel, and society life which had often formed our guests’ subject of conversation, this endless fiddle-faddle of the price of farm produce and the state of crops was very fatuous.
Those men, like everyone else, only talked shop. I say nothing in condemnation of it, but merely point out that it did not then interest us, as we were not living in that shop just then.
Mrs. Melvyn must have found favor in the eyes of the specimens of the lords of creation resident at Possum Gully, as all the matrons of the community hastened to call on her, and vied with each other in a display of friendliness and good nature. They brought presents of poultry, jam, butter, and suchlike. They came at two o’clock and stayed till dark. They inventoried the furniture, gave Mother cookery recipes, described minutely the unsurpassable talents of each of their children, and descanted volubly upon the best way of setting turkey hens. On taking their departure they cordially invited us all to return their visits, and begged Mother to allow her children to spend a day with theirs.
We had been resident in our new quarters nearly a month when my parents received an intimation from the teacher of the public school, two miles distant, to the effect that the law demanded that they should send their children to school. It upset my mother greatly. What was she to do?
“Do! Bundle the nippers off to school as quickly as possible, of course,” said my father.
My mother objected. She proposed a governess now and a good boarding school later on. She had heard such dreadful stories of public schools! It was terrible to be compelled to send her darlings to one; they would be ruined in a week!
“Not they,” said Father. “Run them off for a week or two, or a month at the outside. They can’t come to any harm in that time. After that we will get a governess. You are in no state of health to worry about one just now, and it is utterly impossible that I can see about the matter at present. I have several specs on foot that I must attend to. Send the youngsters to school down here for the present.”
We went to school, and in our dainty befrilled pinafores and light shoes were regarded as great swells by the other scholars. They for the most part were the children of very poor farmers, whose farm earnings were augmented by roadwork, wood-carting, or any such labor which came within their grasp. All the boys went barefooted, also a moiety of the girls. The school was situated on a wild, scrubby hill, and the teacher boarded with a resident a mile from it. He was a man addicted to drink, and the parents of his scholars lived in daily expectation of seeing his dismissal from the service.
It is nearly ten years since the twins (who came next to me) and I were enrolled as pupils of the Tiger Swamp public school. My education was completed there; so was that of the twins, who are eleven months younger than I. Also my other brothers and sisters are quickly getting finishedwards; but that is the only school any of us
have seen or known. There was even a time when Father spoke of filling in the free forms for our attendance there. But Mother—a woman’s pride bears more wear than a man’s—would never allow us to come to that.
All our neighbors were very friendly; but one in particular, a James Blackshaw, proved himself most desirous of being comradely with us. He was a sort of self-constituted sheik of the community. It was usual for him to take all newcomers under his wing, and with officious good nature endeavor to make them feel at home. 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 vigor, energetically pommeling 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, dog trappers—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. It puts me in mind ev the time wen the black fellers made the gins do all the work. 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.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Career Which Soon Careered to an End
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 sale yards every Wednesday, always going into town the day before and not returning till a day, and often two days, afterward.
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 honor. That is where Richard Melvyn 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 twelvemonth 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 milk 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.
Richard Melvyn 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 milk 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 en
ough 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 recognizable 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 the 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 neighbors.
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 neighbors, 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 honored 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.
My Brilliant Career Page 2