Читать книгу Settlers and Convicts - Alexander Harris - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The site for a settler's hut—How to erect a good hut—Settlers' shop-keeping—Termination of job—Fresh journey in search of work—Beginning to saw in the Cedar-brush—Cedar-wood—Cedar-cutting—Cedar-sawyers described—Dangerous trip by sea

THE adventure related in the last chapter was the only one of the kind we met with while we were getting our stuff, which was about two months. The succeeding three months again were taken up in erecting the building, which, as it may be an object of some curiosity to the English reader, I shall briefly describe. Mr. ——'s farm was close to a saltwater inlet lying between two low flats, in their natural state covered with a perfectly impervious brush. The soil was of the richest description. On each side of this low tract the country was very mountainous, and in some places timbered with fine tall forest trees; in others, clad with brush and scrub. Where the foot of one of these ranges ran down with an easy slope into the flat, Mr. —— had fixed his first huts; and, as the point of the hill altogether contained three or four acres, there was plenty of room for the new buildings as well as the old. At the most elevated spot he had had about an acre and a half cleared and stumped for the erection of his new house. Thus it stood in a little hollow square, backed and flanked on each side by the forest, and looking down from the front on the old farm buildings and the cultivated land. It was some thirty-five feet in length by twenty in depth. Like all bush-houses it was only one story high, and, like almost all, had a verandah in front of about six feet deep. The first step of its erection was digging post-holes, of about two feet deep, at various distances round the circumference, and along the interior divisions, in which were placed posts ten feet high, squared on the four sides with the axe, excepting the two feet let into the ground, where the whole strength of the timber was left. Along the ground between these, as well as along the tops, wherever there was to be a wall, were laid ground-plates and wall-plates, of about the same size, and squared on the sides facing each other, and having a groove of about an inch and a half wide and two inches deep mortised into the flat sides their whole length. Into these grooves were fitted the two ends of the eight-feet slabs we had split with the maul and wedges. The roof was made much in the usual way, only, being for some time to come to continue covered with bark, the battens were not put so close together as they would have been if the roof had had to be shingled. The flooringboards, according to the custom of the country, were six inches wide and one thick; timber being used so green, and the heat being so great, boards of any greater width turn up at the edges, so as in time to look like a row of spouts. The rooms were all joisted at top, and on the joists was spread a floor of bark, so as to form, over the whole top of the house, the settler's usual first rude granary. Squares of a couple of feet each way were left open in the wall in various places for windows; at present, however, they were only fitted with shutters. The chimneys were large, like those of old farm-houses, and, for security, had a little wall of rough stone and mortar run up inside about three feet; and in the middle of the fire-place was a large flag-stone, of a sort capable of resisting the fire, which constituted the hearth and baking-place. This, of course, is only a general outline, and that portion of the work which really consumed the smallest portion of the time.

Many things occurred during the performance of my contract to make me very much dissatisfied with my employer; but I should not be acting fairly if I were to omit adding that the experience and reflection of later years have led me to consider them rather the faults of a particular class of Australian institutions than of the man. The Australian settler undertakes, as a matter of course, to supply his labourers with rations; but he never thinks there is the slightest obligation on himself to make that supply a constant one. Sometimes there is no tea, sometimes no sugar, sometimes no tobacco. When it suits his convenience to look after a fresh supply, he does so; otherwise all the free men on the farm may leave their work and lose their time in going ten or twenty miles to get it for themselves; and on men who are very much the slaves of tobacco or tea or sugar this bears in some cases very heavily.

But the work was at length completed; and after some days of what I considered very unnecessary delay, the chief of which Mr. —— spent in walking round and round, and in and out his new habitation, and looking at it from all mentionable distances and at all possible angles, I got a cheque for the balance due to me, 43l.

I now, for the first time, found myself up the country without a job. The immediate question was, what to do next. At length it struck me that if I did as others did, whatever they got I should get. It was now near winter, and having disposed of such of my tools as I could not well carry with me, I set off one morning after breakfast for the more settled parts of the country. My route lay partly along the sea beach, and partly through the tangled and gloomy masses of the cedar-brush. I felt very forlorn at starting; but the load of tools, and clothes, and provisions, was really so serious a matter that it presently outbalanced the weight within.

I felt that if I meant to get to —— to supper, I must betake myself to my heels instead of my head: so after settling my load as comfortably as I could, I walked off in good earnest for my destination. About noon I got to a sawyer's hut in the very middle of the brush, where I had been told it would be best for me to stop and have my dinner. No work was going on; only the dog greeted me with some lusty growls as I came up. It was a tent hut, thatched with the fanlike leaves of the cabbage tree; open at one end, with the fire in front. On coming up to the fire, I could see the only occupant of the hut for the time was the dog who stood in the entrance, and very plainly told me I must come no farther. I therefore contented myself with unslinging my load, filling my quart pot at the creek below, freshening up the fire, and taking possession of the back of it for my kitchen; to which arrangement my four-legged friend offered no further resistance. When I had had my dinner and was just about to shoulder my load and start again, two little boys came, barefooted, along a track out of the bush. These were the sons of the sawyer that the hut and pit belonged to. They told me their father was gone round among the other pits to look for a mate; after which, dismissing Ponto very summarily with something not much short of a broken back, they made me come in. By this time I was quite cool, and felt so stiff with having overweighted myself, that I was inwardly consulting whether I had not better make three days' stage of my journey, stopping where I was for the night; which, always feeling much more at home in the company of children than in any other, I was not long in determining to do. The shadows of evening take possession of the cedar-brush an hour and a half earlier than they do of the open country; especially in the deep, winding, hollow ways of the ravines of the coast mountain; a little within the entrance of one of which was the hut. The lads' father came home between three and four o'clock, by which time it was getting very dusk. He was a merry, strong Lancashire man: his wife had been dead some years; and he had brought up these two little boys in the wild brush all by himself, except that he always had a mate for his work. The consequence was, that the little chaps at nine and ten years of age could take their axe and fall a moderate sized tree as well as any sawyer's labourer in the brush. In the course of the evening when he found out that I was tolerably handy with timber tools of one sort and another, he made an offer of taking me for a mate, which offer I immediately accepted: the next day saw us at work. He was in the midst of a very good fall of timber; but the ground was so rough and thickly wooded that we had to build a fresh pit to almost every tree. These pits were merely scaffold side-strikes lodged on posts against trees, with long easy skids leading up to them for pitting the log. Sometimes six inches or even a foot of earth might be excavated; but to have dug regular ground pits would have been much too tedious a job; besides which in many places it was so rocky that it would have been impossible. Usually the pits were made very solid; but at other times I felt, I must acknowledge, not quite easy while working under a log of two or three tons weight lodged on side-strikes so small and limber that they sprang up and down two or three inches at every stroke of the saw. Some of these trees were noble-looking objects, with their great spurs running out at the butt like the buttresses of a castle; and when one of them fell before the axe, what a body of timber it crushed down before it, and what an opening it made in the brush! It was seldom we cross-cut the logs off longer than ten or twelve feet, but our planks were sometimes a couple of feet square on the end, or three and four feet in depth, by six, eight, or ten inches in thickness. These planks were always taken out on either one side or the other of the heart, that part of the log being too porous and spongy for use. As the various planks came off the pit, they were rolled over into one large stack in some convenient spot a few feet off; and when the whole tree was cut up, this heap was covered over with cabbage tree leaves, on the outside, to protect the timber from the weather. The wood of the trees generally where we were cutting was very flowery and variegated, and the colour very good: when first cut, nothing could exceed the splendid crimson of some of the planks. There is a very fragrant scent from it, of which, however, a person working among it soon ceases to be sensible. Another singular and beautiful peculiarity is, the flame it yields in burning. Laying on the fire of a night sometimes a heavy outside slab in its green state, I used to observe it, as it were, melt gradually away in an almost imperceptible flame of indescribably beautiful pink; the flame itself looking more like mere light than fire.

We used to get up in the winter and have our breakfast before going to work, on account of the day being so short in the cedar-brush. But when we did begin to work it was pretty solid eye-balling. A cedar-sawyer's cuts are very deep, and a deep cut makes the saw move stiff. Again the lifts in a cedar-brush are very heavy. I have often worked for half a day together with a lever that I could barely lift into its place. Besides this, the only intermission through the day is one hour at noon for dinner, and perhaps twenty minutes towards the latter part of the afternoon, fifteen of which the topman employs in brightening up his saw, and the pitman in boiling a couple of pots of tea, and throwing the dust out of his pit; the other five are occupied in a very active lunch. Both men, if they are smokers, just light their short pipes and turn to with them in their mouths. If any man can without exaggeration at night say he is as tired as a dog after a hard day's run, it is the cedar-sawyer. A striking peculiarity of the class is their colour, or rather deficiency of all colour. A few months' residence and hard work in the brush leaves most men as pallid as corpses. Probably this is chiefly the effect of shade, but promoted further by excessive perspiration; for it is not necessarily attended by any sensation of illness.

It is during the three or four evening hours that elapse after his work that the sawyer enjoys himself. The success of the day, the prospect of a good cutting or an advantageously shaped log on the morrow, the pleasant perfume of the pipe, the cheering pot of tea again and again repeated, with each new yarn, or joke, or laugh, the busy and pompous excursions and barkings of the dog, the pattering shower, the clouds of fireflies that dance along in their countless angular courses where the cold stream tumbles among great stones in the bed of the creek—such are the objects which occupy his senses and his thoughts; and it were well that all things that can occupy our attention and our thoughts had as little in them to excite unwise desires or fears.

In much about the same time that I had been occupied about my last job, this also came to a close, by my mate having finished up cutting the quantity of timber he had contracted for with a Sydney timber merchant. All the time we were cutting, our employer had bullocks and teams drawing the plank down to the boat harbour, and boats conveying it to Sydney; so that we had no more to do than go aboard after our last boat load was shipped, and proceed with it to Sydney. Our voyage was not one of the most agreeable possible; but the unpleasant circumstance of it is such a very common one with these little coasting boats (sloops and schooners), that common consent among the parties usually concerned seems to have decreed that it is not to be at all gravely treated. When we were some considerable distance on our voyage, it came on to blow a perfect hurricane off shore, and it was not until it had done so for two days and two nights that we could again venture to steer for Port Jackson. According to the custom of these reckless men they had no compass on board, and had started without refilling their water-keg, and with no more in it than remained from the last trip. To the boatmen, I suppose, use had become a second nature; but both my mate and I agreed, that as it was our first, so it should be our last treat of the sort. I never went on board one of these small craft again for a coast trip, however short, without seeing that there was both compass and water-keg aboard. My sufferings during a portion of the four days we were at sea, although what water we had was carefully apportioned out both as to quantity and time, were such as I cannot describe.