In The Far North

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Becke Louis. In The Far North

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Jack Barrington, nominal owner of Tinandra Downs cattle station on the Gilbert River in the far north of North Queensland, was riding slowly over his run, when, as the fierce rays of a blazing sun, set in a sky of brass, smote upon his head and shoulders and his labouring stock-horse plodded wearily homewards over the spongy, sandy soil, the lines of Barcroft Boake came to his mind, and, after he had repeated them mentally, he cursed aloud.

“That’s where the dead men lie! Poor Boake must have thought of this God-forsaken part of an utterly God-forsaken country, I think, when he wrote ‘Out where the Dead Men Lie.’ For I believe that God Almighty has forgotten it! Oh for rain, rain, rain! Rain to send the Gilbert down in a howling yellow flood, and turn this blarsted spinifex waste of scorching sand and desolation into green grass—and save me and the youngsters from giving it best, and going under altogether.... Boake knew this cursed country well.... I wonder if he ever ‘owned’ a station—one with a raging drought, a thundering mortgage, and a worrying and greedy bank sooling him on to commit suicide, or else provide rain as side issues.... I don’t suppose he had a wife and children to leave to the mercy of the Australian Pastoralists’ Bank. D–n and curse the Australian Pastoralists’ Bank, and the drought, and this scorching sand and hateful spinifex—and God help the poor cattle!”

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Skirting the inner edge of the scrub till he reached its centre, he looked carefully among the timber, but not a beast was to be seen; then dismounting he led his horse through, came out upon the river bank, and looked across the wide expanse of almost burning sand which stretched from bank to bank, unbroken in its desolation except by a few ti-trees whose roots, deep down, kept them alive.

“Bob, old fellow,” he said to his horse, “we’ve another ten miles to go, and there’s no use in killing ourselves. I think that we can put in half an hour digging sand, and manage to raise a drink down there in the river bed.”

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