Читать книгу Chips And Splinters - Edward S Sorenson - Страница 5

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I halted one day for lunch on the bank of Sawpit Gully. On the slope, now covered with ferns, was a half-filled pit, with heavy junks of partly-sawn timber, a rotten cedar log, and a couple of old rusted saws lying about it.

Those saws had once been the pride of the men who worked there. They kept them as bright as a new shilling, and loved to hear the swish of their savage teeth through the fragrant red-wood.

Then, when the buzz and hum of the circular was heard, those saws, that no other dared touch before, were thrown aside in disgust. The deserted sawpit was eloquent. "We won't want them any more, Jack," it echoed still. "We've got to find another job."

But it was a busy scene that I looked back upon long, long years ago, when those rusted blades were humming on Sawpit Gully.

The sawyers, whose home was a bark gunyah near by, were tradesmen whose work was important then.

The homes of the pioneer settlers were commonly built of split timber, but here and there was one that rose to the magnificence of sawn planks and boards. It was something very special in the way of houses, built of solid cedar throughout, even to the sleepers, and piece by piece sawn by hand and dressed by hand.

On that quiet gully side, where the lyre bird learnt to mock the swish of the pitsaw, the work was constant and long continued.

It took a good while to cut enough material for a house, which necessarily made sawn timber prohibitive to the poor man. If he cut it himself, he could only spare a little time now and again, so that it sometimes took him years to complete his contract. His house was built in sections, a couple of rooms to begin with, and the rest added from time to time, the outside being completed a long while before the inside was commenced.

Pitsawing was then a lucrative trade. Hundreds followed it, working in scrub and forest, by many a stream other than Sawpit Gully.

Then the portable mill arrived, and with it a new phase in bush life. The pit sawyers, their trade for ever vanished, had to throw down their saws; they could not even sell them; and the pit was abandoned, with a pang of regret, no doubt, for the storms to fill and erase as the years roll by.