Читать книгу A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip - Edward S Sorenson - Страница 5

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When you are shut up at night in a rocking, rolling, rattling coach, packed for hour after hour in the form of a zigzag, even the heavy sandhill can be a welcome variation to the tedium of travel. On coming to one or the latter the horses pulled up of their own accord, and the driver peremptorily ordered all hands to get out. We got out and walked, and now and again we shoved and spoked the wheels, and otherwise worked our passage over the bars. We paid £6 each for this privilege.

We didn't mind walking over the sand. It was better to have it underfoot than to meet it whirling through the atmosphere in dense clouds. The scenery was like the weather—monotonous; and these little breaks were a relief. We did not grumble either when the coachdriver got lost at night, and we had to do some exploring with lamps and matches. It might delay us a few minutes, or a few hours—what matter? We were quite animated when we took our seats again. We exhibited scratches and bruises as proof that we found trees and other vegetation without the assistance of a guide; and we related how we discovered numerous small gullies, without injury and without breaking or losing the coach lamp.

We did lose the coach on one occasion. Everybody had gone road-hunting, and when the thoroughfare was located and all hands had been summoned to the spot, we found that we had mislaid the conveyance. No light had been left to guide us, and the horses wouldn't answer a coo-ee like a lost passenger. They wouldn't make any sound at all. On that lone, benighted plain no team ever stood so still. So things looked serious for a while.

When we set out to recover it, it was surprising what a lot of things could look like a coach and horses. A small mulga tree and a colossal hill equally resembled it. One, in his eagerness to be the saviour of the party, would call out. "Here it is" and cause the rest to concentrate there before he ascertained that his discovery was a straggling shrub or a heap of roly polies. This circumstance was treated jocularly at first, but its repetition became exasperating.

I believe we found everything in the neighbourhood, including rabbit burrows, before we struck the vehicle. This happy event was brought about by a man falling over a clump of saltbush; he bumped so hard that the horses jumped and the rattle of the traces directed another man to the place.

The driver came in for some abuse—in asides—that night. Not for losing the road, but for leaving the team. The road across many level expanses was often invisible in daytime; it had been buried in a duststorm or blown away into the next State. A 20 mile plain, bare as a claypan, and showing no sign of a wheel mark, had to be crossed by dead reckoning. I like a wide road, but one that is 20 miles wide is a little too extensive.

On these far tracks the traveller noticed here and there a candle box or a biscuit tin nailed to a tree. There might be no habitation visible from the road, but somebody lived not far away, somewhere through the timber or over the hills; and that receptacle, placed convenient for the coach driver, was the family mailbox, in which letters and papers were posted and delivered. Much else at times was deposited there besides mail matter. Mrs. Smith, for instance, sent along a sample of her birthday cake, or a jar or two of some jam she had made, to a distant friend. It was the custom, too, among settlers that when one killed a beast a fresh joint was sent to the nearest neighbour. Fresh meat was rare, for a beast, even half a beast, lasted an ordinary family a long while. So a joint from time to time was appreciated.

On some of the long stretches between boxes there were spots well known to the coach driver, which were marked only with a little bridle track running off at right angles to the coach road. Here the mail girl was met with. Sometimes she was riding, sometimes she drove down in a sulky or a single buggy. Almost invariably she was waiting at the spot when the coach arrived, either sitting on a horse, her hat tied down over her ears, or sitting on a log or by the road side. Here and there two mail girls met at the same spot, arriving from opposite directions. Sometimes a little romance was interwoven in those trips for the mail—when the party from the opposite way chanced to be a young man. The trips were longer then, perhaps, and longer, too, seemed the intervals between the Coach days.

"The returning exiles!" Said a passenger, in allusion to himself and companions, as the coach extended the dull, grey miles behind us, and the veil of haze was drawn over the austere face of Tongowoko and its neighbouring counties.

The people of the eastern, southern and northern regions were wont to style that part the Gates of Purgatory, and term its inhabitants the exiles of Outback. But the speaker was not as happy as a stranger to that land of suprises would have expected; and one of the returning exiles, a lady, was crying—crying because she was leaving for ever the pregnant, brooding spaces where the sun goes down. They had gone to that corner to make money, with the intention of getting out of it again as speedily as possible; and subtly, unconsciously, the place had gripped them. Not with joy, but with a pang of regret, they saw the glinting rock-caps at Mount Browne disappear behind the obscuring curtain.

A more striking contrast to the cold, green isles beyond the Atlantic could hardly be imagined; yet English, Irish and Scots were scattered all over it, a great many of them in a position to purchase an estate in their native land, and to live well on the interest of their money for the rest of their days. But you couldn't drag them out of it. Australians, too, who had tasted the sweets of the coastal climbs, turned back, in spite of all the disadvantages, to that siren with the austere countenance, and burning tresses.

We said as much to the man who had called us "the returning exiles," and he closed the argument by saying they were mad. Two years afterwards he was carrying between Wilcannia and Warri Warri—the extreme corner; and carrying out there was about the most trying occupation he could have engaged in.

As a rule, the settler is a stickler for home. Many a one of middle age has never seen a train or a ship; many a one who has grown up and reared a family has never been 50 miles away from the selection where he was born; and there are old men in plenty in the heart of Australia, and nearer, who have never looked upon the sea. Though there are roving spirits among them, the average, even when in search of work, keep within certain limits like their native crows. When they go droving, on a journey of several hundred miles, they make straight for their old haunts on being paid off. At the same time there may be nothing to call them back but familiar squattages where they have worked, or a few mates they had worked with; no fixed home and no kindred, and never a pair of bright eyes to induce them to "turn their greys once more to the south"—or the west.