Читать книгу A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip - Edward S Sorenson - Страница 9

Table of Contents

When you travel over the great western country, with the solitary question of water in your mind (and you don't want a piece of string tied round your finger to keep it slipping from your memory), you realise the grim, dogged fight that has been made by the men who have settled there. Thousands of creeks and gullies vein this region, just the same as in other parts; but they are treacherous affairs to the stranger, who is lured by the promising lines and clumps of timber to search for potholes, such as his "inside" experience leads him to expect. There are rivers, too, draining vast areas of one State, and moistening hundreds of miles of another. They start far north with a roaring flood, and are exhausted and lost in the immensity of their travels, or they end their long journey with a brown trickle that creeps into the Darling or Murray. When settlers along the upper reaches of eastern rivers are flooded, warning is sent to those far down to prepare for the coming rush; but the people at the lower end of the outback waterways only hear casually that a big flood has happened above them. Though it may sweep grandly for a couple of hundred miles, only now and again do they expect it to run in their part of the course. The great plain awaits it with parched lips. Thirstily, greedily, it drinks up the river.

The great bulk of the inland drainage courses underground, down the ever flowing subterranean channels. When you look at the surface courses after a dry storm, you cannot but think that any other kind of river is impossible without some gigantic scheme of afforestation. To the small settler, who wants to wet his whistle in a hurry, the underground river is hopeless. Still, he goes out, and prospers. One whom I knew well, after working for some years on the roads with a team, took up a dry selection in the Corner, starting with a few sheep. He passed in his checks in 1909, leaving to his widow and children a well watered estate and £32,000 in cash. He was a canny Scot. All he did to make his pile was to put down a couple of tanks in the midst of timber. Most western graziers made their tanks in the sun-baked, windswept open, so that the sheep, after drinking, wouldn't camp round the tank. Both sheep and tank suffered in consequence.

"Death's Corner" and "Hell's Gate" were not terms applied to the Big Basin by thirst-tortured travellers from inside. The great, deceiving distances, the sun-glitter on the stones, the mocking mirages, and the apparent barrenness of everything around, are heart-breaking to the peddler and the swagman. But they get a grip of the immense possibilities of that territory when they know that, after years of drought, fat sheep have been obtained there when they could not be got anywhere else. The main stays of the land are mulga and saltbush. In fair seasons Mitchell grass grows like wheat. Cut and stored, it is as good as oaten hay. It is better, for the haymaker has not to plough or sow—he merely reaps. When the grass is in ear, he drives his machine across the plain, and within a few hours the "cut" is ready to stack. The hay has been found to be sweet and fattening after being stacked for 20 years. There is no trouble about feed. The great problem is water. You daren't ride a few miles out on the run without taking a bag of it with you, or the chances are there will be a funeral, and you'll be in it.

When the "insider" goes on the land, the first thing he does is to put up a hut; but when the westerner goes on to his block the first thing he has to do is to make a water hole. That is the most important and the most valuable improvement he can make. His wealth is reckoned and his status in the community determined by the number of waterholes he has. In putting down his first he has to choose his time; when rain has left a pothole within reach to supply him and his teams with liquid refreshment. Then it is a race between the sinking of the tank and the sinking of the water. When the hole is completed he goes away, to wait till the next rain comes and fills it. Then he may return and build his home. It is a big undertaking for the small man, but once he has amassed waterholes he can sit back and live comfortably on the interest.

Most of the work while we were there was done by contract. In earlier days tank sinkers reaped a rich harvest, getting a shilling a yard for excavation which was now being done for as low as 4d. The landowner found the plant—horses, ploughs, scoops and harness. Bullocks were sometimes used for ploughing, but as a rule they were considered too slow, and unwieldy. Horses were worked three and four abreast to save time in turning, and to prevent unnecessary climbing and consequent damage to the batters. Close by the work was a sapling yard, with grindstones, water tanks on drays, and a small forge for pointing shares and picks and shoeing horses. The men lived in tents or canvas huts, walled in with bushes; and there was a long shed, walled and roofed with boughs or cane grass for eating and cooking in, while out in front was a fireplace, enclosed in a semi-circular wall of stones to protect it from the wind. Round the fire, in this roofless enclosure, the men sat and smoked their pipes and swapped yarns after tea. Occasionally on moonlight nights they worked an hour or two at the forge, repairing damaged swingle-bars or mounting new ones, and making horseshoes and scoop-handles. He had to be a handy man, the tank-sinker. On Sunday morning a tank or two of water was carted, and a load of dry mulgar or gidgee for camp use. Besides all this, there were broken chains to mend with split links, and horse collars and other harness ware to attend to. The tank sinker made hay while the sun shone, working from daylight till dark. Then the horses were driven away to water and feed, a sheep was killed by starlight, and now and again a bag of grass was cut and carried home on the pommel of the saddle for the hack, which was kept in the yard all night for running up the draught horses in the morning.

Some contractors kept a bullock team constantly drawing water so as to save the plough and scoop horses by watering them in troughs, where they work.

Hard years of experience taught the flock owners many economic points in the excavating of tanks. The open-fronted tanks, into which everything poured unchecked, and played havoc with the batters, were no longer made: nor was the partially banked variety with a catch-tank in front, from which the force of the overflow cut huge gutters through the intervening space, carrying the silt into the main bank, or else it ploughed through the light-wings and cut gutters down the outside of the bank. The later tanks were banked high all round with earth scooped out of the excavation. You saw these grey banks every now and again from the coach. The Darling Downs, as I remember them, was a land of wells and windmills. A part of Southern Queensland specialised in substantially constructed overflows. In other parts, as the northern area of South Australia, where water has a habit of running away at short notice, the ordinary cheap variety of dam was the common reservoir. But the north-west of New South Wales was the land of tanks.

Some of the tanks were so large that you could spend hours round them shooting ducks. A few contained yellow-belly (golden perch), and in most of them youngsters caught crayfish or yabbies with scoop nets or traps. A small catch-tank was made at the top end, from which fluming was laid through the banked-up earth, having a self-acting valve on the inside, and from this a race made of galvanised iron, posts and rails, ran down to the bottom of the main tank. These tanks held well if a foot of water was first run in, and the bottom and sides were then puddled and trampled by putting a mob of sheep in and driving them round. The great bulk of the shifting sand was checked by the earth walls, but still a lot got over, tons of dust being deposited during every dry storm. The evaporation was very considerable. Roly-polies did a great amount of damage. These huge, white balls of grass and burrs, from two to three feet in diameter, rolled mile after mile across the plains, banking up against fences, and completely smothering them, and bowling down into unprotected tanks.

Here and there stub walls were built as a partial protection; but these were soon buried under sand, and the roley poley took a flying leap over them, and went gambolling on in triumph. A hundred rolies racing across a plain in the moonlight was a weird sight; a few score bogged in the silt round the edges of a tank meant a big fall in the value of the reservoir.

Dams were made in some of the creeks. Many of them were constructed at considerable expense, only to be swept away by the first flood that came down. After heavy rains the water rushed down from the rocky hills in foaming torrents, sometimes several miles wide, levelling fences, yards, and all such structures before it. At these times half that "desert" country presented the aspect of a vast inland sea; yet in a little while a man might perish of thirst in the creek beds. All that enormous bulk of water has run to waste, and the four winds began to gather up the dust again. Only the tanks, the salvation of Outback, remained.