Читать книгу Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang - Miles Franklin - Страница 5

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Bordering or within the Federal Territory may be a dozen geographical entities perpetuating the grey cockatoos of the pomegranate crests and genteelish screech, but the best known of them all is Gyang Gyang Plain, the summer run of Sylvester S. Labosseer, well known from Jindilliwah in the west country to the snow leases as one of the soundest and safest pastoralists old Monaro ever turned out.

Labosseer usually appeared at Gyang Gyang about November by way of the mountain where the peaks that wear his own name stand blue and wild on the right, and the road ascends from Bool Bool to the watershed by gradients that vary from one-in-eight to one-in-fifteen. From the crest, some of the rivulets tumble away with a voice like the wind to swell the Murrumbidgee, while others dash down to the Eucumbene, which marries the Snowy, famous for ever in song and story. There the world of Up Above, presided over by old Kosciusko, is dusted in summer with everlasting daisies—ivory and gold—and is creased far and wide with valleys boggy with spring-heads, or vocal with little creeks cutting key patterns amid the tussocks, and alive with trout, whose forerunners, when the size of tadpoles, Sylvester Labosseer himself had liberated from milk-cans a generation ago.

Old Bluestone's pub is a well-known landmark at the edge of Monaro proper, where the regulars may be heard interspersing advice about fishing with talk of flies blowing the sheep and the efficiency of "one-in-twenty" as against "one-in-thirty" for swabbing. Scattered like gems amid the clack are such names as Curradoobidgee, Eueurunda, Bibbenluke, Tintaldra, Gegezerick, Yarrangobilly, Gowandale, Kelly's Plain, Kiandra Plain, Gooandra Plain, Coolamon Plains—old and new—Charcoal Plain, Black Plain, Letterbox Crossing, Whipstick and Blanket Hills, and Whiskey Creek, while the Boggy Plains, Bullock Hills, and Flea Creeks are as plentiful as those that answer to the adjective of Red, or Little, or One-Tree, and distinguishable one from another only by their intimates.

Gyang Gyang Plain lies about half a day's ride from where the Gooandra sings over shelves of rock to join the Tantangara between two tiny bluffs of granite slates and the wedded streams steady into a trout hole and sheer to the left under a little hill. Speeding up again the waters hurry in hairpin twists far below Steep Sideling for ever singing a fairy lullaby, sweet as honey, chaste as dew, to glide quietly through Black Duck Swamp with its major orchestra of bullfrogs into old Mother of Waters as she rushes across Long Plain. Thence back with a wild free song by Currangorambla and Tantangara through the Gulf and all the roundabout world of the upper Murrumbidgee from Yauok and Gabramatta through Billilingera, Bredbo, Bumbalong, Cuppacumbalong and Timlinbilli, by Tuggeranong, Lanyan, Uriarra, Keba, Cuppinbingle, Yeumburrah, Oak Vale, Bombala, Good Hope and Goodradigbee and Coolgarbilli to Jugiong, to Gundagai and Wagga through Riverina to the Murray and the Bight.

The pilgrim bent on definitely locating Gyang Gyang Plain must not be seduced by the siren song of these waters but firmly head the other way. Only then is Gyang Gyang just half a day's ride from any point between the junction of the Tantangara and Gooandra and their confluence with the Murrumbidgee; but remember always that the bushman's day begins half a day earlier in the morning than that of the black-coated workers who languidly sip their execrable breakfast coffee in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury, and that some bushmen ride at a steady jog and others at a dead run.

A track that cannot be missed is Dinnertime Creek all draped with the perfumed tea-tree and tea-tree heaths as it circles Eagle Hill; no vehicle track this, and down-the-country horses are nervous of its steeps and angles. Eagle Hill Paddock is next to the Ram Paddock, the outside boundary of which is only six miles from the horse-paddock sliprails, and through the Ram Paddock all the way to Gyang Gyang shearing-shed is a track that a pommy could hardly miss. That is if any really crave for Gyang Gyang. The majority are so addicted to jazz and jollity, so artificiliazed by cults or spurious culture, or so blighted with congenital inability to become en rapport with Nature, that perhaps they, like Bernice Gaylord, don't know or care where such a beastly hole may be.