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Acknowledgements
Prologue
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The first march of the young pioneers was over; the sixteen miles of rough uptrack had been traversed in a day; the average load had been over a hundred pounds per man . . . Between the wall of timber and the cliff rim ran an open strip a few yards wide, a breathing space which was chosen for a camp site. Before blankets were rolled out, six tiger snakes had to be killed and two bull-dog ants’ nests burned out. Herb had been sitting on the brink of a cliff watching the opalescent spray of the falls leaping out into the twilight. On getting up to go back to the camp site, he found two hissing flattened reptiles blocking his path; there was no stick handy and no retreat. “Bring a stick!” he yelled to the others, “Two snakes here!” “You can have my stick,” Norb called out, a bit out of breath, “as soon as I’ve finished killing these beggars over here.” Two carpet snakes and a twelve foot rock python were spared – they proved useful about the camp later by eradicating bush rats. It would have been a bad camp for a sleep-walker; three yards from the foot of their leafy beds was certain death over the three hundred feet cliffs; behind their heads was a tangled mass of thorn, stinging tree and burning vine, which the jungle always uses as a first line of defence; over in the coarse tussocks beyond the camp fire lived a large community of tiger snakes and death adders, which for centuries had been lords of this one, sun-baked ledge on the vast, gloomy plateau. Such trifles do not trouble men who carry a horse’s pack all day, and so, undisturbed by the howling of dingoes and the scream of Powerful Owls, the first night passed in heavy sleep.6
Australia is a hard country and the people have had to adopt a starkly realistic view of life, or go under. In the bush, they usually go under anyway. One way to cope with a hard country and a tough life is through humour. Australian humour – realistic and sardonic – is used as a self-protective device to keep one’s courage up in the face of inevitable disaster. This black humour involves an ironic acceptance of the fact that in the end, we all lose. Confronted by tanks, a digger said to his mate: ‘You go that way and I’ll go this way, and we’ll surround ‘em’. Deeply rooted in disjunctions – English versus Irish, male versus female, bush versus city, optimism versus pessimism – irony dominates Australian humour. Casual, shoulder-shrugging resignation leads to the stark conclusion that ‘we can’t win, no matter what’ – the swagman in Waltzing Matilda died, the bushrangers Ned Kelly and Ben Hall perished, and many soldiers died pointlessly in the disaster at Gallipoli. Despite this, Australians continue to protest vigorously, and their vehicle for protest is swearing. Ned Kelly’s description of the Victorian police is legendary:
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