Old Melbourne Memories/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
WORK AND PLAY
The captain's first cattle-muster was fixed for a certain day. I had the honour of being invited specially to superintend the classing and drafting of the bullocks, retaining the presumably marketable, and condemning the irreconcilables. I was happy to accede, but a slight difficulty stood in the way. The night preceding the muster had been devoted to the coming ball at Dunmore, an anxiously-anticipated festivity, to which all Port Fairy was bidden, and from which no loyal Western man could be absent if alive. Certainly not the writer, Terpsichore's not least ardent votary. The difficulty was to combine drafting and dancing with a conscientious attention to both. "Minorca lies in the middle sea." Lyne is half-way between Dunmore and Hamilton—over twenty miles anyhow. The drafting would commence at sunrise—the dancing would continue till daylight. Such trivial discrepancies were negotiable, however,
Ere nerve and sinew began to fail
In the consulship of Plancus.
The summer morn was refreshingly cool, the first hour's ride delicious; then an increasing drowsiness made itself felt, and ere long I would have given all the world to lie down under a tree and sleep till noon. But the inclination was sternly repressed, and less than another hour's ride brought the creek in view, below the blackwood-crowned slopes of Lyne, one of the loveliest spots in all the West. The position of the stock-yard was denoted from afar by the great cloud of dust which rose pillar-like to the clear sky, while the "roaring" of the restless, excited cattle had been audible long before the dust-cloud was visible.
It was a lovely, clear, summer morning; yet, as I rode onward, the sentence of Holy Writ kept ceaseless iteration through my brain as curiously apposite, while ever and anon through the green forest echoed the deep-resounding lowing of the imprisoned herd—"And the smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever." As I rode up to the yard a score of stock-horses stood under the trees. The ocean of unbroken greenery that lay to the eastward was flame-tinted by the rising sun, but, early as was the hour, work had begun. Joe Twist of Werrongourt, and Mackay of Eumeralla, were at the drafting gates; the cattle were running through. I was just in time to enter upon my duty as classifier, at which arduous and delicate task I continued till noon. A half-hour for the mid-day meal, a few minutes' grace while pipes are lighted, then through the long, dusty hours of the hot afternoon the laborious, exciting work is ceaselessly carried on. Strangers and pilgrims, calves and clear-skins, are separated at the same time. The sun declines, dips lower still, and lower. The day is done, and a highly respectable amount of necessary work has been performed. The liberated herd streams back in a score of droves to familiar pastures. Two hundred and twenty "boilers" are safe in the small yard, the which will be started for their last drive on the following morning. The stock-riders are accommodated on the station. Some ride home—those who had no calves or stray cattle on their minds; the rest remain, ready to give a hand with the boiling-down draft next day. I partake of Captain Carr's hospitality, warmly thanked for my exertions. Do I not doze off almost before the evening's meal is concluded? I beg to be excused on the ground of fatigue, and depart incontinently for bed thereafter. Do I turn round until sunrise next morning? I trow not.
But I was soon in the saddle then, and away with the drove referred to. What a rush they made when the gate was opened!—what a pace they went for the first mile or two! I can see Joe Twist now on his favourite stock-horse—a steed that even his master cared not to ride without his permission—going like a Comanchee Indian, the merest trifle less than racing speed, parallel with a tossing forest of horns, his bridle-hand low, his stock-whip raised threateningly, the eager horse's head now on the ground, now raised higher than a nervous rider would choose. Was there another man "steadying the lead" on the opposite side, right well mounted also, gallant in the pride of youthful horsemanship and the full inspiration of "God's glorious oxygen ? It may have been so. Ah me! those were pleasant days. Would they might return! Even as I write,
Still comes the memory sweet
Of bygone hours, long-gathered flowers
Pressed by our youth's gay feet.
It may not have been wholly in the interests of an Australian merino principality that our shores were honoured by the captain's company and capital. With him—and to a certain extent, it was understood, indebted to his guardianship—came a Prince of Augustenburg, who had not then succeeded to his present exalted position. This royal personage was apparently not deeply interested in the pastoral life of Australia, and remained to the last unconcerned about the weights and fineness of fleece of merino sheep. Providence had arranged his destiny so as to be unaffected by the wool market, or even by the prevalence of dry seasons. He also spoke English indifferently, and, thus handicapped, preferred the sylvan shades of Toorak and the tempered solitude of a club smoking-room to the primeval waste. His more mercurial senior mean while utilised his colonial experience to some purpose, as the sequel will show.
Possibly a strict provincial life at Lyne became monotonous after the "boilers" had realised some 30s. per head. The Ballarat diggers would have eaten them gaily at £7 or £8 each a year or two after, but we did not forecast that and a few other unimportant changes. After the calves were branded, after the German shepherd had with paternal care cured the Silesians of foot-rot—(how different from the demeanour of Australian Corydon purring at his foul pipe, and double-blanking the sheep, with everybody connected with the place, from the ration-carrier upwards, as he pares the offending hoof)—after these, and divers other engrossing duties, had helped to hurry along the stream of Time, the captain delegated such and the like, permanently, to Mr. J. R. Nowlan, a gentleman who dwelt hard by, constituting him his managing partner. He then betook himself with his Prince back to Europe, via Panama, a route then coming into fashion with Australian home-returning voyagers. The travellers—including, I think, Messrs. Lang and Winter—had nearly completed their foreign tour in an abrupt and melancholy fashion. While crossing the Chagres river (I will not certify as to the name, but, if doubtful on the point, communicate with Baron Lesseps, Captain Mayne Reid, and Mr. Frederick Boyle) their light bark sprang a leak. They were partly canoe-wrecked, and left by their boatman upon a sandbank in the mid-stream of a big, rapid river, swarming with alligators. The river was rising, which tended to limit their period of security. In this strait, a small dug-out was seen approaching from the farther bank. The Indian paddler explained by pantomime that he could take but two. That was self-evident. One passenger even suggested risk. Then arose a generous contention. To the Prince was unanimously yielded the pas. The second place the captain was prayed to take. "No," said the gallant veteran; "you fellows have all the world before you. I have had my innings, and a deuced good one too. Moi qui parle! Get in, either of you; I'm dashed if I do." The time was rapidly growing shorter; the sandbank contracting its area. The boatman gesticulated. The alligators, presumably, were expectant. It was no time for overstrained ceremony. One of the squatters stepped in, and the frail craft swirled into the eddying current. It returned in time, and the Greytown Herald missed a sensational paragraph.
That was in other respects an exciting trip. Mr. Lang found himself, when at Panama, relegated to a huge dormitory, crowded like a sixpenny boarding-house. Comforting himself with the reflection that it was but for a night, he invoked Somnus, all vainly. The groans of a sick man on the next couch forbade repose. "What's the matter with him?" he inquired at length of his nearest "strange bedfellow." "Only Isthmus fever," was the answer. My friend shuddered, knowing how the railway labourers were even then being decimated.
"And why is the bed between you and me vacant?" he went on to inquire. "They buried a cholera patient out of it this morning. You don't happen to have a cigar, do you?"
It was too late to retreat. The streets were none too safe. But it may well be believed that the ex-owner of Lyne wished himself back among the blackwood trees, or even in the stock-yard, were the day ever so dusty, and what delicately constituted persons term oppressive. And when the red sun aroused him from the troubled slumber which ended the night's unrest, he naturally doubted whether cholera or "the fever" would first lay upon him a fatal grasp.
Mr. Nowlan, an experienced manager, after Captain Carr's departure "worked" Lyne pretty vigorously, selling the original herd as they became fit for market, and putting on store cattle to the full carrying capacity of the run. The gold discovery of course transmuted profits magically. At the first onset of the revolution, cattle stations reaped most of the benefit, so much less labour being required than on sheep stations. Within a few years not only had large profits been realised for the partnership, but the value of the property had quintupled. An estate of freehold land had been purchased at Melton, near Melbourne, from the profits of fat stock. A thousand head of cattle more than the station had been purchased with were now depastured. At the post-auriferous prices then obtaining, Lyne, with 3000 head of cattle, was a very different property from that which Captain Carr had originally purchased.
At this stage a plenipotentiary from Captain Carr arrived in the person of Baron von Loesecke, a jolly, blue-eyed, fair-bearded Teuton, who had married his only daughter and heiress. He prudently concluded to sell. Lyne and the Melton property were accordingly, "on a future day, of which," etc., put up to auction by, I think, Messrs. Kaye and Butchart.
The Baron used to remind us at the Melbourne Club a good deal of Monsieur le Comte de Florac, in the character of his sentiments and the quality of his English. He was good-natured, effusive, polite, though ready to resent any criticism which he did not interpret as friendly. "Do you think he intended himself to be satirical for me?" he once inquired, with earnestness; "if I thought so, I would challenge him on the instant." The challenge did not come off, and it need hardly be said that no offence was intended to a guest and a foreigner. The day of sale came off, and as we walked up from the Club the Baron requested a friend to bid for him the amount of the reserve price, which had been fixed, I think, at £6 or £5: 15s. per head. The run was, if anything, overstocked. As a number of stores had been recently put on, it was thought a fair price. Whatever it was, owing to a misconception, he went £500 higher than he had been instructed to do. The bidding was not very brisk towards the end, the sale trembled on the balance for a minute or two, then the purchaser came forward and made a further advance. The station was knocked down to him. The Baron rushed up to his friend and shook his hand enthusiastically; "You have made for me £500," he said, "but I did hold my breath till the next offaire arrive." Mr. Nowlan, as well as the captain, his heirs and assigns, must have realised handsomely from the proceeds of Lyne. Purchased for less than £4000, it fetched nearly £20,000, not reckoning intervening profits and the Melton freehold. It afforded one more illustration of the strangely-assorted luck which apparently besets colonial investments, the occasional success of outsiders, not less than the hard measure too often dealt out to pioneers.
I am not aware whether the last purchaser of Lyne found the scale of profits perennial. I doubt it, inasmuch as Duffy's Act followed, bringing darker days for the squatter. Fortune did not favour the original owners either. Cheery and full of pluck to the last, George Elms sailed for Fiji, as after an interval did his old comrade Lang—pleasant, ever-courteous "Allan-a-Dale." It was the fashionable "rush" for a while. They lie at rest under the whispering palm. Perhaps, ere the last slumber, the murmur of the surges had lulled to sleep all bitter memories of the wild southland in which their early manhood was passed.