life that exists for me here—that is, at times: oftener I feel sick of the whole thing and long for some other country and a more stirring life.
There is a pleasure in a mad gallop; or in watching the dawn of day on a cattle camp—to see the beasts take shape, and change from an indistinguishable mass of white and black into their natural colours; in the dead of night to find yourself alone with the cattle—all the camp asleep, perhaps only a red spark betokening the camp. I always, when I think of it, find something unearthly in this assemblage of huge animals ready at any moment to burst forth like a pent-up torrent, and equally irresistible in their force. When every beast is down, asleep or resting, just pull up and listen. You will hear a low moaning sound rising to a roar, then subsiding to a murmur like distant surf—or, as I fancy, the cry of the damned in Dante's ‘Inferno.’ When the cattle are like that it is a good sign. But in the moonlight this strange noise, the dark mass of cattle with the occasional flash of an eye or a polished horn catching the light—it always conjures up strange fancies in me: I seem to be in some other world.
If I could only write it, there is a poem to be made out of the back country. Some man will come yet who will be able to grasp the romance of Western Queensland and all that equally mysterious country in Central and Northern Australia. For there is a romance, though a grim one—a story of drought and flood, fever and famine, murder and suicide, courage and endurance.
And who reaps the benefit? Not the poor bushman; but Messrs. So-and-So, merchants, of Sydney or Melbourne—or the Mutual Consolidated Cut-down-the-drovers’-wages Company, Limited—or some other capitalist. If you showed them the map half of them could not point out the position of their runs. All they know is that their cheques come in regularly from the buyers; and if the expenses pass the limit they in their ignorance place, they sack the manager and get another easy enough.
