nearly all the trees was pine), and she’d a-brought out her feather-beds with her, an’ we spread ’em on the floor an’ slept soft. For all chairs an’ table, we’d our wooden chests that we brought with us; an’ mother, I remember, made curtains of a bit o’ print she had, because she couldn’t abide the sight of a naked window—it looked so mean, she said. Mother, she got more contented, after a bit, specially after your great-uncle Mat was born; but she never come to like the life as father an’ me did. See England again? Poor soul, poor soul, nay, that she never did!
“What did we do all day, an’ how did we live? I’ll tell you. The men (they was all sorts, from them that lived respectable in the huts alongside ours with their wives an’ children, to them as had built theirselves little shacks right back in the Bush, an’ was mostly Tasmanian ticket-o’-leaf men, an’ nothing’ for nobody to boast on), they used to work some of ’em at fallin’ the Bush, an’ some at sawin’ the timber in the sawpits. An’ then, when they’d got enough cut, one o’ the craft ’ud come down for it from Port, an’ some o’ the men ’ud go away in a whaleboat up to Town with it—plenty o’ the wood Town’s built of grew green once in the Bay; an’ then, with the money it fetched, they’d buy stores an’ bring down. So the men wasn’t so bad off, you see, for they did get a change, once in a while; an’ rare old sprees some of them used to have too, don’t I know it! when they found theirselves back among faces again, an’ talk, an’ news, an’ liquor! But the women, with all the cookin’ an’ cleanin’ an’ clothin’ to do an’ mostly nothin’ to do it with: an’ they a-grievin’ for them they’d left behind, an’
