By midnight all the money is nearly spent, and on the slopes by the grog shanty most of them are sprawling fast asleep, the more excitable ones lifting their hatless heads up now and again, gurgling out some spasmodic strain of the last drunken song which they were singing just before they fell down.
At daybreak they are standing outside of the grog seller’s door kicking it with their boots, their mouths fevered and parched by the awful poison which they drank the night before, and so the great resolution ends once more. With their billy-cans and swags they depart across the bush on their several ways sad men on the “Wallaby track” homeless and penniless. And so they go on till they die, and I can well tell you all this because I was with those men, heard the good resolutions, saw the tears rise in their fearless eyes as they spoke with emotion of the happy-to-be future, and then witnessed their fall. With four of them I tramped away across the bush solitudes to look for work in a world of stern reality, for wherever you go in this world you will find that you cannot live on dreams.
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Lost in the Bush—The Drought—We find dead Comrades together—Horse and Rider
IT was my luck to be on the lonely track humping the swag when a great drought swept its burning wave across the whole of Australia. On the borders of Queensland I had been with two more English emigrants working on a selector’s ranch at “Sunrise Creek.” Dorrell was the boss’s name and he had a splendid stock of sheep and many acres of land under cultivation. He proved a fine man to us lads and treated us as though we were his own sons. I taught his daughter to play the violin and he was so proud when she was first able to play “Home, Sweet Home” that he smacked me on the back and gave me a week’s holiday. But life in a selector’s homestead is extremely monotonous, and after staying there six months I bade them all farewell, and with a kindred spirit started off to tramp to Maranoa with the idea of getting across to Queensland and into more lively surroundings.
It was on that tramp that the great drought struck the country; forests that were green shrivelled to grey and then to brown, as the fiery blast from the white hot sun day after day crept over the sky as we tramped along. The wind blew like the hot blasts from some volcano; the swamps and creeks and pools soon became baked and cracked shallows, wherein the very frogs stuck in the dry ooze, died and stank. While we passed by, half dead ourselves, searching for water, overhead across the cloudless blue passed swarms of parrots. As my comrade and I staggered along we heard the dismal mutterings of those birds as they sped away overhead and faded away leaving a greater loneliness after they disappeared, tiny specks on the Southern skyline. To the south-west of us rose some hills, and at nightfall we came across a pool of water at the bottom of a deep gully. It was hot-fevered stuff, but we knelt side by side and drank it as on the scorched blue gums the carrion crows wept, and yet, with that same hope that springs eternally in the human breast, sharpened up their beaks with the forlorn hope that we might yet die and our rotting carcasses supply them with food. By the swamp we slept that night, and once more at daybreak started off. Over us on the eucalyptus trees the carrion crows had slept and over our heads they croaked and flapped lazily along, following us, and often they would stay by the trackless track to feed on the dead birds in the mulga-scrub, birds that had fallen from their perch during the night, dead through the want of water. For miles and miles the bush lay around us, nothing but a leafless, waterless drought-stricken ocean, and often as the migrating birds passed over, some would half fall from the blazing sky and settle on the tree-tops to die, just the same as swallows do far out at sea as the stragglers fly to the rigging of the lonely ship, and fall dead on the deck during the night through hunger.