Chapter I: NEVER knew what to make of Guest; he certainly believed all that he

told me. He eventually came to my lodging and lived in the next room; he had an old duck, I think he said it was eighteen years old; he carried it about much the same as folks do a pet poodle. I never saw such a wise and affectionate thing as that duck was. By his bed in a large collar-box it would sit the whole night long and follow him and me about the room like a kitten. How he got it and why he was so fond of it was a mystery to me; he was the last man in the world one would have thought to have a pet duck and put up with the nuisance of it, but he had the duck right enough, and when we sat having our meals together it would push its beak under our arms and steal the dainty bits off our plates. That was nuisance enough, but the smell of it was outrageous and I very seldom had luncheon with Guest afterwards, but had most of my meals in a restaurant hard by.

I was still engaged at playing the fiddle at the dancing hall, and now and again I accepted engagements to go out to balls, etc., among the “élite” of San Francisco. It was at the palatial residence of a ’Frisco nabob out at Menbo Park that I played my first public solo. I was terribly nervous. The solo I played was Rode’s “Air in G,” and I gave as an encore the “Cavatina” by Raff. Guest was there that night; I had managed to get him a ticket and borrowed a decent suit for him. I was sorry after that I had invited him. He got drinking too much, and though I had warned him to behave himself he shouted at the top of his voice as soon as I had finished my solo, “Good old Middleton! Give us another.” I turned hot all over and the perspiration whisked off my brow as I bowed to the applause of the audience and the pretty girl at the piano gazed up into my face and quickly placed the music of the “Cavatina” on the pianoforte and I was glad to start off playing again. I made several mistakes but I don’t think anyone noticed them; my name on the programme was not Middleton but Signor Marrionette! and everyone, of course, had great faith in the playing of a gentleman with that name.

Through my musical ability and enterprise I saw a good deal of ’Frisco “high life,” and after a deal of experience I came to the conclusion that low life was only the crude essence of high life. One set wiped their noses with a silk pocket handkerchief and the other with the thumb and forefinger, but both acted under the same impulse. The real curse of those early engagements was that after I had played the ladies would circle round me, quizz me up and down, old and young plying me with questions, telling me how they would love to spend their lives listening to delicious strains of music; they thought I was a soft sentimental poetical youth, green to the ways of life, and little dreamed that I had seen them all, so to speak, dancing in the South Seas with nothing on!

I was very homesick about that time and as Guest had made up his mind to go to Alaska I made up my mind to get out of ’Frisco and home to England. I threw my job up and not having enough money to pay my fare home I set about trying to get a berth on a ship. I will not weary you with my disappointments, but I eventually after many hardships got a job as deck-hand on the _Alameda_ bound for Sydney. I had made up my mind to get to Sydney first and then get a berth on a ship that went by the Suez Canal route. After a rotten trip across tropic seas, working like a nigger, and sleeping in quarters that would have made the ’Frisco Chinamen sniff with disgust, I arrived at Woolloomoolloo Bay, was paid off and wandered about for several days.

I could not discover any of my old acquaintances that I would like to have seen. The _Lubeck_ was in dock, but though I tried all I could to see if William my friend had returned, I could get no information. There were hundreds of English fellows trying to work their passages back to England and every week the deep-sea boats came through Sydney Heads with hundreds of passengers on deck gazing with admiring eyes at the beautiful scrub-covered hills of Sydney Harbour, their hearts beating happily as the relatives and friends waved their hands on the wharf. I often stood and watched the sisters, brothers, and lovers meet, and as the ships left the wharf for England once more I stood and watched the farewell hands waving as the great P. & O. or Orient liners sailed away, taking the hearts of the pinched white-faced, ragged brigade with her.

Failing to get a berth or a job at violin-playing, I availed myself of an opportunity offered me to go up country sheep-shearing. The new friends I had fallen in with told me that I could earn a splendid wage at the job, and though I knew nothing about the work, I believed them and went off.

We went a hundred miles by rail and tramped the rest, and when I eventually reached the sheep-station I had no boots to my feet, and my trouser legs were torn away through tramping through stiff scrub. I never had such a rough job in my life as on that sheep-shearing station. Hundreds of men arrived day after day from different parts of New South Wales, and clamoured for work. They were men of all degrees, swagsmen of long experience, and men of no experience, new chums and old chums. I got in just in time to get a job as a “rouse-about,” and then became a “penner-up.”

Many of us slept in camp tents and I made a good bit of money by fiddle-playing. I extemporised a small orchestra, which consisted of a concertina, two banjos and a bone clapper, and when the work was done we would sit under the blue gums and, as the sun twinkled on the skyline and disappeared, start the concert, and never did I have such an appreciative audience as they stood, those rough unshaved men leaning against the trees or sitting on stumps smoking and listening to the melodies that took their hearts back to the homeland, and as we played away and the marsh frogs croaked they would join in the chorus of some old song and put their whole soul in it. “Play that again, matey,” they would say as some strain touched them and awoke memories of long ago. I’ve often seen the tears in the eyes of those men, and I liked them; some of them were old enough to be my father. They were mostly men of a sentimental turn of mind and good men, as far as their intentions went, but they all found it so hard to make their actions harmonise with their intentions. They work hard when they do work, and after the shearing season go off with a big cheque and a firm resolve to start a little business or go back across the seas to see the old faces again.

With their billy-can swinging in their hand and their swag on their back they start across the bush, outbound to the new life of quiet and sweetness, and then the dreadful fall comes. Hot and tired they all stumble across the grog shanty in the bush town, outside of its wooden door they drop their swags to the ground, gaze in each other’s eyes with that querying look that says in silent language, “Well, I don’t think just one drink would hurt us,” and then each one carefully looks at the other, as though to say, “Mind, Bill, only one this time,” for they have all been through the same old fiasco before, made the same good resolutions and alas, then do as they will always do, for that one drink resolves into two. Each one looks once more at the other and each one relents and grants his comrade one more drink. “Yes, Bill, but mind you that’s the last,” and then one poking his head out of the grog shanty sees the sun setting and remarks to the others, “It’s getting late, chums; we’d better camp here for the night.” They all agree, and again all agree that another drink could not possibly hurt any of them. By that time they are getting half-seas over with the extra drinks in between which they each swallowed while the other wasn’t looking! Then the loud songs commence, and the yarns of past brave deeds, and the grog seller rubs his hands, delighted to see them getting affectionate one with the other as each finds his appreciative listener. By this time their voices can be heard at the township homesteads two miles over the hills, and the folk come from far and near to hear the songs, and to see the drunken spree of the homebound shearers. Already the dance has commenced, and the banjo is going full speed, “pink-a-tee-pink,” and then a space is cleared for the grand fight over the awful insult to the man from Stony Creek who has been doubted when he said he knew where gold could be found by the ton, and he found it but it was so heavy that he couldn’t carry it into town.

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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XXVII

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.

My comrade was English, and was a splendid friend; he was three or four years older than I, and when we sat down together and shared out the food we had in our swag, we would almost quarrel because he would deny himself and give me the largest share. He was uneducated, but that did not matter. God had amply repaid him in the making for all that his education might lack when he was a man, and twelve months after, when I read in a newspaper that I had been drowned at sea on the schooner _Alice_ that was lost with all hands, I felt terribly upset. I had given him one of my “Very good” discharges so that he could secure a berth; he got the berth, and my name being on his discharge he had to sail under my name, and died bearing my name. Many beautiful things were said of me when my old acquaintances also read the account, and thought it was I who was drowned; but when the truth came out, and I appeared and was once more known to be living in common flesh, I became commonplace, and the beautiful things that only survive in the memory for those who are dead, faded and my sins once more awoke and peeped through my good reputation like the slit-mouths of those frogs that protrude among the pure white lilies of a crystal lake. But I must return to that tramp across those drought-stricken plains.

I think it was three weeks before we reached civilisation again, though we were not more than two hundred miles from Warrego. I sprained my ankle while crossing a gully, and found it a terrible job to get along, but Ned Shipley, my comrade, made me lean on his shoulder as he staggered along with the swag, which was nearly empty. We had thrown all the blankets away and kept just one small rug to wrap our little remaining food in. Several times I gave in and told him to go on and take care of himself, but he was not made that way and simply lifted me up and dragged me along. Just when we were both nearly roasted up to dried skin and bone and despairing, we came across a deep cleft in a gully, and in its shaded glooms we found dozens of juicy prickly pears growing on the huge boughs. I lay at full length on my back utterly exhausted as Ned knocked the prickles off the rind with his boots and placed the crimson fruit in my parched mouth. That night was the first night that we really slept soundly, and when we awoke the sun had already fired the eastern sky with blood-red streaks. As we lay on our backs under the tall dried-up blood-wood trees, we saw the flocks of cockatoos and migrating spoonbills pass in hurrying fleets across the sky. All was hushed on the slopes around us, excepting for the chanting noise of the locusts and the surviving tree-frogs. I remember well that particular morning; the long sleep had considerably refreshed us both, and my comrade even started to sing and I to dream of home and England. I lay by his side and I seemed to realise with a deeper intensity all that had happened. And as the scent of the parched sea-scrub blew in whiffs around my nostrils, and my chum stood up and gazed dreamily across the plains with his hand arched over his sky-blue eyes, I felt the atmosphere of wild romance come over me. Notwithstanding all the misery of that tramp and my helplessness, the spirit of adventure seemed to thrill me with a strange happiness. Even now after all the years I can still see the rolling plains around us, our homeless camp under the blood-wood trees, and the big bird that fluttered just overhead, with crimson underwings and one of its legs hanging down as though it was broken, as it gave a lonely wail and passed away. On we tramped that day and towards nightfall, by the side of a dried-up creek, we both stood and gazed on one of the saddest sights of loneliness and helplessness that I ever saw or may ever see again. There by a dead stunted palm on the desert lay the skeleton of a horse; the bones were bleached white and so was the relic of humanity beside it, and as we both gazed on that sad sight, we instinctively drew closer to each other.

The last lone ride I live it again,
Lost, alone on the drought-swept plain,
The grey-green gone from the scattered scrub;
The frogs stink, dead in the dry creek mud;
Away in the sky on southward flight,
Far specking the waste of blinding light,
The parrots are curling their glittering wings,
Soft-croaking their dismal mutterings;
By the small hot sun in fleets they pass
Where the wide sky flames like molten glass,
On crawls the horse o’er the trackless track,
The rider scorched on its blistered back!
A castaway on wide, waveless seas.
Miles, miles away rise gaunt gum-trees,
Like derelicts old, with sailless mast,
Cast on the rocks by the drought’s hot blast
The sun dies down—on the dim skyline
Faint-twinkles once like a goblet of wine
Held over that dead world’s hazy rim,
And the lost man’s eyes far gaze aswim
As the tide of dark rolls over him!
There’s hope! for a tiny cloud doth rise,
Toils slowly across the noiseless skies,
Creeps down to a speck on the other side,
To leave him alone on the desert wide;
’Tis night—overhead the bright stars creep.
He lies with his one friend down to sleep:—
And the months and the years have since rolled by,
And the horse and the master still there lie;
Where those sad eyes of hope peered thro’
The green shoot peeped—a bush flower blew,
For we found them there, yes, side by side—
Two skeletons white—just as they died.
Our hearts were heavy as on we went,
For his thin bone arm was softly bent—
Curled round the neck of his big comrade
There, telling us how two friends had laid
Their tired heads under the drought-swept sky.
And still out there the white bones lie.[9]

Footnote 9:

Reproduced from the author’s _Bush Songs and Oversea Voices_.

It was a long time before the first influence left on our minds by that sight passed away. As darkness crept over the cloudless skies and the bright Australian stars flashed out, we lay together behind some large boulders and dead scrubwood as nervous as two children, and often my heart leapt as the jewel-like eyes of the big lizards darted up the dead scrub and grass twigs by our heads, as they slipped and squeaked and scampered away. We were only about three or four hundred yards from that spot, and as night wore on and moonrise burst out over the trackless plains, the wind-blown shadows seemed to move to and fro by the steeps and gullies, as though the ghosts of dead men crept from their unknown graves and wailed while the hot night wind cried through the leafless gum clumps. I almost feared to see my tired-out chum’s face in repose, as he lay by me fast asleep, with his mouth open, breathing out God’s sad music of humanity as with each breath his chest heaved up and down, while the moonbeams on his unshaved thin face sea-sawed with his snores.

It was with intense relief that, when still staggering along three days after, we stumbled across a track and following it for some miles came to a homestead, and almost fell down by the verandah as we knocked at the door. The old Irishwoman almost wept over us and ran about with her pots muttering and saying, “Sure and begorra the poor bhoys have suffered.” The dear soul kept pushing broths from her stockpot down our throats with a long wooden spoon till at last I had to beg of her to desist, otherwise I am sure I should have brought the whole gift up again. Her husband was also very kind to us and they gave up their own bed for us to sleep in that night. In two days we were almost fit again. I had devoted all my spare time to bathing my ankle and the swelling soon went down, and when Riley rode off, bound in his shaky old bush cart for a place called Indrapilly, he took us with him, for though we were welcome to stay there at his homestead, we had had quite enough of the bush and both of us longed to get to the town again. Here I will end this short narrative of my experience with that true comrade of mine in the Australian bush and the lonely tramp across solitudes where many men in times gone by have gone and passed away for ever; for often the traveller comes across bleached bones in those wastes, and sometimes lonely graves, with the name cut in the bark of a tree just by or on some roughly extemporised cross.

In the never-never land they sleep,
Where the parrots o’er them fly,
Winged-flowers across some sombre steep
And monumental sky.
Fenced by stretched skylines far around
Where thro’ the bushman creeps,
Finds some lone long-forgotten mound
Upon the nameless steeps;
Ay, by its cross may dreaming stand
Then, swag upon his back,
Fade far across the scrub and sand
Out on the lonely track.

For two or three months my chum and I stuck together and secured employment on the farm stations near Toowoomba and then tramped on again. With several pounds saved up we eventually arrived at Port Bowen and from there went by boat to Brisbane, and then I bade him good-bye, for he secured a berth on a ship bound for New Zealand and the next I heard of him was from a newspaper report that he was drowned, as I have previously told you. I stayed for about two months in Brisbane and made an attempt to get into the theatre orchestra again, but could not manage it; I secured several concert engagements, however, as I was then an expert violinist and could play by heart several of Spohr’s concertos and the tricky variations of Paganini’s “Carnaval de Venice.”

About this time the rumours of great gold finds were being discussed, believed and doubted in all of the Australian cities, and I got hold of a newspaper article which had evidently been written by some imaginative journalist. Had the account of the discoveries and immense fortunes that were picked up day by day been believed by the author of that story he would have been a terrible ass to have sat there writing articles for a provincial paper, wasting valuable time when fortunes were awaiting men who cared to take the trouble to get them by strolling through the bush north of Perth. Anyway I believed a good deal that he wrote, and got the gold fever, which was raving pretty strongly all over, like an echo of “the roaring fifties,” when gold was first discovered by Hargraves. The exiled convicts of those days in Sydney threw their shovels and crowbars down on to the Government land allotted to them, went across country, made fortunes and returned to Sydney and Melbourne prosperous men, elevated from the convicts’ chains to the peaks of fame, their pedigrees forgotten, the past swallowed up for ever. Their late enemies became their firmest friends, as it was, is now and ever shall be, world without end, to those who have plenty of gold; and so by one stroke of fortune men from the condemned cell who had grinned through prison bars attained to velvet comfort and applause, became notable officials, ay, and rose to be judges on the Bench, and so by the irony of fate often got their own back! But I must not digress and go so far back, as that time is now history and all happened long before I emigrated from my sleep in eternity into the realms of time to creep across the “Never-never land” on my futile search for gold to help me to keep comfortable and warm.

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XXVIII

Off to the Gold Fields—The Great Rush—Digging for Gold—Various
Characters—I find an Old Pair of Boots and am thankful