There are many times in this world when a healthy boy is happy. When he is put into knickerbockers, for instance, and ‘comes a man to-day,’ as my little Jim used to say. When they’re cooking something at home that he likes. When the ‘sandy-blight’ or measles breaks out amongst the children, or the teacher […]

I. Spuds, and a Woman’s Obstinacy. Ever since we were married it had been Mary’s great ambition to have a buggy. The house or furniture didn’t matter so much–out there in the Bush where we were–but, where there were no railways or coaches, and the roads were long, and mostly hot and dusty, a buggy […]

Jim was born on Gulgong, New South Wales. We used to say ‘on’ Gulgong–and old diggers still talked of being ‘on th’ Gulgong’–though the goldfield there had been worked out for years, and the place was only a dusty little pastoral town in the scrubs. Gulgong was about the last of the great alluvial ‘rushes’ […]

I. A Lonely Track. The time Mary and I shifted out into the Bush from Gulgong to ‘settle on the land’ at Lahey’s Creek. I’d sold the two tip-drays that I used for tank-sinking and dam-making, and I took the traps out in the waggon on top of a small load of rations and horse-feed […]

Dave Regan, Jim Bently, and Andy Page were sinking a shaft at Stony Creek in search of a rich gold quartz reef which was supposed to exist in the vicinity. There is always a rich reef supposed to exist in the vicinity; the only questions are whether it is ten feet or hundreds beneath the […]

I. Dave Regan’s Yarn. ‘When we got tired of digging about Mudgee-Budgee, and getting no gold,’ said Dave Regan, Bushman, ‘me and my mate, Jim Bently, decided to take a turn at droving; so we went with Bob Baker, the drover, overland with a big mob of cattle, way up into Northern Queensland. ‘We couldn’t […]

‘Simple as striking matches,’ said Dave Regan, Bushman; ‘but it gave me the biggest scare I ever had–except, perhaps, the time I stumbled in the dark into a six-feet digger’s hole, which might have been eighty feet deep for all I knew when I was falling. (There was an eighty-feet shaft left open close by.) […]

Told by one of Dave’s mates. Dave and I were tramping on a lonely Bush track in New Zealand, making for a sawmill where we expected to get work, and we were caught in one of those three-days’ gales, with rain and hail in it and cold enough to cut off a man’s legs. Camping […]

‘Oh, tell her a tale of the fairies bright–That only the Bushmen know–Who guide the feet of the lost aright,Or carry them up through the starry night,Where the Bush-lost babies go.’ He was one of those men who seldom smile. There are many in the Australian Bush, where drift wrecks and failures of all stations […]

‘Tap, tap, tap, tap.’ The little schoolhouse and residence in the scrub was lighted brightly in the midst of the ‘close’, solid blackness of that moonless December night, when the sky and stars were smothered and suffocated by drought haze. It was the evening of the school children’s ‘Feast’. That is to say that the […]

It was blazing hot outside and smothering hot inside the weather-board and iron shanty at Dead Dingo, a place on the Cleared Road, where there was a pub. and a police-station, and which was sometimes called ‘Roasted’, and other times ‘Potted Dingo’–nicknames suggested by the everlasting drought and the vicinity of the one-pub. township of […]

Most Bushmen who hadn’t ‘known Bob Baker to speak to’, had ‘heard tell of him’. He’d been a squatter, not many years before, on the Macquarie river in New South Wales, and had made money in the good seasons, and had gone in for horse-racing and racehorse-breeding, and long trips to Sydney, where he put […]

About seven years ago I drifted from Out-Back in Australia to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and up country to a little town called Pahiatua, which meaneth the ‘home of the gods’, and is situated in the Wairarappa (rippling or sparkling water) district. They have a pretty little legend to the effect that the […]

Saturday afternoon. There were about a dozen Bush natives, from anywhere, most of them lanky and easy-going, hanging about the little slab-and-bark hotel on the edge of the scrub at Capertee Camp (a teamster’s camp) when Cob & Co.’s mail-coach and six came dashing down the siding from round Crown Ridge, in all its glory, […]

The Half-way House at Tinned Dog (Out-Back in Australia) kept Daniel Myers–licensed to retail spirituous and fermented liquors–in drink and the horrors for upward of five years, at the end of which time he lay hidden for weeks in a back skillion, an object which no decent man would care to see–or hear when it […]

I lately revisited a western agricultural district in Australia after many years. The railway had reached it, but otherwise things were drearily, hopelessly, depressingly unchanged. There was the same old grant, comprising several thousands of acres of the richest land in the district, lying idle still, except for a few horses allowed to run there […]

This is a story–about the only one–of Job Falconer, Boss of the Talbragar sheep-station up country in New South Wales in the early Eighties–when there were still runs in the Dingo-Scrubs out of the hands of the banks, and yet squatters who lived on their stations. Job would never tell the story himself, at least […]

You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as “An old mate of your father’s on the diggings, Johnny.” And he would pat our heads and […]

The Western train had just arrived at Redfern railway station with a lot of ordinary passengers and one swagman. He was short, and stout, and bow-legged, and freckled, and sandy. He had red hair and small, twinkling, grey eyes, and–what often goes with such things–the expression of a born comedian. He was dressed in a […]

The worst bore in Australia just now is the man who raves about getting the people on the land, and button-holes you in the street with a little scheme of his own. He generally does not know what he is talking about. There is in Sydney a man named Tom Hopkins who settled on the […]