Down the street as I was drifting with the city’s human tide, Came a ghost, and for a moment walked in silence by my side — Now my heart was hard and bitter, and a bitter spirit he, So I felt no great aversion to his ghostly company. Said the Shade: ‘At finer feelings let […]

THE two-roomed house is built of round timber, slabs, and stringy-bark, and floored with split slabs. A big bark kitchen standing at one end is larger than the house itself, veranda included. Bush all round—bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native […]

MOTHER MIDDLETON was an awful woman, an ‘old hand’ (transported convict) some said. The prefix ‘mother’ in Australia mostly means ‘old hag’, and is applied in that sense. In early boyhood we understood, from old diggers, that Mother Middleton—in common with most other ‘old hands’—had been sent out for ‘knocking a donkey off a hen-roost. […]

AS FAR back as I can remember, the yarn of the Hairy Man was told in the Blue Mountain district of New South Wales. It scared children coming home by bush tracks from school and boys out late after lost cows; and even grown bushmen, when going along a lonely track after sunset, would hold […]

THERE were about a dozen of us jammed into the coach, on the box seat and hanging on to the roof and tailboard as best we could. We were shearers, bagmen, agents, a squatter, a cockatoo, the usual joker— and one or two professional spielers, perhaps. We were tired and stiff and nearly frozen—too cold […]

IT was raining—“general rain. ” The train left Bourke, and then there began the long, long agony of scrub and wire fence, with here and there a natural clearing, which seemed even more dismal than the funereal “timber” itself. The only thing which might seem in keeping with one of these soddened flats would be […]