FullReads

Christmas–no, that was New Year–on the Warrego River, out back (an alleged river with a sickly stream that looked like bad milk). We spent most of that night hunting round in the dark and feeling on the ground for camel and horse droppings with which to build fires and make smoke round our camp to keep off the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes started at sunset and left off at daybreak, when the flies got to work again.

Christmas dinner under a brush shearing-shed. Mutton and plum pudding–and fifty miles from beer!

An old bush friend of mine, one Jimmy Nowlett, who ranked as a bullock-driver, told me of a Christmas time he had. He was cut off by the floods with his team, and had nothing to eat for four days but potatoes and honey. He said potatoes dipped in honey weren’t so bad; but he had to sleep on bullock yokes laid on the ground to keep him out of the water, and he got a toothache that paralysed him all down one side.

And speaking of plum pudding, I consider it one of the most barbarous institutions of the British. It is a childish, silly, savage superstition; it must have been a savage inspiration, looking at it all round–but then it isn’t so long since the British were savages.

I got a letter last year from a mate of mine in Western Australia–prospecting the awful desert out beyond White Feather–telling me all about a “perish” he did on plum pudding. He and his mates were camped at the Boulder Soak with some three or four hundred miles–mostly sand and dust–between them and the nearest grocer’s shop. They ordered a case of mixed canned provisions from Perth to reach them about Christmas. They didn’t believe in plum pudding–there are a good many British institutions that bushmen don’t believe in but the cook was a new chum, and he said he’d go home to his mother if he didn’t have plum pudding for Christmas, so they ordered a can for him. Meanwhile, they hung out on kangaroo and damper and the knowledge that it couldn’t last for ever. It was in a terrible drought, and the kangaroos used to come into the “Soak” for water, and they were too weak to run. Later on, when wells were dug, the kangaroos used to commit suicide in them–there was generally a kangaroo in the well in the morning.

The storekeeper packed the case of tinned dog, etc., but by some blunder he or his man put the label on the wrong box, and it went per rail, per coach, per camel, and the last stage per boot, and reached my friends’ camp on Christmas Eve, to their great joy. My friend broke the case open by the light of the camp-fire.

“Here, Jack!” he said, tossing out a can, “here’s your plum pudding.”

He held the next can in his hand a moment longer and read the label twice.

“Why! he’s sent two,” he said, “and I’m sure I only ordered one. Never mind–Jack’ll have a tuck-out.”

He held the next can close to the fire and blinked at it hard. “I’m damned if he hasn’t sent three tins of plum pudding. Never mind, we’ll manage to scoff some of it between us. You’re in luck’s way this trip, Jack, and no mistake.”

He looked harder still at the fourth can; then he read the labels on the other tins again to see if he’d made a mistake.

He didn’t tell me what he said then, but a milder mate suggested that the storekeeper had sent half a dozen tins by mistake. But when they reached the seventh can the language was not even fit to be written down on a piece of paper and handed up to the magistrate. The storekeeper had sent them an unbroken case of canned plum pudding, and probably by this time he was wondering what had become of that blanky case of duff.