CHAPTER XIV.

EFFECTING IMPROVEMENTS.

After the satisfactory interview with the storekeeper I tramped out home with a light heart. I wouldn't starve for a month or two, anyhow, and now the first thing to be done was to erect a house. I had fourteen ten-foot sheets of iron, and though some of them were a bit battered owing to an irresponsible bloke thrashing out seed on them while I was away, still they were good enough for an eighteen-by-twelve humpy. The building was to be of rough-split bush timber. I chose red oak for the purpose, mainly because I didn't know of any of the other good splitters, like silky oak, young maple, or ash. With a crosscut I cut the tree up into three-foot lengths; then, with a maul, wedges and axe, split these up into a species of short weatherboards.

My two mates being now away on holiday, there was nobody to show me how to start right, so of course I met endless difficulties, which made the work back-breaking. An experienced "bushey" would have had all the required timber split in about four days. It took me exactly three weeks.

Then came the erection. Four corner posts, which I would have three feet in the ground, and going right up to the roof, for stability in case of cyclones, of the hardest timber I could find, which was also the heaviest, as I thought it would be the most likely to last in the ground. As a matter of fact, these rot quickest. The four posts weighed about five hundredweight each, and I had to "fleet jig" them with block and tackle over the log-strewn paddock up to the site, and then erect a derrick to get them into their places. It was interesting enough, but Lord! how slow.

Then wall plates and ground plates--the former one end at a time with the tackle; then lash that end while I tackled the other end up and nailed it. "Dinkum yakker" all right, and about three-parts of it not necessary, if I'd only known. I think "Senex's house" was the topic of amused conversation all over the district for months after.

The studs were saplings on which I left the bark, thus making a fine harbourage for all sorts of biting, stinging and stinking vermin. On to these went the slabs, weatherboard fashion. Then the roof, with a nail in every corrugation, in the concaves instead of the convexes, and the mansion wanted but a floor. I got a bloke to buy me some second-class boards from a mill on the line, and bring them out to me. The cartage came to ten shillings more than the price of the timber, but, as he had to wait nine months for me to pay him, he deserved it.

Next, I put in a fireplace with the roof of it at the wrong angle, so that the smoke came pouring into the main room all the time the fire was going. Finally, I set the guinea stamp of aristocracy on the mansion by inserting a cracked glass window. It was raining nearly all the time I was building. I had spilt a gallon billy of boiling water over my feet through the handle coming adrift, and, to add to the difficulties, I had to hump the floor boards about a mile through the mud, fallen timber preventing the cart getting right out. Anyhow, it was finished at last.

I felt so proud the first night I camped in it that I couldn't sleep, and got up several times to walk round and admire the shanty in the moonlight. On one of these peregrinations (I clad in an airy costume of a single shirt), I suddenly felt something cold and wriggley under my foot. I must have jumped about fifteen feet. Turning round, I saw a black snake squirming about. I must have stepped on his neck. Otherwise, I don't know how I escaped a bite. I got a stick and finished the little devil. Nobody seems to pay much attention to black snakes up here. They always whip out of the way, and don't attack unless actually interfered with, and they're easily killed with a light stick.

About this time I got a small brushing job from a mean person who gave me ten shillings an acre to cut four acres thickly grown with the accursed stinging tree. I found afterwards that thirty shillings an acre is little enough for tackling this dreadful stuff. However, I got it done, and was laid up for a week in consequence. No sleep through the pain, and blood coming from nose and ears while working in it. There must be a frightfully deadly poison in the plant. The bare inhalation of the smell of the fresh-cut stalks makes you vomit, and brings blood from the nose in a few minutes, while the least touch on any part by the bush causes agonising pain, which lasts for weeks sometimes. There is no palliative.

I then got a job from a neighbouring selector to brush twenty acres, so I shouldered "Matilda" and went to camp with him. It's the devil's own job "Matilda-ing" in the Rainy Season. The tracks are knee deep in mud, and the paddocks, what with logs and interlaced seed stems on the grass, are nearly impassable. I don't know of anything so tiring as trying to wade through a paspalum paddock in seed. I anticipated being a month or so with this chap, Barker. He was a bachelor, young, fair-haired, rather shifty blue-grey eyes, a quick and uncertain temper, and as sarcastic as the devil. Although twenty-four, he was practically illiterate, owing to having had to milk cows from about six years of age, there being therefore no time for schooling. As is always the case, this misfortune had bred in him a suspicion of anyone educated, and a disposition to try and take him down a peg, to show that he was as smart as the other, in spite of lack of education. This sort of thing is inevitable.

I must give him his due though--he had "made good." He cleared out from the cow-slavery when he was fifteen years old and started for himself; told a fib about his age, got a selection, and felled most of the scrub himself. When twenty-one he sold out for L800, and took a partly improved place further out, going in for fattening "beefers." A dry spell nearly ruined the game youngster, so, sickening of the South, he sold out, came up with a wad, got a block here, and started in to fall all the scrub as before. He had about a fifteen-acre paddock with a house on it when I made his acquaintance. His place is worth L1000 easily now.

His mate was an Irish-Tasmanian named Paddy (of course); middle-aged, tall, lank and dark, with a long melancholy face like a cow, and very weather-beaten. Quite uneducated, but an absolute glutton for work, and with a very decided weakness for beer--lots of it for choice. He was an artist with the axe, putting a scarf in a tree as neat as a saw cut. Good-tempered, he had a quiet humour that floored Snappy Barker every time, as thus:--

Barker: "Hey, Paddy! I was down at Blogg's yes'day, and they was runnin' yer down summat crool."

Paddy: "Was they? Well, why dinyer stop 'em? Yer could, easy."

Barker: "'Ow could I?"

Paddy: "Oh! Don't you start runnin' me down to 'em. Then they won't git startit."

The three of us were to tucker together, and as they had ordered a big stock, which had been left at a house three miles off, the first job we did was to hump the stuff out. It was raining hard--as it did almost every day of the six weeks I was with them. We had an old pack-horse. My road was bad enough, Lord knows; but Barker's was literally waist deep in mud in places, covered with a repulsive green slime and bubbling with foul-smelling gas when disturbed. There was a whole cask of salt beef among other things, and this was the first thing we tackled. We emptied the meat into corn sacks, and loaded the old horse and Paddy with that, while Barker and I slung the cask, with about five gallons of salt pickle in it, on a pole between us, and started out home. We struggled up the first slippery hill.

"Blow this," said Barker. "We'll lighten up."

We emptied out part of the pickle, and proceeded. After we had ploughed along a mile or so, I said "Blast the stuff!" so we emptied out some more. A little further, and we mutually damned it, and jettisoned the whole cargo, finding even the empty cask all too heavy on that dreadful road. It took us the next two days to get the balance of the stuff out. We got sick of unloading the old nag, hauling him out of the bog, and loading him up again.

It would have been an enlightening sight for the city "go-on-the-land-young-man" person to have seen us slowly crawling along between the gloomy walls of scrub, squash! squelch! splash! covered with mud and sweating with the heat, Paddy ahead with two bags of tinned stuff, Barker next with two fifties of flour slung by straps over his shoulders, I last with two dozen of jam in my shirt, and a seventy of sugar across my neck, with sacking round it to keep it a bit dry. By cripes! It made us appreciate Barker's dry snug little crib, really beautifully built of split-out stuff, roof and all. It was quite waterproof.

I would have quite enjoyed living there, if only it hadn't been for Barker's infernal tongue. He soon found I didn't take very much rousing up, so of course it was a great joke to "gittim wild." With this end in view, he assumed a particularly galling habit of patronisingly referring to me as "Me good mahn," or more often "Me good little mahn." I think he must have spent his hours devising ridiculous names, and springing them on us at night. Paddy suffered in silence under "Me little gohanna;" his dog, with a sort of Zulu touch, was dubbed "Little-snake-with-the-teeth-so-sharp-and-big;" while I was driven to a state bordering on homicidal mania by a week of "Me little axe-handle breaker," because I fractured the handle of the doddery firewood axe--already badly sprung and wobbling--which he had sworn should last the year out.

The more we expostulated, the worse he got. He had a pair of cats ("Curse-guts" and "Stinker"), of whom he was so fond that he took them to bed with him at night, and then blamed me for bringing fleas to the camp, after a night spent in scratching himself. With as much sense of music as a cow, he used to drone out all day the one song he knew in a dismal monotone. It was a doleful ditty; something about "Why did they sell Killarney?"

He was very superstitious, and I'm ashamed to say that I once or twice got my own back on him through this weakness--but only when very wild.

I made him lose a night's sleep once through suddenly jumping out of bunk, opening the door, slamming it to again, and then turning wild-eyed to Barker, whispering: "It's there again, Jack!" He was keen on his garden, and he and Paddy had about a dozen different kinds of vegetables growing, with bananas and pineapples to beat the band. When the latter were ripening we had to light big fires to keep the flying foxes off, and it gave one a creepy feeling to lie round one of the fires before turning in, swapping yarns, and watching the countless myriads of bat things stream steadily across the sky in an unbroken cloud by the hour together. (Note for orchardists: These pests don't alight anywhere near a decent blaze.)

I finished my contract with Barker by the end of May, and got enough out of it to renew my credit with the storekeeper, and pay the L3 inspection fee for survey of improvements, prior to borrowing from the Agricultural Bank, so that I could go on falling on my own place. I applied for L120, to fall sixty acres; the loan was granted. Payment by instalments as work proceeded, and terms twenty-one years at five per cent. interest. Getting my old friend Len Vincent to help me, I re-started on my own place early in June.