My Brilliant Career

Mr M’Swat very kindly told me I need not begin my duties until Monday morning, and could rest during Saturday and Sunday. Saturday, which was sickeningly hot and sultry, and whi...

Next day was Sunday—a blazing one it was too. I proposed that in the afternoon some of us should go to church. Father sat upon the idea as a mad one. Walk two miles in such heat...

In pursuance of his duty a government mail-contractor passed Caddagat every Monday, dropping the Bossier mail as he went. On Thursday we also got the post, but had to depend par...

If a Sydney man has friends residing at Goulburn, he says they are up the country. If a Goulburn man has friends at Yass, he says they are up the country. If a Yass man has frie...

I arose from bed next morning with three things in my head—a pair of swollen eyes, a heavy pain, and a fixed determination to write a book. Nothing less than a book. A few hours...

Uncle Julius had taken a run down to Sydney before returning to Caddagat, and was to be home during the first week in September, bringing with him Everard Grey. This young gentl...

It was the time of the annual muster at Cummabella—a cattle-station seventeen miles eastward from Caddagat—and all our men were there assisting. Word had been sent that a consid...

We felt the loss of the Beechams very, very much. It was sad to think of Five-Bob—pleasant, hospitable Five-Bob—as shut up, with no one but a solitary caretaker there pending th...

Every station hand from Five-Bob, male and female, had gone to the ball at Yabtree. Harold and his overseer had to attend to the horses, while the jackeroos started a fire in th...

Here goes for a full account of my first, my last, my only _real_ sweetheart, for I considered the professions of that pestiferous jackeroo as merely a grotesque caricature on t...

It was my duty to “rare the poddies”. This is the most godless occupation in which it has been my lot to engage. I did a great amount of thinking while feeding them—for, by the...

The holding of these races was an elderly institution, and was followed at night by a servants’ ball given by one of the squatters. Last year it had been Beecham’s ball, the yea...

We walked in perfect silence, Harold not offering to carry my little basket. I did not dare lift my eyes, as something told me the face of the big man would not be pleasant to l...

“Bah, you hideous animal! Ha ha! Your peerless conceit does you credit. So you actually imagined that by one or two out of every hundred you might be considered passable. You ar...

Men only, and they merely on business, came to Barney’s Gap—women tabooed the place. Some of them told me they would come to see me, but not Mrs M’Swat, as she always allowed th...

It was the second day after my arrival at Five-Bob. Lunch was over, and we had adjourned to the veranda. Miss Beecham was busy at her work-table; I was ensconced on a mat on the...

It is indelibly imprinted on my memory in a manner which royal joy, fame, pleasure, and excitement beyond the dream of poets could never efface, not though I should be cursed wi...

There was something beautifully sincere and real about aunt Helen. She never fussed over any one or pretended to sympathize just to make out how nice she was. She was real, and...

In spite of our pottering and lifting, with the exception of five, all our cows eventually died; and even these and a couple of horses had as much as they could do to live on th...

In one of grannie’s letters there was concerning my sister: “I find Gertie is a much younger girl for her age than Sybylla was, and not nearly so wild and hard to manage. She is...

I have started to write no less than seven letters to you, but something always interrupted me and I did not finish them. However, I’ll finish this one in the teeth of Father Pe...

“Well, Miss Sybylla,” he began, “when I arrived I thought you and I would have been great friends; but we have not progressed at all. How do you account for that?”

“I don’t hold with too much pleasure and disherpation, but you ain’t had overmuch of it lately. You’ve stuck at home pretty constant, and ye and Lizer can have a little fly roun...

It was a very hot day. So extreme was the heat that to save the lives of some young swallows my father had to put wet bags over the iron roof above their nest. A galvanized-iron...

The Beechams were vacating Five-Bob almost immediately—before Christmas. Grannie, aunt Helen, and uncle Jay-Jay went down to say good-bye to the ladies, who were very heartbroke...

Joe Archer was appointed to take us home on the morrow. When our host was seeing us off—still with his eye covered—he took opportunity of whispering to me his intention of comin...

About a week or so after I first met Harold Beecham, aunt Helen allowed me to read a letter she had received from the elder of the two Misses Beecham. It ran as follows:

They were expecting me on the frosty evening in September, and the children came bounding and shouting to meet me, when myself and luggage were deposited at Possum Gully by a ne...

Its residents were principally married folk and children under sixteen. The boys, as they attained manhood, drifted outback to shear, drove, or to take up land. They found it to...

When he was not away in Riverina inspecting a flock of sheep, he was attending the Homebush Fat Stock Sales, rushing away out to Bourke, or tearing off down the Shoalhaven to bu...

The next time I saw Harold Beecham was on Sunday the 13th of December. There was a hammock swinging under a couple of trees in an enclosure, half shrubbery, partly orchard and v...

The morning came, breakfast, next Harold’s departure. I shook my head and slipped the note into his hand as we parted. He rode slowly down the road. I sat on the step of the gar...

“Come, come, now. Daddy’s little mate isn’t going to turn Turk like that, is she? I’ll put some fat out of the dinner-bag on it, and tie it up in my hanky. Don’t cry any more no...

It chanced at last, as June gave place to July and July to August, that I could bear it no longer. I would go away even if I had to walk, and what I would do I did not know or c...

The coach was a big vehicle, something after the style of a bus, the tilt and seats running parallel with the wheels. At the rear end, instead of a door, was a great tail-board,...

I was nearly nine summers old when my father conceived the idea that he was wasting his talents by keeping them rolled up in the small napkin of an out-of-the-way place like Bru...

When alone I confessed to aunt Helen that Harold had accompanied me to within a short distance of home. She did not smile as usual, but looked very grave, and, drawing me in fro...

“There are others toiling and straining ’Neath burdens graver than mine; They are weary, yet uncomplaining,— I know it, yet I repine: I know it, how time will ravage, How time w...

A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush signed “Miles Franklin”, saying that the writer had written a novel, but knew nothing of editors and publishers...