“Call _your_self a bullock-driver?” Bob was saying, when an old shoe that Mrs. Jones had thrown after Harry hit Bob in the face.
He was going to abuse Mrs. Jones then, but Jim growled out,
“Doan’t get inta a scoat, lahd! It hit thee wheer tha ken’t be hoort,” and Handsome Bob had to subside into his flour-sack couch again, silenced for once.
With much cracking of whips, trampling of hoofs, clanking of chains, jingling of tin pots, grinding of wheels, and creaking of pole and yokes, the expedition at last fairly got under way. We watched it go down the rise, across the flat, and through the slip-panels that led into the bush beyond; and then, when we could see nothing but the dust above the tree-tops, Mrs. Lawson and Mrs. M‘Intyre, who was visiting at Wonga-Wonga, went into their bed-rooms—perhaps to pray for their boys’ safety.
I saw them start, but can only relate their adventures from what I heard of them when the boys came back.
The settled country through which they passed would have seemed wild enough to most English people, accustomed to hedged-in little fields, fitting like patches in a patchwork quilt, with roads and lanes curving between them, and railways running over them in the most rural places. In this “settled country” there were miles without a fence, and our pioneers generally camped out at night; although, when they came to a public, or an “accommodation-house,” with a paddock, about sundown, they would have a night between sheets for a change, and when they chanced to halt near a head-station at nightfall, they could make sure of hearty hospitality, although not always of a bed. As they went on, the country seemed wilder and wilder to their eyes, although perhaps we should not have seen much difference.
When I went out to New South Wales, I expected, from what I had read in guide-books, to see capital convict-made roads running through the colony everywhere. What I found was a tolerable bit of road reaching as far as Parramatta (not twenty miles from Sydney), but beyond that there was nothing that we should call a road in England. Deep ruts running right across the road; grey logs that the mail-cart used to bump over, and black jagged tree-stumps that it used to graze against; the smoothest bits of road like a ploughed field; unbridged creeks; “corduroy” causeways of tree-trunks across swampy places;—that is what I remember of Australian up-country roads in dry weather; and in wet weather they were chains of ponds, with marsh that swallowed you to the ankle, and bog that gobbled you above the knee, intervening; and bogged blue-bloused dray-drivers sitting here and there on the tops of their loads of wool-bales, smoking in sullen resignation, like mariners in the tops of gradually-sinking wrecks.
