The Book of the Bush - George Dunderdale (life books to read txt) 📗

our Sovereign Lady, the Queen, we do not, and will not, respect her men servants, her maid servants, her oxen, or her asses."

A Commission was coming to Ballarat to report on wrong doings there, and they were looking for witnesses. On Friday, December 8th, the camp surgeon and Dr. Carr had a narrow escape from being shot. While the former gentleman was entering the hospital he was fired at by one of the sentries. The ball passed close to the shoulder of Dr. Carr, who was reading inside, went through the lid of the open medicine chest, and some splinters struck him on the side. There were in the hospital at that time seven diggers seriously wounded and six soldiers, including the drummer boy. Troubles were coming in crowds, and the bullet, the splinters, and the Commission put the little doctor to flight. He left the seven diggers, the five soldiers, and the drummer boy in the hospital, and made straight for Colac. Fear dogged his footsteps wherever he went, and the mere sight of him had sent the impudent thief Lilias to hide behind the tussocks.

I always hate a man who won't talk to me and tell me things, and the doctor was so silent and unsociable, that, by way of revenge, I left him to the care and curses of old "Specs."

After four days he departed, and he appeared again at Ballarat on January 15th, giving evidence at an inquest on one Hardy, killed by a gunshot wound. In the meantime a total change had taken place among the occupants of the Government camp. Commissioner Rede had retired, Dr. Williams, the coroner, and the district surgeons had received notice to quit in twenty-four hours, and they left behind them twenty-four patients in and around the camp hospital.

Dr. Carr left the colony, and the next report about him was from Manchester, where he made a wild and incoherent speech to the crowd at the Exchange. His last public appearance was in a police-court on a charge of lunacy. He was taken away by his friends, and what became of him afterwards is not recorded.

Doctors, when there is a dearth of patients, sometimes take to war, and thus succeed in creating a "practice." Occasionally they meet with disaster, of which we can easily call to mind instances, both ancient and modern.


III.

Diggers do not often turn their eyes heavenwards; their treasure does not lie in that direction. But one night I saw Bez star-gazing.

"Do you know the names of any of the stars in this part of the roof?" I asked.

"I can't make out many of the Manchester stars," he replied. "I knew a few when I was a boy, but there was a good deal of fog and smoke, and latterly I have not looked up that way much; but I can spot a few of them yet, I think."

Bez was a rather prosy poet, and his eye was not in a fine frenzy rolling.

"Let me see," he said; "that's the north; Charles' Wain and the North Pole ought to be there, but they have gone down somewhere. There are the Seven Stars-I never could make 'em seven; if there ever were that number one of 'em has dropped out. And there's Orion; he has somehow slipped up to the north, and is standing on his head, heels uppermost. There are the two stars in his heels, two on his shoulders, three in his belt, and three in his sword. There is the Southern Cross; we could never see that in our part of England, nor those two silvery clouds, nor the two black holes. They look curious, don't they? I suppose the two clouds are the Gates of Heaven, and the two black spots the Gates of Hell, the doors of eternity. Which way shall we go? That's the question."

The old adage is still quite true-'coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt'. When a young gentleman in England takes to idleness and grog, and disgraces his family, he is provided with a passage to Australia, in order that he may become a reformed prodigal; but the change of climate does not effect a reform; it requires something else.

Dan in Glasgow and Bez in Manchester had both been given to drink too much. They came to Victoria to acquire the virtue of temperance, and they were sober enough when they had no money.

Dan told me that when he awoke after his first week at sea, he sat every day on the topgallant forecastle thinking over his past wickedness, watching the foam go by, and continually tempted to plunge into it.

After the rum, the dray, and the four horses were seized by the police. Dan and Bez grew sober, and went to Reid's Creek, passing me at work on Spring Creek. They came back as separate items. Dan called at my tent, and I gave him a meal of damper, tea, and jam. He ate the whole of the jam, which cost me 2s. 6d. per pound. He then humped his swag and started for Melbourne. On his way through the township, since named Beechworth, he took a drink of liquor which disabled him, and he lay down by the roadside using an ant-hill for a pillow. He awoke at daylight covered with ants, which were stinging and eating him alive.

Some days later Bez came along, passed my tent for a mile, and then came back. He said he was ashamed of himself. I gave him also a feed of damper, tea, and jam limited. Dan had made me cautious in the matter of lavish hospitality. The Earl of Lonsdale lately spent fifty thousand pounds in entertaining the Emperor of Germany, but it was money thrown away. The next time the Kaiser comes to Westmoreland he will have to pay for his board and buy his preserves. Bez made a start for Melbourne, met an old convict, and with him took a job at foot-rotting sheep on a station owned by a widow lady. Here he passed as an engraver in reduced circumstances. He told lies so well, that the convict was filled with admiration, and said, "I'm sure, mate, you're a flash covey wot's done his time in the island."

The two chums foot-rotted until they had earned thirty shillings each, then they went away and got drunk at a roadside shanty; at least, Bez did, and when the convict picked his pockets, he kindly put back three shillings and sixpence, saying, "That will give him another start on the wallaby track."

Bez at last arrived at Flagstaff Hill, which was then bare, with a sand-hole on one side of it. He had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and had only one shilling and sixpence in his pocket, which he was loath to spend for fear of arriving in Melbourne a complete beggar. He lay down famishing and weary on the top of the hill near Flagstaff, and surveyed the city, the bay, and the shipping. He had hoped by this time to have been ready to take a passage in one of those ships to Liverpool, and to return home a lucky digger. But he had only eighteen pence, so he said, "I am afraid, Bez, you will never see Manchester again."

There was at that time a small frame building at the west end of Flinders Street, with a hill behind it, on which goats were browsing; the railway viaduct runs now over the exact spot. Many parties of hopeful diggers from England and California had slept there on the floor the night before they started for Ballarat, Mount Alexander, or Bendigo. We called it a house of refuge, and Bez now looked for refuge in it. There he met Dan and Moran, who had both found employment in the city, and they fed the hungry Bez. Dan was labouring at his trade in the building business, and he set Bez to work roofing houses with corrugated iron. They soon earned more money than they had ever earned by digging for gold, but on Saturday nights and Sundays they took their pleasure in the old style, and so they went to the dogs. I don't know how Dan's life ended (his real name was Donald Fraser), but Bez died suddenly in the bar of a public-house, and he was honoured with an inquest and a short paragraph in the papers.

Moran had saved a hundred pounds by digging in Picaninny Gully, and he was soon afterwards admitted to serve Her Majesty again in the police department. On the Sunday after Price was murdered by the convicts at Williamstown I met Moran after Mass in the middle of Lonsdale Street. I reproached him for his baseness in deserting to the enemy-Her Majesty, no less-and in self-defence he nearly argued my head off. At last I threatened to denounce him as a "Joey" -he was in plain clothes-and have him killed by the crowd in the street. Nothing but death could silence Moran. The rest of his history is engraved on a monument in the Melbourne Cemetery; he, his wife, and all his children died many years ago.-R.I.P. He was really a good man, with only one defect-most of us have many-he was always trying to divide a hair 'twixt West and South-West side.

I met Santley after thirty years, sitting on a bench in front of the "Travellers' Rest" at Alberton, in Gippsland. He had a wrinkled old face, and did not recognise my beautiful countenance until he heard my name. He had half-a-dozen little boys and girls around him-his grandchildren, I believe-and was as happy as a king teaching them to sing hymns. I don't think Santley had grown rich, but he always carried a fortune about with him wherever he went, viz., a kind heart and a cheerful disposition. Nobody could ever think of quarrelling with Santlay any more than with George Coppin, or with that benevolent bandmaster, Herr Plock. He told me that he was now related to the highest family in the world, his daughter having married the Chinese giant, whose brothers and sisters were all of the race of Anak.

My mate, Philip, was so successful with his little school in the tent that he was promoted to another at the Rocky Waterholes, and then he went to the township at Lake Nyalong. Philip had never travelled as far as Lake Nyalong, but Picaninny Jack told him that he had once been there, and that it was a beautiful country. He tried to find it at another time, but got bushed on the wrong side of the lake; now he believed there was a regular track that way if Philip could only find it. The settlers and other inhabitants ought to be well off; if not, it was their own fault, for they had the best land in the whole of Australia.

Philip felt sure that he would find at least one friend at Nyalong- viz., Mr. Barton, whom he had harboured in his tent at Bendigo, and had sheltered from the pursuit of the three bloodthirsty convicts. Some people might be too proud to look forward to the friendship of a flagellator, but in those days we could not pick and choose our chums; Barton might not be clubable, but he might be useful, and the