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

until he drops into the grave. The man who works "all for love and nothing for reward" is a being incomprehensible to us ordinary mortals; he is an angel, and if ever he was a candidate for a seat in Parliament he was not elected. Even love-"which rules the court, the camp, the grove"-is given only with the hope of a return of love; for hopeless love is nothing but hopeless misery.

I once hired an old convict as gardener at five shillings a day. He began to work in the morning with a great show of diligence while I was looking on. But on my return home in the evening it was wonderful to find how little work he had contrived to get through during the day; so I began to watch him. His systematic way of doing nothing would have been very amusing if it cost nothing. He pressed his spade into the ground with his boot as slowly as possible, lifted the sod very gently, and turned it over. Then he straightened his back, looked at the ground to the right, then to the left, then in front of him, and then cast his eyes along the garden fence. Having satisfied himself that nothing particular was happening anywhere within view, he gazed awhile at the sod he had turned over, and then shaved the top off with his spade. Having straightened his back once more, he began a survey of the superficial area of the next sod, and at length proceeded to cut it in the same deliberate manner, performing the same succeeding ceremonies. If he saw me, or heard me approaching, he became at once very alert and diligent until I spoke to him, then he stopped work at once. It was quite impossible for him both to labour and to listen; nobody can do two things well at the same time. But his greatest relief was in talking; he would talk with anybody all day long if possible, and do nothing else; his wages, of course, still running on. There is very little talk worth paying for. I would rather give some of my best friends a fee to be silent, than pay for anything they have to tell me. My gardener was a most unprofitable servant; the only good I got out of him was a clear knowledge of what the Government stroke meant, and the knowledge was not worth the expense. He was in other respects harmless and useless, and, although he had been transported for stealing, I could never find that he stole anything from me. The disease of larceny seemed somehow to have been worked out of his system; though he used to describe with great pleasure how his misfortunes began by stealing wall-fruit when he was a boy; and although it was to him like the fruit

"Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe."

it was so sweet that, while telling me about it sixty years afterwards, he smiled and smacked his lips, renewing as it were the delight of its delicious taste.

He always avoided, as much as possible, the danger of dying of hard work, so he is living yet, and is eighty-six years old. Whenever I see him he gives me his blessing, and says he never worked for any man he liked so well. A great philosopher says, in order to be happy it is necessary to be beloved, but in order to be beloved we must know how to please, and we can only please by ministering to the happiness of others. I ministered to the old convict's happiness by letting him work so lazily, and so I was beloved and happy.

He had formerly been an assigned servant to Mr. Gellibrand, Attorney-General of Tasmania, before that gentleman went with Mr. Hesse on that voyage to Australia Felix from which he never returned. Some portions of a skeleton were found on the banks of a river, which were supposed to belong to the lost explorer, and that river, and Mount Gellibrand, on which he and Hesse parted company, were named after him.

There was a blackfellow living for many years afterwards in the Colac district who was said to have killed and eaten the lost white man; the first settlers therefore call him Gellibrand, as they considered he had made out a good claim to the name by devouring the flesh. This blackfellow's face was made up of hollows and protuberances ugly beyond all aboriginal ugliness. I was present at an interview between him and senior-constable Hooley, who nearly rivalled the savage in lack of beauty. Hooley had been a soldier in the Fifth Fusiliers, and had been convicted of the crime of manslaughter, having killed a coloured man near Port Louis, in the Mauritius. He was sentenced to penal servitude for the offence, and had passed two years of his time in Tasmania. This incident had produced in his mind an interest in blackfellows generally, and on seeing Gellibrand outside the Colac courthouse, he walked up to him, and looked him steadily in the face, without saying a word or moving a muscle of his countenance. I never saw a more lovely pair. The black fellow returned the gaze unflinchingly, his deep-set eyes fixed fiercely on those of the Irishman, his nostrils dilated, and his frowning forehead wrinkled and hard, as if cast in iron. The two men looked like two wild beasts preparing for a deadly fight. At length, Hooley moved his face nearer to that of the savage, until their noses almost met, and between his teeth he slowly ejaculated: "You eat white man? You eat me? Eh?" Then the deep frown on Gellibrand's face began slowly to relax, his thick lips parted by degrees, and displayed, ready for business, his sharp and shining teeth, white as snow and hard as steel. A smile, which might be likened to that of a humorous tiger, spread over his spacious features, and so the interview ended without a fight. I was very much disappointed, as I hoped the two man-slayers were going to eat each other for the public good, and I was ready to back both of them without fear, favour, or affection.

There is no doubt that the blacks ate human flesh, not as an article of regular diet, but occasionally, when the fortune of war, or accident, favoured them with a supply. When Mr. Hugh Murray set out from Geelong to look for country to the westward, he took with him several natives belonging to the Barrabool tribe. When they arrived near Lake Colac they found the banks of the Barongarook Creek covered with scrub, and on approaching the spot where the bridge now spans the watercourse, they saw a blackfellow with his lubra and a little boy, running towards the scrub. The Barrabool blacks gave chase, and the little boy was caught by one of them before he could find shelter, and was instantly killed with a club. That night the picaninny was roasted at the camp fire, and eaten.

And yet these blacks had human feelings and affections. I once saw a tribe travelling from one part of the district to another in search of food, as was their custom. One of the men was dying of consumption, and was too weak to follow the rest. He looked like a living skeleton, but he was not left behind to die. He was sitting on the shoulders of his brother, his hands grasping for support the hair on the head, and his wasted legs dangling in front of the other's ribs. These people were sometimes hunted as if they were wolves, but two brother wolves would not have been so kind to each other.

Before the white men came the blacks never buried their dead; they had no spades and could not dig graves. Sometimes their dead were dropped into the hollow trunks of trees, and sometimes they were burned. There was once a knoll on the banks of the Barongarook Creek, below the court-house, the soil of which looked black and rich. When I was trenching the ground near my house for vines and fruit trees, making another garden of paradise in lieu of the one I had lost, I obtained cart loads of bones from the slaughter yards and other places, and placed them in trenches; and in order to fertilize one corner of the garden, I spread over it several loads of the rich-looking black loam taken from the knoll near the creek. After a few years the vines and trees yielded great quantities of grapes and fruit, and I made wine from my vineyard. But the land on which I had spread the black loam was almost barren, and yet I had seen fragments of bones mixed with it, and amongst them a lower jaw with perfect teeth, most likely the jaw of a young lubra. On mentioning the circumstance to one of the early settlers, he said my loam had been taken from the spot on which the blacks used to burn their dead. Soon after he arrived at Colac he saw there a solitary blackfellow crouching before a fire in which bones were visible. So, pointing to them, he asked what was in the fire, and the blackfellow replied with one word "lubra." He was consuming the remains of his dead wife, and large tears were coursing down his cheeks. Day and night he sat there until the bones had been nearly all burned and covered with ashes. This accounted for the fragments of bones in my black loam; why it was not fertile, I know, but I don't know how to express the reason well.

While the trenching of my vineyard was going on, Billy Nicholls looked over the fence, and gave his opinion about it. He held his pipe between his thumb and forefinger, and stopped smoking in stupid astonishment. He said-"That ground is ruined, never will grow nothing no more; all the good soil is buried; nothing but gravel and stuff on top; born fool."

Old Billy was a bullock driver, my neighbour and enemy, and lived, with his numerous progeny, in a hut in the paddock next to mine. In the rainy seasons the water flowed through my ground on to his, and he had dug a drain which led the water past his hut, instead of allowing it to go by the natural fall across his paddock. The floods washed his drain into a deep gully near his hut, which was sometimes nearly surrounded with the roaring waters. He then tried to dam the water back on to my ground, but I made a gap in his dam with a long-handled shovel, and let the flood go through. Nature and the shovel were too much for Billy. He came out of his hut, and stood watching the torrent, holding his dirty old pipe a few inches from his mouth, and uttered a loud soliloquy:-"Here I am-on a miserable island-fenced in with water-going to be washed away -by that Lord Donahoo, son of a barber's clerk-wants to drown me and my kids-don't he-I'll break his head wi' a paling-blowed if I don't." He then put his pipe in his mouth, and gazed in silence on the rushing waters.

I planted my ground with vines of fourteen different varieties, but, in a few years, finding that the climate was unsuitable for most of them, I reduced the number