Such Is Life - Joseph Furphy (philippa perry book txt) 📗

out for that dog of yours when you get in range of Dan’s place. He’s great on strychnine; and the station gets the benefit of it in two ways⁠—he keeps his paddock clear of dingoes, and he never has a scalp to sell.”

By this time, breakfast was concluded; and in two minutes the combined topographical knowledge of the young fellows had laid down the best route to Mulppa, via Dan’s hut.

Then a short official interview with Mr. Spanker, followed by a long, desultory gossip, brought me another couple of hours nearer the final reward of my orthodox upbringing. In another hour, my horses were saddled, and I was having a drink of tea and a bit of brownie in the men’s hut.

A few minutes afterward, Cleopatra was shaking this refreshment well down by means of the exercise with which he habitually opened the day’s work. But this was to be accepted in the same spirit as the abusive language of a faithful pastor. It was all in the contract. I had made a rule of backing him only on loose sand-hills, or in soft swamps, for the first fortnight. By that time, an amicable understanding had been established between us, at an expense of only three spills⁠—once through an unexpected change of tactics; once through my own negligence; and once in spite of my best endeavours, for the faithless swamp was dry. I dare say I might have gradually weaned him from his besetting sin, but I didn’t want to be pestered with people borrowing him.

However, before midday I was out on the ration-cart track, along which I had started with the wire, nearly three years before. Here and there the marks of the wagon were still identifiable, where the long team and heavy load had cut off corners of the winding track.

Presently the heavy wheel-marks diverged to the right, and disappeared in the all-pervading scrub. Then the faint track became suddenly fainter, where half the scanty traffic branched off to the left, in the direction of Lindsay’s paddock.

It is not in our cities or townships, it is not in our agricultural or mining areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the Aboriginal savage. Faithfully and lovingly interpreted, what is the latent meaning of it all?

Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day! Pause and think how she has waited in serene loneliness while the deltas of Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable⁠—waited while the primordial civilisations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan and Mongol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of tradition’s earliest fable⁠—waited still through the long eras of successive empires, while the hard-won light, broadening little by little, moved westward, westward, round the circumference of the planet, at last to overtake and dominate the fixed twilight of its primitive home⁠—waited, ageless, tireless, acquiescent, her history a blank, while the petulant moods of youth gave place to imperial purpose, stern yet beneficent⁠—waited whilst the interminable procession of annual, lunar and diurnal alternations lapsed unrecorded into a dead past, bequeathing no register of good or evil endeavour to the ever-living present. The mind retires from such speculation, unsatisfied but impressed.

Gravely impressed. For this recordless land⁠—this land of our lawful solicitude and imperative responsibility⁠—is exempt from many a bane of territorial rather than racial impress. She is committed to no usages of petrified injustice; she is clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols, enshrined by Ignorance, and upheld by misplaced homage alone; she is cursed by no memories of fanaticism and persecution; she is innocent of hereditary national jealousy, and free from the envy of sister states.

Then think how immeasurably higher are the possibilities of a future than the memories of any past since history began. By comparison, the past, though glozed beyond all semblance of truth, is a clinging heritage of canonised ignorance, brutality and baseness; a drag rather than a stimulus. And as day by day, year by year, our own fluid present congeals into a fixed past, we shall do well to take heed that, in time to come, our own memory may not be justly held accursed. For though history is a thing that never repeats itself⁠—since no two historical propositions are alike⁠—one perennial truth holds good, namely, that every social hardship or injustice may be traced back to the linked sins of aggression and submission, remote or proximate in point of time. And I, for one, will never believe the trail of the serpent to be so indelible that barefaced incongruity must dog the footsteps of civilisation.

Dan O’Connell’s ten-by-five paddock lay end-on to my route; his hut being about midway down the line of fence. On striking the corner of the paddock, I went through a gate, and was closing and securing it behind Bunyip and Pup, when I became aware of a stout-built, blackbearded man on a fat bay horse, approaching along the inside of the fence.

“Rory?” said I inquiringly.

“Well-to-be-shure! A ken har’ly crarit it, Tammas!” exclaimed the evergreen, grasping my proffered hand, while his face became transformed with delight.

“You’re so much changed,” said I⁠—“so manly and sunburnt, and bearded