Confessions of a Beachcomber - Edmund James Banfield (suggested reading txt) 📗

or the yacht. And for nearly a fortnight the disconsolate wife and her little ones were alone on the island.

Ten years later, on one of the two bare patches of sand, another BECHE-DE-MER smoke-house was built. While the owner a swarthy Arabian, was out on the reef miles away, a phenomenally high tide occurred. His wife--a comely girl of British descent--was alone on the shoal. She watched the rising water apprehensively, until all the sand was covered save the few feet on which the frail shelter stood. One more ripple and the floor was swamped. Then, wading and swimming, she managed to reach a punt, and so saved her life. Since then these patches of sand have not been regarded as a safe outpost even by those most venturesome of people--BECHE-DE-MER fishers.

This is not an apology, but a confession; not a plea of defence, but a justification--a fair and free chronicle, a frank acknowledgment of the tributes of impartial Neptune--Neptune who gives and who takes away--who stealthily filches with tireless fingers, and who, when in the mood, robs so remorselessly, and with such awful, such majestic violence, that it were impious to whimper. Who beachcombed my three rudders, the one toilfully adzed out in one piece from the beautiful heart of a bean-tree log, another cunningly fitted with a sliding fin, and that of red cedar with famous brass mountings? Who owns the pair of ballast tanks once mine? Who the buoy deemed securely moored? Who the paddles and the rowlocks and the signal halyards, lost because of Neptune's whims and violence? Beachcombing is a nicely adjusted, if not quite an exact art. Not once but several times has the libertine Neptune scandalously seduced punts and dinghies from the respectable precincts of Brammo Bay, and having philandered with them for a while, cynically abandoned them with a bump on the mainland beach, and only once has he sent a punt in return--a poor, soiled, tar-besmirched, disorderly waif that was reported to the police and reluctantly claimed.

A mind inclined to casuistry, could it not defend Beachcombing? Does not the law recognise it under the definition of trover? Why bother about the law and the moralities when it is all so pleasing, so engrossing, and so fair?

The Beachcomber wants no extensive establishment. His possessions need never be mortgaged. The cost of living is measurable by a standard adjustable to individual taste, wants and perceptions. The expenditure of a little manual labour supplies the omissions of and compensates for the undirected impulses which prevail, and the pursuit--not the profession--leads one to ever-varying scenes, to the contemplation of many of the moods of unaffected, unadvertised Nature. Ashore, one dallies luxuriously with time, free from all the restrictions of streets, every precious moment his very own; afloat in these calm and shallow waters there is a never-ending panorama of entertainment. Coral gardens--gardens of the sea nymphs, wherein fancy feigns cool, shy, chaste faces and pliant forms half-revealed among gently swaying robes; a company of porpoise, a herd of dugong; turtle, queer and familiar fish, occasionally the spouting of a great whale, and always the company of swift and graceful birds. Sometimes the whole expansive ocean is as calm as it can only be in the tropics and bordered by the Barrier Reef--a shield of shimmering silver from which the islands stand out as turquoise bosses. Again, it is of cobalt blue, with changing bands of purple and gleaming pink, or of grey blue--the reflection of a sky pallid and tremulous with excess of light. Or myriad hosts of microscopic creatures--the Red Sea owes to the tribe its name--the multitudinous sea dully incarnadine; or the boat rides buoyantly on the shoulders of Neptune's white horses, while funnel-shaped water spouts sway this way and that. Land is always near, and the flotsam and jetsam, do they not supply that smack of excitement--if not the boisterous hope--bereft of which life might seem "always afternoon?"

These chronicles are toned from first to last by perceptions which came to the Beachcomber--perceptions which lead, mayhap, to a subdued and sober estimate of the purpose and bearing of the pilgrimage of life. Doubts become exalted and glorified, hopes all rapture, when long serene days are spent alone in the contemplation of the splendours of sky and sea, and the enchantment of tropic shores.



TROPICAL INDUSTRIES

Was there not an explicit contract that some of the experiences and events of a settler's life should be duly described and recorded? How to fulfil that obligation and at the same time avoid what is ordinarily regarded as the dull and prosaic, the stale, the flat, the unprofitable, is the trouble. I would gladly shirk even this small responsibility, even as greater ones have been outmanoeuvred, but a written promise unfulfilled may be troublesome to a conscience, which, when reminiscent of ante-beachcombing days, is not altogether unimpressionable.

Well, the life of a settler--the man who drags his sustenance, all and every part of it, from the soil in tropical Queensland, as a mere settler very closely resembles that of others who cultivate. If an abstract of the universal experience were obtainable, it would very likely be found to go towards the establishment of a standard from which many would cheerfully desire many cheerful changes. After all, that represents a condition not altogether monopolised by settlers.

Yet, when once the life is begun, how few there are who attempt to withdraw from it? It grows on the senses and faculties. It appeals to the emotional as well as to the stolid humours. The cares of this world as expounded in town life, and the sinfulness of never-to-be-acquired riches are foreign to the free, bland air which has filtered through the myriad leaves of the mountain, and which smacks so strongly of freedom. Sometimes the settler takes up studies and relieves the sameness of his duties by pastimes. One never went to his maize field, along narrow gloomy aisles through the jungle, without a net for the capture of butterflies. His humble home was as resplendent as the show-cases of a natural history museum. But he was singularly favoured. A lovely waterfall was the jewel on his estate. That was the shape of beauty that moved away the pall from his dark spirit and gave colour to his life and actions. Another took to collecting birds' eggs; another to the study of botany; another to photography. Each wreathed, according to his predilections, a flowery band to bind him to the earth, finding that even the life of a settler may be filled with "sweet dreams, and health and quiet." But the great majority seem to have taken to the scrap heap of Federal politics with such ardour that they clutch but the fag ends of the poetry of life.

Many become great readers and are knowing and knowledgeable. Those who drift away from country life are for the most part men who hustle after the coy damsel fortune by searching for minerals, and just as many who have succeeded in that arduous passion settle quietly on the land. Each may and does desire amendments to and amelioration in his lot. There is still left to all the healthy impulse of achievement, the desire for something better, the noble and inspiriting virtue of discontent.

Rare is a deserted home. Even the first rough dwelling of a settler possessing the slenderest resources is invested with tender sentiments. There is his home--a poor one, perhaps, but his own, and to it he clings with desperation, sees in and about it attractions and beauty where others perceive nothing but untoned dreariness, unrelieved hopelessness. His little bit of country may be remote and isolated, but Nature is warm and encouraging, and profuse of her stimulants here. She responds off-hand without pausing to reflect, but with an outburst of goodwill and purpose to appeals for sustenance. She has no despondent moods. She never lapses in prolific purposes. She may be wayward in accepting the interferences of man, but all her vigorous impulses are expended in productiveness. She cannot sulk or idle. Kill, burn and destroy her primeval jungle, and she does not give way to sadness and despair, nor are any of her infinite forces abated. Spontaneously she begins the work of restoration, and as if by magic the scar is covered with as rich and riotous a profusion of vegetation as ever. Nature needs only to be restrained and schooled and her response is an abundance of various sorts of food for man.

The routine that cultivators of the soil have to obey is diverse, but the life of the dweller in the country in tropical Queensland can be asserted with perfect safety to be more comfortable than that of the average settler in any other part of Australia. There are no phases of agricultural enterprise devoid of toil, save perhaps the growing of vanilla, the very poetry of the oldest of pursuits, in which one has to aid and abet in the loves and in the marriage of flowers. But vanilla production is not one of the profitable branches of agriculture here yet. We have to deal only with things that are at present practicable.

Whether the settler grows maize, or fruit or coffee, or as a collateral exercise of industry gets log timber, or raises pigs or poultry, the life has no great variations. If he farms sugar-cane, being resident within the zone of influence of a mill, he belongs to a different order--an order with which it is not intended to deal. My purpose refers only to men who do not employ labour, who have to depend almost solely upon their own hard hands. The conditions upon which the land is acquired demand personal residence during a period of five years and the erection of permanent improvements, such as fencing, thereon, and there are not many who take up a selection who are in the position to pay wages. The selector must do the clearing, and the preparation of the soil for whatever crop in his experience or the experience of others is considered the most remunerative. During this period his love for the particular piece of land by-and-by to become his own begins. More realistically than anyone else he knows the quantity of his energy and enthusiasm, his very life, the land has absorbed. It becomes part of himself even in the early days of toil, and though when in the fulness of time and the completion of conditions he may lease the land to Chinese cultivators, and become a resident landlord, he cannot leave the place even for the attraction of town life, for possibly the rent he receives does not make him independent quite. At any rate he lives on the land. The alien race does the hard work, and takes the greater portion of profit; but he enjoys the luxury of possession, and must make sacrifices accordingly.

I am fearful of entering upon a description of the cultivation of maize, or bananas, or citrus fruits, or pineapples, or mangoes, or coffee, or even sweet potatoes, because experience teaches me that others know of all the details in a far more practical sense.

Would it not be presumptuous for a mere idler, an individual whose enterprise and industry have been sapped by the insidious nonchalance of the Beachcomber, to tell of practical details of cultural pursuits--the enthusiasm, the disappointments, the glowing anticipations, the realisation of inflexible facts, the plain emphatic truths which others have reason to know ever so much more keenly?

But it may be forgiven if I generalise and say that the minor departments of rural enterprise in North Queensland are in a peculiar stage--a stage of transition and uncertainty. Coloured labour has been depended upon to a large extent. Even the poorest settler has had the aid of aboriginals. But