On the wool track

Front matter

o Ao^

[Frontispiece.

THE AVOOL PKESS.

Preface

THE RED COUNTRY

This day as I write, the Namoi River has come down from the hills in flood for the second time within six months. There are people at this moment crowded on to the house roofs watching sheep and haystacks and telegraph poles float past them. There are little lonely homesteads far down the river-flats where last night, in the dark, they could hear through the wooden walls the far-off roar of the water rising. The man, may be, went out into the black, and as he opened the door the roar of the river sounded savagely close. What chance have they of help if anything happens unless somebody goes out twenty miles to help them ? Somebody may go out ; or if he does not, there is a chance they will struggle out through the twenty miles somehow by themselves. That is what is making Australia.

Now those men, women, and children are not out there for sport. They are out there to grow wool,

and this is a part of the day's work in the wool

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industry. The writer of these chapters has tried to show what the life on the back stations really is for the men and the women who live and work there. He was instructed by the proprietors of the Sydney Morning Herald (by whose kindness he is allowed to republish them here) to describe the wool industry from any point of view which he chose. The wool industry turns out wool and meat and tallow and glue and cold cream, and many other things. But the most important things it turns out are men. And so the articles dealt with men. They followed down the long wool track from the paddock to the loom, the industry which is the chief training of Australians, mostly through the country where that life is most typical. That is the red country.

Floods come once in a way. They are hardly typical of the red country. But the drought is. When we Australians have sung our blue skies and soft airs, our sea beaches and gardens and fruits, our short toil and long pleasure, perhaps we shall some day sit down and praise our droughts. Australians owe more to the droughts.

It must not be taken that all Australia is like the red country. City-bred Australians go very little into the " outside '' country. Even the immigrants do not go there ; or if they do, they return to the " inside '' country where life is easier and

Preface ix

profits are as large. The "outside" country will always be pastoral. At present a living area there is about twenty thousand acres. When a big run is cut up for closer settlement, the settlers may be able to see each others' homesteads through the telescope. The immigrant and most Australians make for country which will some day be agricultural. And who will blame them ? It is the hard-bitten, frosted old customers, the hard cases, the failures, the men who are battered and scarred, who have, perhaps because of some weakness, fallen behind the running in the inner country, that find their way, almost for a refuge, out to the red country.

Perhaps that is why the red country, with the narrow black-soil river-flats which cross it, is the scene of most of these chapters. It is a country where bad men are very bad, and good men are magnificent; but where all men are interesting. And if, when the time comes to describe the red country, the writer lingers a little over things that may not be merely wool industry, perhaps it may be forgiven him. The red country does not contain half the wool-growing in Australia, or anything like it. It does not even deserve its place here as being typical of all pastoral Australia. But it is typical of the great tracts, in the Northern territory and elsewhere, to which the pastoral industry of Australia will in the end retreat.

X

Preface

If you draw a rough circle well inside the map of Australia about four hundred miles inland from the coast-line, the country inside that line is quite different from the country outside of it, in the Eastern half of Australia, at anyrate. The country outside that line has in parts a heavy tropical rainfall, and heavy tropical forest, and heavy tropical atmosphere. In other parts it is not so very different from Europe. But the country inside that line is the problem of Australia.

That country, though it makes up the inside of Australia, they call the " outside " country, because the centre of Australia is uninhabited, and this is the country which is on the farthest outskirts of civilisation. One was inclined to think it was "out-back" before one got there. White Cliffs seemed to be pretty well out-back from Wilcannia. But one found men quite surprised if one said so. However far you chase it, there is always an out-back beyond. Probably if one got past the centre line of the continent one would have to turn round and hunt it back again.

If an Englishman saw the red country in some years he would probably say it was the old Sahara Desert. Some of the explorers did say so. And then other explorers went there in other years and said they had found a beautiful pastoral country with grass waist-high. And they were both right.

Preface xi

That country does turn into a Sahara in drought time, except where there happens to be scrub upon it. And it has so much impressed people that they have laid far too much stress upon the drought and forgotten the more extraordinary change which happens afterwards.

For about half of Australia has a certain quite astonishing quality, which only those who have seen it can realise. It is a quality gradually developed in the plant life of the country through continual trial by drought and by fire. Drought and fire have come upon Australia so regularly for so many aeons of time that no plant whose seed could not resist them had any chance of surviving. Consequently, if the country becomes a desert above them the seeds that are below the surface of the desert will live for fifteen or twenty years at least, waiting for a favourable rain or goodness knows what other conditions to turn that desert into country as well grassed, for the time, as England itself. After the last flood grass grew on Boolaboolka Lake, east of Menindie, which had been dormant first under drought and then under flood for fifteen years; and at Bourke at this moment there are some who hope to see on the common after these spring rains, at least some sign of Mitchell or other grasses which have not been seen there since 1894 or, some say, since the flood in 1890.

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Preface

If the people in Mars are watching the earth through telescopes just now, when they are close to it, the place that must puzzle them will be Australia. Because when last they were close to the earth — two years ago — Australia was pink. Now it is green. And if they could watch it they would see it change almost every year. In some years the centre of it does actually become a desert — a red sandy desert, with the surface blown off it and piled in sandhills by any wind that comes along. And then down comes the rain in the proper part of the month, and the particular grass or herb, or even tree, which this extraordinary Australian nature has marked up on her calendar against that particular day or two, comes up and turns the land into a wheatfield. It is as though England and the Sahara Desert got mixed, and one was always flushing up for the time and effacing the other.

Well, so far they have found that this particular country — the interior — ^is exceedingly well suited to the growing of fine wool. It may be that they will some day discover something else to suit it, and make it a country where people grow some kind of wheat or fruit, which is very unlikely, but would probably be for the better, or even a country where men have to work in factories, which would probably be for the worse. But, be it for better or for worse, if ever the old industries are changed, so

Preface xiii

will the old population be changed. The new types may be good — sturdy, heavy-limbed farmers, healthy fruit-pickers and fruit-packers; or they may be nervous, narrow, city-bred factory folk. But, good or bad, they will not be the old types. If ever the wool industry of Australia were to be not merely supplemented, but supplanted, by other industries, the old types of the Australian, such as they are, would go with it.

And there are some that would be very sorry to say good-bye to them.

Contents

OHAP. 1. THE MAKER OF A CONTINENT

PAGE I

2. THE CHARACTER HE HASN't .

II The Character He Hasnt

"It's a cur'ous thing," said the bullock-driver, shifting his pipe from one corner of his straight, strong, comprehensive mouth to the other, " it's a cur'ous thing, when you think of it, that though we most has made our whack out of 'em, you never 'eard tell a good yarn about a sheep."

The bullock-driver heaved himself slowly up, and strode out of the fierce firelight into the blackness. We could hear him kicking down a rotten pine stump. Presently he returned, and flung it on top of the blaze. That extraordinary country — though the whole West is extraordinary for that matter — was nothing but dead pine-forest. We were on the edge of probably a hundred square miles of pine trees, all as straight and shiny and dead as any door-nails. Beyond that was ragged mallee and spinifex — green tufts of porcupine grass, which will blaze like kerosene if you drop a match on them. Being mallee

and spinifex, the country between Mount Hope

17 2 and the Willandra had been overlooked or understocked, and the grass was standing high in it at a time when Riverina and the south were getting one of the worst grueUings on record. Consequently bullock teams had flocked there as mysteriously as migrating birds, to be kept alive on other people's grass for so long as other people suffered them, and perhaps just a little wee bit longer. When the managers got really angry they moved on, and often did a little carrying just for the look of the thing. So carrying was dirt cheap, and it was a rosy time for Mount Hope.

We were at Fourteen Mile Well, on the boundary of Roto run. The buUocky's team must have been somewhere near, enjoying themselves in the Roto grass, which was luscious and long. The buUocky was camped right under the well. His wagon, all sheeted in, showed vaguely like some huge rounded boulder in front of the fire. Behind, black against the sky, we could see the great winze of the well; and the low, long iron of the trough occasionally glinted in the firelight. Far away, like a cigarette end in the dark, a tiny spark showed where we, too, had camped for the night under a wilga tree. The chink .... chink .... of hobbles came to us, always getting farther away. Our horses, too,

^^Just a Woman" 19

were enjoying themselves on Koto grass. The buUocky shifted his pipe again.

" You see, a 'orse is different," he said. " A 'orse has the feelings of a man ; and a mare — she's just a woman over again. I had an old mare once that had a foal, and she was that jealous of it she wouldn't allow any 'orse to come near it. You know how 'orses will always come up to a foal. Well, if they came anywhere near her foal she lathered out at them quick and lively. She'd let the station children come up and play with it, but the scraggy stock 'orses she couldn't bear. When 'orses came near that foal she'd lay back her ears and charge them like a bull. I've seen her rush at 'em and wheel round in such a terrible hurry that she missed her footing and tumbled fair over on her back.

" Well, one day there was someone come along with a good sort of a 'orse — a beautiful, big, well-groomed riding 'orse, and they let 'im out in the paddock with her. I was half-frightened what might happen to him, for I knew he'd take notice of the foal. Right enough ! He went straight up to him, and bent his neck over him and nosed him. I tell you, the old mare never winked an eyelash. She just arched her neck — preened herself like you see an old parrot — fairly flowing over with pleasure and pride.

" Tell me she didn't know the difference between a handsome, well-groomed feller and a scraggy stock 'orse ?

" 'Orses are just like 'umans ; and so are bullocks, though you mightn't think it. Look 'ere, I'll tell you what I've seen 'em do. I was with two men rounding up some pretty wildish sort of cattle on a ridge in the hills one day. There was a crick ran down the valley on the left, and about half a mile down the course of it was the place where these cattle used to cross it. I knew when we set 'em going they'd make down along the same track they always took to the crossing — they must have gone that way every day. So I told the two hands with me to ride back along the ridge, and then make a circle across the crick and down to this crossing. They were to cooee when they got there, and I was to drive the mob down. When the cattle crossed they were to head them downstream — the way we wanted to send them — and stop them from breaking back.

" The men went off, and I stayed there to hold the cattle. Every single beast in that mob had his head stuck in the air, watching what we were doing with wide eyes. From the moment the men rode off they watched me. Thej^ watched me all the time — never took their eyes off me for an instant.

The Craft of Cattle 21

" I sat on my 'orse, and waited and waited for that cooee — them watching me. And at last, from far down the crick behind the wattles and the gum trees in the valley, came the sound of a ' cooee/ That instant every single pair of horns in the mob turned right round — all together, as quick and clean as if they were soldiers drilling — looking in the direction the sound came from.

"Well, I began cracking my stockwhip and singing out, and they started off. But do you think they went down the track to the crossing place ? They'd gone down it hundreds of times. In ordinary times they'd have gone down it full bang, tearing over wattles and suckers. In ordinary times nothing could have stopped 'em.

"But this time, as I cracked the whip at 'em, they came straight up the ridge towards me. I made all the noise I could, but they came straight ahead. When they got up to me the mob just split in two, and went past me quite close on either side. I knew it was useless, so I just let them go. They weren't going down the valley for me. They'd heard that cooee, and they knew something was up.

" Oh, cattle are clever — dead crafty. You know the noise they ordinarily make going alpng a road. Well, you'd think you c'd hear them if they were anyways near you, wouldn't you ? Do you know.

IVe known 'em steal past me in camp not twentyyards away, and me not hear them ? It's the truth. After IVe camped at night IVe known them steal away on their toes — yes, on the tips of their toes, it must have b n, just like men.

" But what genly gave them away, though — each beast has got a mate. They'd lose sight of their mates in the dark and start lowing to one another to find them. But even then it was no bellowing like the way they bellow to one another at ordinary times. It was — mo-ooo . . . maw-aw . . . muu-u. . . . You know the way they ordinarily answer one another — one high, another low, only so soft like you'd scarcely reckonise it.

" I've had 'em go by not twenty yards off, with me in my tent there not hearing them at all. But when I used to hear that moo-oo . . . maw-aw . . . muu ... u ... I'd know it w's time to get my 'orse quick and go after 'em.

" That's like cattle. But you never 'card a story of sheep like that, did you ? I've 'card a man say a dozen times this past week, ' As silly as a sheep.' If a fellow calls you a sheep it's good enough to clip him under the jaw, isn't it ? But I never 'eard a story about a sheep yet."

Now, that yarn is true — for the man that told it was true; and the moral is quite true, too, when you come to think of it. Everyone has a yarn to

No Yarns about Sheep 23

tell about his dog and his horse, and even his cow and his cat. But who ever tells yarns about his sheep — even about their vices ? The sheep hasn't got any. It hasn't apparently any character at all. The best way to describe it is to describe what it hasn't got. Rudyard Kipling says: — "The 'orse 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool " — which was wrong, according to the buUocky — " the elephant's a gentleman, the battery mule's a mule ; but the commissariat camuel, when all is said and done, 'e's a infant an a ostrich an a orphan child in one."

A sheep isn't even that. He's just a sheep. Probably that's why nobody takes any interest in him — any personal interest, that is. Occasionally a lamb loses its mother and has to be spoon-fed. The station children grow fond of it and pet it, and its tail is left long and it is called " Clara." In the end Clara invariably turns up on the dinner table to be carved, and becomes for a day the family joke.

Since this chapter was first written I have heard one story about a sheep. A one-time stockman, who had read what was written above, brought it to me. He said he once knew a sheep which had a character. It always wanted to go to the right. They were sending in some sheep to the homestead to be killed and they sent this one amongst them. When they got to the homestead they rounded them up to the gate of the yards and put them at it; but every time this particular wether veered to the right and led the mob astray. In the end they had to send for a gun and shoot it.

Apart from a statement in Chambers's Encyclopcedia that a ram has been known to overthrow a bull in a fight by charging him, that is the one interesting yarn one has heard about a sheep. Perhaps he appeals to pity.

By far the most rich men in Australia owe every penny to their sheep. But no one makes a friend of a sheep any more than he would of a sixpence. They are counted over like so many sovereigns. That is all. They are fed because feeding pays. When rain fails, and the paddocks are eaten out, and the mothers are too weak to suckle, and the poor scraggy lambs stagger after them in jerks as if they were made of wire, and the stock routes are dry dust, and the crows sit along the fence — then it is just possible that if some of the mulga trees in the paddocks were cut they would save the sheep till the rain came. But scrub-cutting costs money, and the rain might not come. From one huge far outside station in the drought, a distracted manager wired to his principals : " Half flock dead of starvation." A wire came back at once : " Kill rest." And they did. The sheep as they were

A Counter 25

were simply trampling the face of the paddock. It is said by some that the only thing to be done at such times is to let the sheep starve. But one noticed that the biggest and richest owner of all, Sir Samuel M'Caughey, always expected his managers to save all that they could.

From his lambing to the day he is executed or boiled down or starved, the sheep is just a counter in his owner's wealth. His life is simple — almost boresome. He simply feeds. Once a year — if he is not wanted for meat — he is penned up and shorn. In five minutes, when the shearer who has finished him rams him staggering and crabwise, and looking something between a goat and a badly peeled blood orange, down a slide into the counting pen beneath the wool shed, he is done with for the year.

From the moment he is lambed a sheep is either so much wool or so much meat ; and wool or meat he remains until he dies, unless he strikes very evil days and becomes tallow. He is a pretty pastoral picture to the town man. But up-country they have their eyes either on his fleece or on the chops and fat and lean inside of him, and on one more than the other, according as he is to be wool or meat ; occasionally on both equally. And that is — in the simplest of language — the clue to a great deal of the science of the sheep ; in this way : —

You may, on a very rough average, be able to make out of the wool of each sheep about 5s. each year. Your business will be to keep him alive for twelve months and then shear him, and turn him out again and repeat the process. Probably you intend to sell him after some years for what he will fetch as meat. In that case he is primarily wool and only incidentally meat.

On the other hand, it is possible to get a kind of sheep which will fatten so quickly after he is lambed that he may be sold a few months later for something like 12s. or 14s. without your having even been put to the trouble of shearing him. Sometimes it may be difficult to get him away, or the season may fail and he may be too thin, and you may shear him that year or perhaps two years, and fatten him and sell him afterwards. Each year you will get something out of his wool — it may be 4s. or 5s. But your chief aim is to fatten him and sell him to butchers or cold stores. And so in this case he is primarily meat and incidentally wool. It is an exceedingly attractive way of making good profits, and making them quick. And there has grown up a whole class of busy men in Australia whose one aim is scientifically to select and breed and nurse, so that the interior of each fat, woolly lamb may be well filled with good lean palatable meat so quickly that he may be sold to be eaten when he is four or five months old.

Wool or Meat 27

But it is one thing to take a fat lamb from his mother in a paddock alongside the railway line and truck him in a day to Sydney, and quite another to drive him, half -weaned, from the Paroo over a hundred miles of drought-stricken stock-route on the chance that he will survive it and die in a railway truck. For that very plain reason, whilst the "inside'' stations may grow for meat if they care, the "outside" stations grow for wool. And the outside country will continue to grow wool as long as there is any outside country to do it. s/ Now, it so happens that the sheep which have the most mutton on them and least wool are the English ones, the short- wool sheep — the Shropshires and Southdowns — especially; and the long- wool sheep — Leicester, Border Leicesters, Lincolns, Romney Marsh sheep — to a lesser extent. And the sheep which have most wool on them and least mutton are the Spanish — the merinos — and the American Vermont sheep, which are very close to the Spanish.

■ The Australian sheep — there are about 100,000,000 of him — was originally bought by the King of England for his Royal farm from the King of Spain — or, some say, from the wife of the Spanish Ambassador in London — at the price of two creamy coach-horses. | At least, that is the pedigree people speak about. There were some rather less noble ancestors, who came through a mere Republic: they were given by the King of Spain to the Dutch Republic, and sent by the Dutch Republic to the Cape of Good Hope, and during the short spell, when the English held Cape Colony before giving it back to the Dutch, they were imported from there to Australia by Captain John Macarthur. There were also a few skinny, hairy Bengalese sheep, which came first of all — but they are not referred to in polite circles. Some of the original Australian sheep, at any rate, were undoubtedly bought by the King of England for two creamy coach horses. An old Australian Journal, The Nevj South Wales Magazine of 1833 and 1834, tells why the coach horses were given.

George III. was a great experimental farmer, and he dearly wanted some Spanish merino sheep. But Spain was doing so well with merino wool that it was a crime in Spain to export Spanish rams.

However, the King got some ewes all right. A British fleet happened to pass a Spanish fleet, and by way of complimentary gifts the Spanish Admiral gave the British Admiral some sheep for sea stock. They were not eaten on board, and when the fleet arrived in England Sir Joseph Banks, the scientist, happened to see them, and as he knew what they were, he had them presented to the King.

Coach-Horses for Rams 29

But the King could not get any rams. The Spanish Ambassador was asked, but he dared not promise them. Then the lady Ambassadress was approached. She was closely watched ; and it was discovered at last — on the occasion of the King's going to open Parliament — that she had a weakness for the cream-coloured horses that drew his state coaches.

The Ambassadress was at once asked if she would like a pair. They were just the thing she wanted. So two creamy coach-horses were ordered from Hanover and brought over to England for her. It cost nearly £8000 to get them to England. But when they did get there the lady Ambassadress had what no other lord or lady could boast of.

What could she do in return ? The donors would accept a few Spanish sheep by way of compliment.

It was useless for the Spanish Ambassadress to ask the Spanish Government for the sheep. So the Spanish Ambassadress applied to the Spanish smugglers to select a few. They " selected " a few from various flocks, by their own well-known method of selection, and drove them through Spain and France and shipped them at Hamburg.

That is the story — on the authority only of The New South Wales Magazine, which tells it — of how the King of England came by his Spanish flocks. Later, in 1804, Captain John Macarthur bought eight of them, apparently in pretty bad condition, at His Majesty's sale at Kew.

Thirty Saxon merinos were also brought from Germany in 1824. The ship Cumberland, Captain Cairnes commander, was chartered for the job. She brought the sheep out, sailed home, and came out again. This time Captain Cairnes, who was a widower, brought his daughter and son for the round trip. They came to Sydney and were nearly home again, crossing the Atlantic, when they were taken by pirates. The pirates put a plank out over the sea and ordered Captain Cairnes to walk along it. His son and daughter were standing by him. He caught up his daughter by the waist and jumped into the sea with her. His son jumped over the side after them.

So there is a little human romance even in the history of the merino sheep.

Between the big-framed coarse-wooUed pure-bred English sheep and the little fine-wooUed pure-bred merino there have been made any number of crosses. But because Australians bred their merinos and little else for a century for the sake of their wool alone, and thought seriously of those fat English lambs only quite recently when someone invented a way of sending them frozen to Europe, they have come to call every pure-bred sheep, except the finewool merinos and Vermonts, as well as the real