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"Nothing like keeping the ball rolling,", Dan said, also waxing enthusiastic, while the South-folk remained convinced that life out-bush is stagnation.
A man who shall be known as the Outsider, for he was one of a type who could never be one of the bush-folk, even though he lived out-bush for generations: a man so walled in with self and selfishness that, look where he would, he could see nothing grander or better than his own miserable self, and knowing all a mail means to a bushman, he could refuse to carry a neighbour's mail even though his road lay through that neighbour's run because he had had a difference with him.
The bush can be cruel at times, and yet, although she may leave us alone with our beloved dead, her very cruelty bungs with it a fierce, consoling pain; for out-bush our dead are all our own. Beyond those seven faithful years the mate could tell us but little of his comrade's life. He was William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with a mother living somewhere there. That was all he knew.
It was no use trying to wriggle from under Cheon's foot once he put it down. At the slightest neglect of duty, lubras or boys were marshalled and kept relentlessly to their work until he was satisfied; and woe betide the lubras who had neglected to wash hands, and pail and cow, before sitting down to their milking. The very fowls that laid out-bush gained nothing by their subtlety.
Yet, whatever their rank or race, our travellers were men, not riff-raff, the long, formidable stages that wall in the Never-Never have seen to that, turning back the weaklings and worthless to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and proving the worth and mettle of the brave-hearted: all men, every one of them, and all in need of a little hospitality, whether of the prosperous and well-doing or "down in their luck," and each was welcomed according to that need; for out-bush rank counts for little: we are only men and women there.
Go slow, missus!" they cried. "It may look like a house very nearly finished, but out-bush, we have to catch our hares before we cook them." "WE begin at the very beginning of things in the Never-Never," the Maluka explained. "Timber grows in trees in these parts, and has to be coaxed out with a saw."
Lend others a hand with theirs. Let God see to the rest. Men there are in plenty out-bush, "not much at religion," as they and the world judge it, who have solved the great problem of "hoeing their own rows" by the simple process of leaving them to give others a hand with theirs; men loving their neighbours as themselves, and with whom God does the rest, as of old.
With only one room at our disposal it would seem to the uninitiated that the accommodation of the homestead must have been strained to bursting point; but "out-bush" every man carries a "bluey" and a mosquito net in his swag, and as the hosts slept under the verandah, and the guests on the garden paths, or in their camps among the forest trees, spare rooms would only have been superfluous.
Just the tiniest emphasis on the word "you"; but that, and the quick, bright look that accompanied the emphasis, told, as nothing else could, that it was "that other woman" that had not been wanted. Unconventional, of course; but when a welcome is conventional out-bush, it is unworthy of the name of welcome.
Forty years out-bush had convinced him that "most of 'em were the right sort," but it had also convinced him that "you had to take 'em all differently," and he always felt his way carefully, watching and waiting, ready to open out at the first touch of fellowship and understanding, but just as ready to withdraw into himself at the faintest approach to a snub.
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