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Incidentally she has given a few strongly-sketched views of places of Melbourne in midsummer, with its buildings of sombre bluestone and stucco, and streets swept by dust-laden hot winds; of Riverina, arid and drought-stricken; and of the peaceful beauty of rural Tasmania, the home of her own youth but these and other descriptions from the same pen are slight compared with similar work in the stories of Kingsley, Boldrewood, and Mrs.
If in time this district of the north becomes more populous, it is probable it will set up for itself, just as there have long been agitations for separating Northern Queensland from the Southern portion, and the Riverina from New South Wales, on the ground that their particular interests are not sufficiently represented at Brisbane and Sydney respectively.
And in the centre of a clear place, a couple of hundred yards away, you may notice a bullock-wagon, apparently deserted; the heavy wool-tarpaulin, dark with dust and grease, thrown across the arched jigger, forming a tent on the body, and falling over the wheels nearly to the ground, yet displaying the outline of the Sydney pattern which, as every schoolgirl knows, differs from that of Riverina.
I can recall how a morning broke for me once which was the morning of a kind of freedom almost appalling to the child of cities. This was the morning of youth, or rather of earliest manhood, when I was timid and yet unafraid, curious, and, after a manner, innocent, when I had slept by my first camp-fire, on the Bull Plains of Australia's Riverina.
He came down on his hand, poor beggar; it's swelled like a boxing-glove. But he's taking it out of the horse." Now, in the Riverina of that period, it was considered much more disgraceful to be had by a scoundrel than to commit a felony yourself; therefore Martin, partly grasping the situation, assumed an oblivious, and even drowsy, air. "Did the young fellow say where he was going?"
"Of course not. I beg your pardon. Well, I heard it from himself. I met him about three weeks ago that would be about three weeks after my interview with Bob Stirling. He's fairly in love with what he saw of Queensland, before last shearing; and, between bad seasons and selectors not to mention his own presentiment of a rabbit-plague he's full-up of Riverina.
When I had come to Caddagat the last of them had gone "down" with horses poor; now they were travelling "up" with their horses some of them thoroughbreds rolling fat, and a cheque for their weeks of back-bending labour in their pockets. But whether coming or going they always made to Caddagat to camp. That camping-ground was renowned as the best from Monaro, to Riverina.
Indeed, if the matter had rested with the squatters, they would have starved him out of Riverina by industrial boycott.
Overjoyed at this oneness of mind, Laura threw her arms round her friend's neck and kissed her. "You dear!" she said. And yet, a short time afterwards, it was on this very head that she had to bear the shock of a rude awakening. Evelyn's people came to Melbourne that year from the Riverina.
Mile after mile we go at a good walk, till the dark boundary of the scrub country disappears northward in the glassy haze, and in front, southward, the level black-soil plains of Riverina Proper mark a straight sky-line, broken here and there by a monumental clump or pine-ridge.
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