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The rouseabouts do not mind these "slow-down" strikes, as they get paid anyway, but the shearers are very bitter when these have a dispute with the boss and strike, for it cuts down their earnings, probably just when they wanted to finish the shed so as to get a "stand" at the commencement of shearing near by.
It is not wise to allow the "deadbeat" the remittance man, the gaunt shepherd with his starving flocks and herds, the free selector on an arid patch, the drink shanty where the rouseabouts and shearers knock down their cheques, the race meeting where high and low, rich and poor, are filled with the gambler's ill luck fill the foreground of the picture of Australian life.
When we began to move the shearers gave a howl like the yell of a legion of lost souls escaping from down below. They gave three cheers for the rouseabouts' cook, who stayed behind; then they cursed the station with a mighty curse. They cleared a space on deck, had a jig, and afterwards a fight between the shearers' cook and his assistant.
"I'll go halves! or stay, let's form a syndicate and work the Mystery." Some of the rouseabouts laughed, but the joke fell as flat with Tom as any other joke. "The worst of it is," said the Mystery himself, in the whine that was natural to him, and with a timid side look up at Tom "the worst of it is I might be a lord or duke, and don't know anything about it.
Shearers at a shed elect their own cook, pay him so much a head, and they buy their rations in the lump from the station store; and "travellers," i.e. shearers and rouseabouts travelling for work, are invited, as a matter of course, to sit down to the shearers' table.
He started his verses and most of his lines with a howl; and there were unexpected howls all through the song, and it wailed off, just as unexpectedly, in places where there was no pathos that I could see: Oh, I dreamt I shore in a shearer's shed, and it was a dream of joy, For every one of the rouseabouts was a girl dressed up as a boy Dressed up like a page in a pantomime, and the prettiest ever seen They had flaxen hair, they had coal-black hair and every shade between.
The shearers have a separate union from the rouseabouts, and there is a good deal of ill feeling between the two classes. When the shearers want a spell I have known them declare by a majority vote that the sheep were "wet," though there had not been any rain for months!
"With a woman it's love or religion; with a man it's love or the devil." "Or with a man," said Mitchell, presently, "it's love and the devil both, sometimes, Donald." I looked at Mitchell hard, but for all his face expressed he might only have said, "I think it's going to rain." They hold him true, who's true to one, However false he be. -The Rouseabout of Rouseabouts.
Two rows of rough bunks run round three sides of the interior; and a fire-place occupies one end the kitchen end. Sleeping, eating, gambling and cooking accommodation for thirty men in about eighteen by forty feet. The rouseabouts and shearers use the hut in common during shearing.
Shearing had finished the day before, but there was a black boy and a station-hand or two about the yards and six or eight shearers and rouseabouts, and a teamster camped in the men's huts they were staying over the holidays to shear stragglers and clean up generally. Old Peter and a jackaroo were out on the run watching a bush-fire across Sandy Creek.
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