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Updated: May 29, 2025
Of course we kept all the grass near the road eaten bare, to discourage travellers from coming that way. Such hapless wretches as did venture through Buckalong used to try hard to stray from the road and pick up a feed, but old Sandy was always ready for them, and would have them dogged right through the run.
This constituted the whole station staff. Buckalong was on one of the main routes by which stock were taken to market, or from the plains to the tablelands, and vice versa. Great mobs of travelling sheep constantly passed through the run, eating up the grass and vexing the soul of the manager. By law, sheep must travel six miles per day, and they must be kept to within half-a-mile of the road.
Buckalong was a big freehold of some 80,000 acres, belonging to an absentee syndicate, and therefore run in most niggardly style. There was a manager on 200 pounds a year, Sandy M'Gregor to wit a hard-headed old Scotchman known as "four-eyed M'Gregor", because he wore spectacles. For assistants, he had half-a-dozen of us jackaroos and colonial-experiencers who got nothing a year, and earned it.
This bred feuds, and bad language, and personal combats between us and the drovers, whom we looked upon as natural enemies. The men who came through with mobs of cattle used to pull down the paddock fences at night, and slip the cattle in for refreshments, but old Sandy often turned out at 2 or 3 a.m. to catch a mob of bullocks in the horse-paddock, and then off they went to Buckalong pound.
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