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Updated: May 2, 2025
"Don't you bother about the Dandy," he said; "bushmen have a sixth sense, and know a pal when they see one." Just a bushman's pretty speech, aimed straight at the heart of a woman, where all the pretty speeches of the bushfolk are aimed; for it is by the heart that they judge us.
All of them rode in strangers and many of them rode out life-long friends, for such is the way of the bushfolk: a little hospitality, a day or two of mutual understanding, and we have become part of the other's life.
For bush hospitality is something better than the bare housing and feeding of guests, being just the simple sharing of our daily lives with a fellow-man a literal sharing of all that we have; of our plenty or scarcity, our joys or sorrows, our comforts or discomforts, our security or danger; a democratic hospitality, where all men are equally welcome, yet so refined in its simplicity and wholesomeness, that fulsome thanks or vulgar apologies have no part in it, although it was whispered among the bushfolk that those "down in their luck" learned that when the Maluka was filling tucker-bags, a timely word in praise of the missus filled tucker-bags to over-flowing.
Beside it stood the simple camp of the stockman a litter of pack-bags, mosquito-nets, and swags; here and there were scattered the even more simple camps of the black boys; and in the background, the cumbrous camp of the Chinese drovers reared itself up in strong contrast to the camps of the bushfolk two fully equipped tents for the drovers themselves and a simpler one for their black boys.
And as we stood, with our horses' bridles over our arms and the horses nibbling at the sweet grasses, in touch with the world in spite of our isolation, a gorgeous butterfly rested for a brief space on the tiny instrument, with gently swaying purple wings, and away in the great world men were sending telegrams amid clatter and dust, unconscious of that tiny group of bushfolk, or that Nature, who does all things well, can beautify even the sending of a telegram.
Lazily we watched the floating movement, and as we watched, conversation became spasmodic not worth the energy required to sustain it until gradually we slipped into one of those sociable silences of the bushfolk silences that draw away all active thought from the mind, leaving it a sensitive plate ready to absorb impressions and thoughts as they flit about it, silences where every one is so in harmony with his comrades and surroundings that the breaking of them rarely jars spoken words so often defining the half-absorbed thoughts.
Daily the telegraph people hear all the news of the Territory, and in due course give the news to the public, when the travellers gathering it, carry it out to the bushfolk, scattering it broadcast, until everybody knows every one else, and all his business and where it has taken him; and because of that knowledge, and in spite of those hundreds of thousands of square miles of bushland, the people of the Territory are held together in one great brotherhood.
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