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Updated: May 6, 2025
He was a clean-limbed, handsome fellow, with riding-cords, leggings, and a blue sash; he was Graeco-Roman-nosed, blue-eyed, and his glossy, curly black hair bunched up in front of the brim of a new cabbage-tree hat, set well back on his head. 'Do it for a quid, Jack? asked one. 'Damned if I will, Jim! said the young man at the post. 'I'll do it for a fiver not a blanky sprat less.
The cabbage-tree, which is a species of palm, has a small straight stem, often ninety to one hundred feet long, with many knots or joints, about four inches asunder, like a bamboo-cane. It has no leaves except at the top, in the midst of which the substance called cabbage is contained, which, when boiled, is as good as any garden cabbage.
Pea-soupers and lime-juicers are strangers off shipboard. They'd never have spotted you, though, without the bundle. There's no raw-meat tint about you; you're tanned like a native. Buy a blue jumper and get a cabbage-tree up in place of that cap, and you'd pass muster as a Sydney-sider born and bred. 'A cabbage-tree? 'Hat straw. Get a second-hand one if you can: they're more appreciated.
He was dressed in the usual bush costume, viz, jumper, breeches and belt, riding boots, spurs, and cabbage-tree hat; and in his frank open countenance could at once be read the genuineness of his friendship. He was in truth a noble fellow; high-spirited and warm-hearted; bold and daring, though, perhaps, a little thoughtless and impetuous.
What he wanted with it, or what he would have done with it if he had got it, I cannot conceive, but it had taken his simple fancy more, probably, than an emerald of the same size would have done. At last he put it to his eye. "Why, darn my cabbage-tree," he said, "if you can't see through it! He wouldn't sell it, I suppose, now?"
On the right the bank is steeper, and upon it stand a number of cabbage-tree palms. Down below is a little rocky, rugged gully, with a brawling stream rushing through it. Just abreast of the shanty this stream forms a cascade, tumbling into a pool that beyond is still and clear and gravelly.
It has a tuft of green leaves, which are rather palmy-looking at a distance, and which springs from the top of a pithy, worthless stem, varying from one to twenty or thirty feet in height. Sometimes the stem is branched at the top, and each branch ends in a tuft. The flax and the cabbage-tree and the tussock-grass are the great botanical features of the country.
A 'stockman' is naturally the man who drives the stock, and the 'stockwhip' a peculiar short-handled long whip with which he drives them. A 'cabbage-tree' is an immense sun-protecting hat, rather like the top of a cabbage-tree in shape. It is much affected by bushmen. A 'billy' is the tin pot in which the bushman boils his tea; a 'pannikin, the tin bowl out of which he drinks it.
He had attired himself with care in honour of the occasion. He wore a velveteen tunic, girt round the waist with a sash of china silk, a pair of moleskin trousers, and held his cabbage-tree hat in his left hand.
'I shouldn't mind; I should go halves with some one else who had a bigger one, I said. 'More money too, more horses, more sheep, a bigger house! Why should he have it and not me? 'That's a lazy man's argument, and well, not an honest man's, said George, getting up and putting on his cabbage-tree. 'I can't sit and hear you talk such rot. Nobody can work better than you and Jim, when you like.
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