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Updated: June 25, 2025
You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day.
No signs of Headquarters up there. After a lot of shouting to persuade the dog to keep near me, I turned back and went through the mud again, past the cross-roads junction, and along a still slimier, water-logged cart-track. I found every one on Headquarters digging shelters in the side of the road. The servants had rigged up a corrugated-iron habitation for the colonel.
So they plunged down the hill-side on a twisting path, past the bank of hydrangeas and through a grove of shiny-leaved escallonias to where the garage, a large building with a corrugated-iron roof, stood on a natural platform of rock close to the steep high road that flanked the hotel.
Besides these there are several nomadic dwellings, such as tents, bush humpies, and drays. A house is a luxury, and some of the oldest residents have never built one. "Here to-day and gone to-morrow, what's the good of a house?" was the answer I got from one who had only been there for ten years! Mud-brick walls and corrugated-iron roofs is the style of architecture in general vogue.
Here several hundred cars were always kept in reserve, and here was collected an enormous store of automobile supplies and sundries. The scene under the long, low sheds, with their corrugated-iron roofs, always reminded me of the Automobile Show at Olympia. After a car had once been placed at your disposal by the Government, getting supplies for it was merely a question of signing bons.
In an instant the men began to spread about and search, and the farmer dashed down his pipe in a fury, to come running towards the officers, raging and swearing in Dutch as to what he would do; while, as soon as he saw half-a-dozen men approach the corrugated-iron poultry-house and proceed to wrench off the padlock, the old man rushed back into his house, and returned followed by his fat wife and two daughters, all well armed in some fashion or another, the farmer himself bearing a long rifle and thrusting his head and arm through a cartridge-belt.
The colonists at first waited for them to die of indigestion. But they digested the fences. Then between bales of more normal foodstuffs they browsed on the corrugated-iron roofs of houses. Again the colonists vengefully expected dyspepsia. They digested the roofs, too. Presently the lumbering creatures nibbled at axes the heads, not the handles. They went on to the plows.
Greening with the news that the doctor was coming. Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between the long line of waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts on the other hand, in a cross-fire of appeals, requests, complaints. Nothing escaped him.
The placards announcing the tea were still clinging to the outer railings of the hall. When I said that Blake asked for free tea, I should have said, shouted for free tea. He cast one decisive glance at Hatton's placards, and rolled up. He shot into the gate, up the steps, down the passage, and through the door leading into the big corrugated-iron hall which I used for my lessons.
"The distillery where we make the denatured alcohol!" cried MacLeod, gazing with tense face as from other buildings, we could see men pouring forth, panic-stricken, and the silence was punctured by shouts. Kennedy bent over his detector. "That same mysterious buzzing," he muttered, "only fainter." Together we hastened now toward the distillery, another of those corrugated-iron buildings.
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