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Updated: June 14, 2025
As Tom indulged to the fulness of his heart in the luxury of his woe, he began to reflect further, and to change his opinion. He mentioned incidentally that whisky was "good." "Before you gib em that boy whisky, he close up dead-finish. B'mby he more better."
Perhaps I ought to have mentioned before that Billy was just nine years old. I had come a long journey across country with Glenn, the squatter, and now we were entering the homestead paddock of his sheep-station, Winnanbar. Afar to the left was a stone building, solitary in a waste of saltbush and dead-finish scrub. I asked Glenn what it was. He answered, smilingly: "The Strangers' Hut.
Perhaps I ought to have mentioned before that Billy was just nine years old. I had come a long journey across country with Glenn, the squatter, and now we were entering the homestead paddock of his sheep-station, Winnanbar. Afar to the left was a stone building, solitary in a waste of saltbush and dead-finish scrub. I asked Glenn what it was. He answered, smilingly: "The Strangers' Hut.
Lonely and tenantless enough it seemed. There was the range of the Copper-mine hills to the south, lighted by the wan moon; and between and to the west a rough scrub country, desolating beyond words, and where even edible snakes would be scarce; spots of dead-finish, gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and east, and in the trees by the billabong the cry of the cockatoo and the laughing-jackass.
Lonely and tenantless enough it seemed. There was the range of the Copper-mine hills to the south, lighted by the wan moon; and between and to the west a rough scrub country, desolating beyond words, and where even edible snakes would be scarce; spots of dead-finish, gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and east, and in the trees by the billabong the cry of the cockatoo and the laughing-jackass.
"Never knew the showers so late," he growled; and the homestead was inclined to agree that it was the "dead-finish"; but remembering that even then our Fizzer was battling through that last stage of the Dry, we were silent, and Dan remembering also, devoted himself to the "missus," she being also a person of leisure now the Willy-Willys were at rest.
Don't you know, Joan' and his voice got suddenly grave and deep-toned 'you ought to, for you were a bush girl and you've had men-kind out in the Back Blocks Don't you know that when a man has got to go on day after day, week after week, year after year, fighting devils of loneliness and worse with nothing to look at except miles and miles of stark staring gum trees and black, smelling GIDGEE* and dead-finish scrub and never the glimpse of a woman not counting black gins to remind him he once had a mother and might have a wife.
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