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I'd take Mary straight back to Gulgong in the morning I forgot about the load I had to take to the sheep station. We'll go to Sydney, and I'll be a man! and work my way up. And I'd sell waggon, horses, and all, and go. When I got to the hut it was lighted up. Mary had the only kerosene lamp, a slush lamp, and two tallow candles going.
I bought a broken-down waggon cheap, tinkered it up myself christened it 'The Same Old Thing' and started carrying from the railway terminus through Gulgong and along the bush roads and tracks that branch out fanlike through the scrubs to the one-pub towns and sheep and cattle stations out there in the howling wilderness. It wasn't much of a team.
I told you how I went into the carrying line, and took up a selection at Lahey's Creek for a run for the horses and to grow a bit of feed and shifted Mary and little Jim out there from Gulgong, with Mary's young scamp of a brother James to keep them company while I was on the road.
The time Mary and I shifted out into the Bush from Gulgong to 'settle on the land' at Lahey's Creek. I'd sold the two tip-drays that I used for tank-sinking and dam-making, and I took the traps out in the waggon on top of a small load of rations and horse-feed that I was taking to a sheep-station out that way. Mary drove out in the spring-cart.
But then, the farther I got away from poverty the greater the fear I had of it and, besides, there was always before us all the thought of the terrible drought, with blazing runs as bare and dusty as the road, and dead stock rotting every yard, all along the barren creeks. I had a long yarn with Mary's sister and her husband that night in Gulgong, and it brightened me up.
You remember we left little Jim with his aunt in Gulgong till we got settled down. We hadn't much in the way of furniture. There was the four-poster cedar bedstead that I bought before we were married, and Mary was rather proud of it: it had 'turned' posts and joints that bolted together.
I suppose that's all right, Joe, he said. 'I I beg your pardon. I got thinking of the days when I was courting Mrs Black. Brighten's Sister-In-Law. Jim was born on Gulgong, New South Wales. We used to say 'on' Gulgong and old diggers still talked of being 'on th' Gulgong' though the goldfield there had been worked out for years, and the place was only a dusty little pastoral town in the scrubs.
I took a good-size fencing contract, the frontage of a ten-mile paddock, near Gulgong, and did well out of it. The railway had got as far as the Cudgeegong river some twenty miles from Gulgong and two hundred from the coast and 'carrying' was good then. I had a couple of draught-horses, that I worked in the tip-drays when I was tank-sinking, and one or two others running in the Bush.
Gulgong was about the last of the great alluvial 'rushes' of the 'roaring days' and dreary and dismal enough it looked when I was there. The Bush is full of good-hearted scamps called Jim. We had a lot of trouble with Jim with his teeth. He was bad with every one of them, and we had most of them lanced couldn't pull him through without.
He wouldn't eat it even if his bride made it. Christmas on the goldfields in the last of the roaring days, in the palmy days of Gulgong and those fields. Let's see! it must be nearly thirty years ago! Oh, how the time goes by! Lucky diggers who were with difficulty restrained from putting pound notes and nuggets and expensive lockets and things into the little ones' stockings.
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