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Updated: June 16, 2025
And how hard old Ross, the selector, broke down at the end of the sermon, and blubbered, and had to be taken out of church. I left home and drifted to Sydney, and "back into the Great North-West where all the rovers go," and knocked about the country for six or seven years before I met Peter M'Laughlan again.
They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques beautifully when Peter M'Laughlan came along.
God's preacher, of churches unheeded, God's vineyard, though barren the sod, Plain spokesman where spokesman is needed, Rough link 'twixt the Bushman and God. The Christ of the Never. I never told you about Peter M'Laughlan.
But the long, low moaning of cattle dying of hunger and thirst on the hot barren plain in a drought is altogether different, and, at night there is something awful about it you couldn't describe it. This is what Peter M'Laughlan heard. "Do you hear that?" he asked the other preacher. The little parson said he did. Perhaps he only heard the weak lowing of cattle.
Because, perhaps, of something in Peter's early past which was a mystery. Simply and plainly because Peter M'Laughlan was the kindest, straightest and truest man in the West a "white man." They all knew Mitchell and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist and a kindly cynic a "joker" or "hard case" as the bushmen say.
I told you about Peter M'Laughlan, the bush missionary, and how he preached in the little slab-and-bark school-house in the scrub on Ross's Creek that blazing hot Sunday afternoon long ago, when the drought was ruining the brave farmers all round there and breaking their hearts.
Peter walked up and the men made way for him and he went into the office. There was always considerably less swearing for a few feet round about where Peter M'Laughlan happened to be working in a shearing-shed. It seemed to be an understood thing with the men.
His frightened boys had taken him home, and later on, the same afternoon, when they brought news of four more cows down with "the pleuro" in an outer paddock, he had stood up outside his own door and shaken his fist at the brassy sky and cursed high heaven to the terror of his family, till his brave, sun-browned wife dragged him inside and soothed him. And Peter M'Laughlan knew all about this.
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