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"Stagnation!" they called it, when no day was long enough for its work, and almost every night found us camped a day's journey from our breakfast camp. It was August, well on in the Dry, and on a cattle station in the Never-Never "things hum" in August.
Yet, whatever their rank or race, our travellers were men, not riff-raff, the long, formidable stages that wall in the Never-Never have seen to that, turning back the weaklings and worthless to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and proving the worth and mettle of the brave-hearted: all men, every one of them, and all in need of a little hospitality, whether of the prosperous and well-doing or "down in their luck," and each was welcomed according to that need; for out-bush rank counts for little: we are only men and women there.
On stations in the Never-Never the blacks are supposed to camp either in the homesteads, where no man need go hungry, or right outside the boundaries on waters beyond the cattle, travelling in or out as desired, on condition that they keep to the main travellers' tracks blacks among the cattle having a scattering effect on the herd, apart from the fact that "niggers in" generally means cattle-killing.
The wide, sterile, unpeopled deserts have created eloquent phrases like "No Man's Land" and the "Never-never Country." Also this felicitous form: "She lives in the Never-never Country" that is, she is an old maid. And this one is not without merit: "heifer-paddock" young ladies' seminary. "Bail up" and "stick up" equivalent of our highwayman-term to "hold up" a stage-coach or a train.
From sun-up to sun-down on Tuesday, the train glided quietly forward on its way towards the Never-Never; and from sun-up to sun-down the Maluka and I experienced the kindly consideration that it always shows to travellers: it boiled a billy for us at its furnace; loitered through the pleasantest valleys; smiled indulgently, and slackened speed whenever we made merry with blacks, by pelting them with chunks of water-melon; and generally waited on us hand and foot, the Man-in-Charge pointing out the beauty spots and places of interest, and making tea for us at frequent intervals.
To begin somewhere near the beginning, the Maluka better known at that time as the new Boss for the Elsey and I, his "missus," were at Darwin, in the Northern Territory, waiting for the train that was to take us just as far as it could one hundred and fifty miles on our way to the Never-Never.
All around and within the Settlement was bush: and beyond the bush, stretching away and away on every side of it, those hundreds of thousands of square miles that constitute the Never-Never miles sending out and absorbing again from day to day the floating population of the Katherine. Before supper the Telegraph Department and the Police Station called on the Cottage to present compliments.
And the way in which their tiny tongues stumble over the great word seems to show that, following a true instinct, they do not take kindly to that clause in their bedtime prayer. I am told that, away beyond the Never-Never ranges, there is a church from which the children are excluded before the sermon begins. I wish my informant had not told me of its existence.
Go slow, missus!" they cried. "It may look like a house very nearly finished, but out-bush, we have to catch our hares before we cook them." "WE begin at the very beginning of things in the Never-Never," the Maluka explained. "Timber grows in trees in these parts, and has to be coaxed out with a saw."
Every available day of the Dry was needed for the work; but there is one thing in the Never-Never that refuses to take a secondary place the mailman; and at the end of a week we all found, once again, that we had business at the homestead; for six weeks had slipped away since our last mail-day, and the Fizzer was due once more.
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