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Updated: May 28, 2025
He always had a book with him, but, book-lover as he was, it rarely got farther than his chest when we were in camp. Life out-bush is more absorbing than books. "Of course reading's handy enough for them as don't lay much stock on education," Dan owned, stringing his net between his mosquito-pegs, then, struck with a new idea, he "wondered why the missus never carries books round.
The evening drink accomplished, it was time to think of food. Dan welcomed the spectacle as an "impromptu bit of education. Learnt something meself, even," he said with lordly superiority. "Been out-bush forty years and never struck that before "; and later, as we returned to camp, he declared it "just knocked spots off De Rougemont."
If any woman would experience real pleasure, let her pack all her belongings into trunks all but a couple of changes of everything and go away out-bush, leaving them to follow "after the Wet" per bullock waggon, and when the reunion takes place the pleasure will be forthcoming. If she can find a Cheon to be present at the reunion, so much the better.
Every water-hole out-bush is as the axis of a great circle, cattle pads narrowing into it like the spokes of a wheel, from every point of the compass, and along these pads around the Stirling mob after mob of cattle came in in single file, treading carelessly, until each old bull leader, scenting the camp, gave its low, deep, drawn-out warning call that told of danger at hand.
Yet it was in this night camp among the dark pines, with even the stars shut out, that we learnt that out-bush "Houselessness" need not mean "Homelessness" a discovery that destroyed all hope that "this would sicken her a bit." As we were only to be out one night, and there was little chance of rain, we had nothing with us but a little tucker, a bluey each, and a couple of mosquito nets.
Two hundred and fifty guests was the tally for that year, and earliest among them came a telegraph operator, who as is the way with telegraphic operators out-bush invited us to "ride across to the wire for a shake hands with Outside"; and within an hour we came in sight of the telegraph wire as our horses mounted the stony ridge that overlooks the Warloch ponds, when the wire was forgotten for a moment in the kaleidoscope of moving, ever-changing colour that met our eyes.
They sat among the buzzing swarms of flies, light-hearted and self-reliant, chatting of their daily lives of lonely vigils, of cattle-camps and stampedes, of dangers and privations, and I listened with a dawning consciousness that life "out-bush" is something more than mere existence.
"Whatever do you do with your time?" ask the townsfolk, sure that life out-bush is stagnation, but forgetting that life is life wherever it may be lived.
There is no other word that so exactly defines their tender helpfulness to all weakness and helplessness. Knowing how hard the fight is out-bush for even the strong and enduring all their magnificent strength and courage stand ready for those who would go to the wall without it.
By the next midday, grass, inches tall, was rippling all around the homestead in the now prevalent northwest breeze, and Dan was preparing for a trip out-bush to see where the showers had fallen, and Mac and Tam coming in as he went out, Mac greeted us with a jocular: "The flats get greener every year about the Elsey."
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