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There is something sad and pathetic about that old practical joke as indeed there is with all bush jokes. There seems a quiet sort of sadness always running through outback humour whether alleged or otherwise. There's the usual yarn about a jackaroo mistaking Thompson for a brother rouser, and asking him whether old Baldy was about anywhere, and Baldy said: "Why, are you looking for a job?"
The boys, as they attained manhood, drifted outback to shear, drove, or to take up land. They found it too slow at home, and besides there was not room enough for them there when they passed childhood. Nothing ever happened there. Time was no object, and the days slid quietly into the river of years, distinguished one from another by name alone.
The Russian war scare was on, and passing Lytton we had to undergo a strict examination to prove that we were not spies. It can be imagined with what prayers a number of sunburnt, outback Queenslanders paraded to satisfy the defence authorities that they were peaceful and law-abiding citizens.
Then one day I was sure it was from one of the same religion as myself, for that leg was perspiring alone, and in the outback country in Australia, where the temperature reaches one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, the Presbyterian Church is sometimes called "Perspiration." At any rate, I read in a paper that in one town the three churches were Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Perspiration.
After graphic descriptions of life on big stations outback, and the dashing snake yarns told by our kitchen-folk at Bruggabrong, and the anecdotes of African hunting, travel, and society life which had often formed our guests' subject of conversation, this endless fiddle-faddle of the price of farm produce and the state of crops was very fatuous. Those men, like everyone else, only talked shop.
Once, on a far outback sheep station, he sat for three nights running, by the bedside of a young Englishman, a B.A. they said he was, who'd been employed as tutor at the homestead and who died a wreck, the result of five years of life in London and Paris. The poor fellow was only thirty. And the last few hours of his life he talked to Peter in French, nothing but French.
Soon the news of these bands "on the wallaby" at the call of country caught the imagination of the whole nation. Outback was terra incognita to the city-bred Australian, but that these men who were coming to offer their lives should walk into the city barefoot could not be thought of.
His uncle, George Melvyn, his father's eldest brother, who had so often and so kindly set us up with cows, had offered to take him, and his father had consented to let him go. George Melvyn had a large station outback, a large sheep-shearing machine, and other improvements.
When the war broke out the problem of the government was how to collect the volunteers from these outback towns for active service. It would cost from fifty to one hundred dollars per head in railway fare to bring them into camp. The outbacker, however, solved the problem without waiting for the government to make up its mind. They just made up their swags and "humped the bluey" for the coast.
The Salvation Army does good business in some of the outback towns of the great pastoral wastes of Australia. I ain't got nothink agenst the Roming Carflicks." There's the shearer, fresh with his cheque from a cut-out shed, gloriously drunk and happy, in love with all the world, and ready to subscribe towards any creed and shout for all hands including Old Nick if he happened to come along.
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