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Updated: May 8, 2025
Swags were rolled up, saddle-bags packed, horses had been rounded up and driven in, the shearers' cook and his mate had had their fight, and about a hundred men shearers, rouseabouts, and wool-washers were waiting round the little iron office to get their cheques. We were about half through when one bushman said to another: "Stop your damned swearin', Jim. Here's Peter M'Laughlan!"
He ought to have been at sea, or comfortably dead and stowed away under ground, instead of cooking for a mob of unredeemed rouseabouts in an uncivilized shed in the scrub, six hundred miles from the ocean.
"Let's go along to those agencies to-morrow and say we'll be rouseabouts without any wages, just for food. I'd love to be a rouseabout. It sounds so beautifully active. 'Rouseabout'! I think John the Baptist was a rouseabout, don't you? The rouseabout of the Lord! Oh Louis, let's be that, shall we?" "You'd never stand it." "Well, anyway, after this week we've got to do something."
These cats live well during shearing, and take their chances the rest of the year just as shed rouseabouts have to do. They seem glad to see the traveller come; he makes things more homelike.
They were sitting at the western end of the rouseabouts' hut, enjoying the breeze that came up when the sun went down, and smoking and yarning. The "case" in question was a wretchedly forlorn-looking specimen of the swag-carrying clan whom a boundary-rider had found wandering about the adjacent plain, and had brought into the station.
These casual laborers and rouseabouts are paid ten dollars a week, while the shearer works on piece work, receiving six dollars for each hundred sheep shorn, and it is a slow man who does not average one hundred and fifty per day. All the shearing is done by machine, and in Western Queensland good shearers are in constant employment for ten months of the year.
'Your teaching? 'How dare you? No; that is the teaching of rouseabouts and gins. I am trying to unteach it. Poor kiddies! I found them queer, wild, little Bush animals, with no childish companions, so I became a child myself, and we are the best mates in the world. The other is a boy, a monkey and a rip, but we are civilizing together. Do you know the funniest things in the world?
The shearers came aboard next morning, with their swags and two cartloads of boiled mutton, bread, "brownie", and tea and sugar. They numbered about fifty, including the rouseabouts. This load of sin sank the steamer deeper into the mud; but the passengers crowded over to port, by request of the captain, and the crew poked the bank away with long poles.
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