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Updated: May 18, 2025
I had only drifted here through carelessness, brooding, and discontent. I walked on and on till I was more than half-way to the only neighbours a wretched selector's family, about four miles down the creek, and I thought I'd go on to the house and see if they had any fresh meat.
No sign now of a selector's clearing, or of any human occupation.... But there was a pack of emus hustling and shaking their big bunches of feathers like startled ballet girls. 'I feel as if part of the Zoo had been let loose, said Lady Bridget when again there bounded along in the near distance a pair of kangaroos with a little Joey kangaroo taking a lesson in locomotion behind its parents.
This protection is necessary, because the box bark in the roof has crumbled away and left fringed holes also because the fowls roost up there. Sometimes the paper sags, and the cream may have to be scraped off an article on dairy farming. The selector's wife removes the newspapers, and reveals a thick, yellow layer of rich cream, plentifully peppered with dust that has drifted in somehow.
If the selector found him to be a damaged or incomplete orphan, that was the selector's own affair, and he had to put up with his bargain as best he might. The person who chose an orphan in this way became responsible for the boy's maintenance while boyhood lasted, and I believe it was not customary to send out lads under the age of ten or twelve years.
He put the trace harness on his horse, drew in all the logs within half a mile, and piled them on the windward side of that gum; and during the night the fire found a soft place, and the tree burnt off about six feet above the surface, falling on a squatter's boundary fence, and leaving the ugliest kind of stump to occupy the selector's attention; which it did, for a week.
They had a saying that Uncle Abel saw with ten squinting eyes. Also, he could never or would not, as the family said remember names. He referred to Mrs Porter, a thin, haggard selector's wife, as "Mrs Stout" and he balanced matters by calling Mrs Southwick "Mrs Porterwicket" when he didn't address her as "Mrs What's-the-woman's-name" and he succeeded in deeply offending both ladies.
The dummy would have gone under had his wife not arrived on the scene with the eldest son and the rest of the family. They all fell foul of Tom. The woman was the worst. The selector's dog chawed the other and came to his master's rescue just in time -or Tom Hopkins would never have lived to become the inmate of a lunatic asylum.
The impounding of the selector's cattle led to the last bad quarrel between Wall and his son Billy, who was a tall, good-natured Cornstalk, and who reckoned that Australia was big enough for all of us.
Where the road to the west from Birralong dips down to the valley of Boulder Creek, a selection stretches out on the left-hand side, well cleared and fenced, and with the selector's homestead standing back a couple of hundred yards from the main road.
The companions of her childhood were to be Gatling-gunned because of the squatters, whose selfish greed and heartless indifference to all others had made them hateful to this selector's daughter.
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