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Updated: April 30, 2025
In these he packed his money, his nuggets, some tea, sugar, tobacco, salt, a flask of brandy, matches, and as many ship's biscuits as he thought he was likely to want; he took no meat, for he could supply himself from some accommodation-house or sheep-station, when nearing the point after which he would have to begin camping out.
Capital was required to get a sheep-station, and employment as an overseer, in consequence of the depression that existed in the markets for all kinds of stock, altogether hopeless. No man is idle here longer than he can help it, unless he have the wherewithal to look to; and there are fifty modes of gaining bread here, if a man will turn to them?
Perhaps I ought to have mentioned before that Billy was just nine years old. I had come a long journey across country with Glenn, the squatter, and now we were entering the homestead paddock of his sheep-station, Winnanbar. Afar to the left was a stone building, solitary in a waste of saltbush and dead-finish scrub. I asked Glenn what it was. He answered, smilingly: "The Strangers' Hut.
The storm was drawing nearer; the rising grounds to the west were in black shadow but on the fields and scattered buildings in front, wild gleams were striking now here, now there. How trim everything was! how solid and prosperous. The great cattle-shed on the one hand the sheep-station on the other, with its pens and hurdles the fine stone-built laboratory the fields stretching to the distance.
"Well, I've just come in from the bush. It's four days now since I left Tanindie it's a sheep-station down on the Murray. Thomas Rowlands, as shepherds there, asked me to come and tell you that there's a young gent called Scholfield, or Oldfield, or some such name, as is dangerously ill in a little log-hut near the river.
There was a good deal of mystery about his character and position, nobody being able to explain who he was, whence he came, or what was the source of his influence; and it was rather a curious circumstance that I should learn the explanation of what had so much puzzled me in South America, at a solitary sheep-station in Van Diemen's Land.
I shall now proceed to offer a few observations upon sheep and sheep-stations. A sheep-station is, probably, the most desolate place at which a man could be sent to pass his time.
The time Mary and I shifted out into the Bush from Gulgong to 'settle on the land' at Lahey's Creek. I'd sold the two tip-drays that I used for tank-sinking and dam-making, and I took the traps out in the waggon on top of a small load of rations and horse-feed that I was taking to a sheep-station out that way. Mary drove out in the spring-cart.
You can guess the result of such a training. Left alone in the world at the age of eighteen, upon the death of his father, he emigrated to Australia. Failing to take any interest in a bank-clerkship provided by an uncle for him at Melbourne, he was sent to a sheep-station near Glenorchy, one hundred miles inland. Here again he paid little attention to the occupation chosen for him.
These men live all the year round on salt beef and bread, the latter baked by themselves: they have no change either of diet, of employment, or of any thing else; for, be it known, a really good sheep-station in Australia yields nothing but grass and gum-trees, the soil being dry and poor.
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