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Updated: June 21, 2025
Every one was lending a hand, and the Fizzer, moving in and out among the horses, shouted a medley of news and instructions and welcome. "News? Stacks of it" he shouted. The Fizzer always shouted. "The gay time we had at the Katherine! Here, steady with that pack-bag. It's breakables! How's the raisin market? Eh, lads!" with many chuckles. "Sore back here, fetch along the balsam.
Yet never a day late, and rarely an hour, he does it eight times a year, with a "So long, chaps," and a "Here we are again." The Fizzer was due at sundown, and at sundown a puff of dust rose on the track, and as a cry of "Mail oh !" went up all round the homestead, the Fizzer rode out of the dust. "Hullo!
Every available day of the Dry was needed for the work; but there is one thing in the Never-Never that refuses to take a secondary place the mailman; and at the end of a week we all found, once again, that we had business at the homestead; for six weeks had slipped away since our last mail-day, and the Fizzer was due once more.
"Told you he was a bally ass," the Fizzer shouted in his delight, and promising Dan something later on, he lay down to rest. Dan, however, was hopelessly roused.
Then the mail-bags and et-cet-eras came down in successive thuds, and no one was better pleased with its detail than our Fizzer: fifty letters, sixty-nine papers, dozens of books and magazines, and parcels of garden cuttings. "Last you for the rest of the year by the look of it," the Fizzer declared later, finding us at the house walled in with a litter of mail-matter.
He won't find much beer on dry stages, and I reckon the man's dilly that 'ud play a game of skittles on any one of 'em." Every one was all right down the line! But the Fizzer was always a bird of passage, and by the time dinner was over, and a few postscripts added to the mail, he was ready to start, and rode off, promising the best mail the "Territory could produce in a fortnight."
"Takes a bit of fizzing to get into the Powell before the fourth sundown," the Fizzer says for, forgetting that there can be no change of horses, and leaving no time for a "spell" after the "seventy-five-mile dry " the time limit for that one hundred and fifty miles, in a country where four miles an hour is good travelling on good roads has been fixed at three and a half days.
The Fizzer changes horses at Renner's Springs for the "Downs' trip"; and as his keen eyes run over the mob, his voice raps out their verdict like an auctioneer's hammer. "He's fit. So is he. Cut that one out. That colt's A1. The chestnut's done. So is the brown. I'll risk that mare. That black's too fat."
"I'm imprisoned for life," I moaned, after hearing the news of the outside world; and laughing and chuckling outside, the Fizzer vowed he would "do a rescue next trip if they've still got you down."
"Give 'em a drink at the well there," the Fizzer says as unconcernedly as though he turned on a tap. But the well is old and out of repair, ninety feet deep, with a rickety old wooden windlass; fencing wire for a rope; a bucket that the Fizzer has "seen fit to plug with rag on account of it leaking a bit," and a trough, stuffed with mud at one end by the resourceful Fizzer.
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