AUSTRALIAN LIFE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 70, 23 March 1935, Page 10 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIAN LIFE.

NEW ZEALANDER'S MEMORIES PERILS OF THE BUSH. HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS. (By ERNEST L. EYEE.) Whenever I dream of Australia, imagination pictures a township between Sydney and the Blue Mountains (whose indigo colour is caused by the moisture drawn by the sun from the gum-leaves), for, although my family and I were often "hard-up" there, memories of it are not altogether

unpleasant. On the hot October evening of our arrival in the small, scattered settlement wo "dossc:l," not having unpacked our luggage, on our cottage verandah, forty yards from the Western Railway line, but could not sleep because of the attacks of innumerable gigantic, voracious mosquitoes! The surrounding hilly country generally comprised reddishbrown, gravelly soil (which was made, in parts, to produce, almost unbelievably, vegetables and exotic marketfiowers by assiduous labour assisted, in rainless spells, by laid-on water from Sydney's extensive reservoirs), bluegums, scrub, and millions of apparently blind, long-legged, non-venomous big brown/ meat-ants, who, when danger threatened them, darted up through the dozens of holes in their slightly-domed, circular, fivc-fect-in-diameter gravel nests, and ran wildly, but incredibly quickly, hither and thither, with the intention of discovering, e warm ing over, and nipping sharply, the disturbers of their peace. Once a new chum, while expatiating on the local landscape's glories, stood on such a nest, but was compelled, two minutes later, to dive fully dressed into a muddy creek in order to get rid of his numerous, angry, torturing assailants.

Perils of the Bush. Near our cottage was a forest haunted by willy-wagtails (pert birds, like, large New Zealand fantails, that perched on the backs of horses and cattle), mildeyed kookaburras (laughing jackasses), melancholy-cawing crows, sharp-beaked butcher birds, bush canaries, beautifullycoloured diamond sparrows, woodpeckers, magpies, and small, green fruit-eating parrots; and between the heat-twisted j gums lay heaps of dry sticks—swept down by flooded creeks —which my boy and I collected for fuel, despite the danger, unknown in favoured Maoriland, of being bitten, painfully and perhaps fatally, by horrible, slate-coloured woodscorpions, a foot long and half an inch thick, snakes, "camouflaged" by Nature to euit their environment, and trap-door and red-backed spiders. Our neighbour's youngest lad once ran home in terror from the adjacent brickwork's clay pit (the kind in which Australian children are frequently drowned when swimming after heavy rain), and distressfully crying: "Mother, mother, I've been nipped by a 'red-back'; cut my finger open, quick!' allowed, without whimpering, the injured member to be gashed deeply with a razor, and, after it had bled profusely, bathed in lysol. His presence of mind undoubtedly prevented any serious after effects.

But Australian bush-children, who arc sometimes provided at school with antipoison outfits, become etrnngely inured to perils, among which they often move barefooted. A little girl near our place was following, minus boots and shoes, her daddy across his farm one torrid morning, when she collapsed, remained unconscious for three days, and was still unwell, and receiving daily antidote injections, nine months later: Her body displayed no marks, however, of any bites. But death-dealing "terrors" lurked in unexpected places, as the following incident ehowed. Our landlord, who, when young, had "humped bluey" with Henry Lawson, asked us if we would varnish for him (as, being ill, he could not carry out his contract) seventy long seats from the local "movie" show. We agreed, and found beneath them, to our surprised consternation, 40 red-backed spiders, which we unmercifully dispatched, while visualising the .stampede that would have ensued among the theatre's patrons had they suddenly discovered their proximity to the dangerous things.

Seen From a Window. My eon and I also filled many sacks with coal from the railway embankment, where it lay scattered, in all shapes and sizes, for miles, having been usually overbalanced from western coal trains at the curves, or blown down by the strong winds that, inversely to New Zealand, prevail mostly in winter time. But we could not understand why an unemployed man's children, who lived directly opposite us, across the rails, collected daily so much coal from the restricted area of embankment lying between our respective homes, until, on an earlv, cold, foggy morning, preceding a warm, typically-clouniess June day, the puzzle was elucidated by the wife, who saw, through a window, a train puff up the incline with open furnace doors, against which —to quote Will Lawson — was silhouetted a fireman:

Whose online weighed just eighty tons (Blow for the crossing, blow!) He swung his spade on the long, fast runs, The smallest man in the "firing line," Built on a plan that was superfine— He couldn't have weighed scarce eight-stone-four, But sonny, iie made the furnace roar (Blow, you Big Bull, blow !) Then, just as the fiery monster came abreast of, and rocked (in a manner to which we had grown accustomed) our Australian home, the diminutive steker heaved overside two weighty lumps of coal. And often after that occasion we glimpsed, when the same train passed at dawn or dusk, a similar jettisoning of the State's assets by the good Samaritan to help hie financially-embarrassed friends!

Surrounding Blacktown —a neighbouring village called after an aboriginal settlement that once existed there —were extensive convict-day estates embellished with stone and brick mansions (some with private cemeteries attached) occupied mostly by descendants of the rough-living, hard-riding, sporting, hospitable original owners, a ruling military aristocracy with "ticket-of-leave" servants, whose decaying huts dotted the paddocks where the post-and-rail fences were perennially in disrepair. An enterprising New Zealander, who had recently acquired, in the midst of these families, a neglected valley-estate, with pepper tree-shaded drives, and a pretty 6tone villa, observed to me: "You'll notice that my place is the only one hereabouts where, in this prevailing seven months' drought, green grass grows! That's because I utilise manures, whose use my unprogrcssive, tired, but well-to-do neighbours don't bother to understand, but graze instead their bony, halfrstarved stock on the wiry, brown, native grass."

Around the Settlement. Memories of the township's near and distant environs include: "Tin hare" racing courses and greyhounds' kennels; the well-appointed ITAwkesbury Agricultural College, with 3400 attached house; the old stone country seat of Governor Macquarie, the originator, in 1813, of the road to Bathurst; a retired civil servant who had shared the same steamer-cabin as Victor Daley when the poet was enjoying a South Seas' health voyagn at the Sydney "Bulletin's" expense; and tile tempestuous, destructive, furnace-hot, north-westerly wind, accompanied by heaven-blurring, smothering, reddish-brown, "Never Never" dust, that blew for 48 hours!. I see again Penrith'e vineyards and wine-vats; also the orange and peach orchards (in which I often purchased a sugar sack of fruit for a shilling) of elevated, romanticallypicturesque, church-spired Castle Hill, where, in 1800, 400 convicts, inflamed by the oratorical verbosity of several brutally-flogged Irish rebels, broke their irons, downed their road tools, seized 2.">0 muskets, and, expecting to be able, when reinforced by many convicts on the Hawkcsbury Eiver, to overpower the authorities, set out for Windsor, but were overtaken by the sqjdiers and the ringleaders hanged; and, finally, I visualise the sad December sunect crimsoning the enchanting Britannia Falls, in the cool-atmosphcred Biue Mountains, beyond which, in Edwin J. Brady's words, lived the courageous settlers who

Faced Hip rntrlnc summer, nnd prnyed a cooling change— Dust-reddened In the desert; flre-haunted on the range: Who nursed the stock to water, fly-pestered throiiKli the haze, And heat nnd desolation of dry, droughtdevilled days!