HARD WORK.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 53, 10 January 1852, Page 9 (Supplement)

HARD WORK.

Under the above title appeared lately in the Liverpool Mercury, an article, (one of a series upon colonising difficulties and hardships in Australia,) in which the writer addressed himself chiefly to persons previously unused to toil, in the usual acceptation of the term, and described himself as "a pioneer of the class."

This article contains so much sound practical advice, and places the so often dreaded transition from leisure or from mental labour to the sturdy work of the actual settler in so agreeable a light, that it cannot fail to be useful to some of our readers if we extract its most striking passages. Passing over the first disappointment of the writer at finding " gentlemanly employment" unobtainable, and his subsequnt conformity to the circumstances in which he found himself placed, by " turning to," we will narrate his earliest experience of hard work in his own words. They embody the thoughts and the efforts of a truly persevering spirit, that would do well anywhere.

" Before twelve months from the time I commenced hutkeeper had expired, I got quite indisposed to the sort of occupations by which persons who have had a good education usually obtain a livelihood. I felt it a most unequivocal addition to my personal enjoyments to have got free from the law of the clock. Moreover, with feet always warm ■with exercise, and pores in constant action, and lungs and muscles rapidly developing, my stomach became quite a different organ. I began, as it were, to enjoy my being alive. I mean to say, my existence, without the addition of any.fnrther cause, gave me pleasure. This I had certainly never felt throughout the interval between childhood and that time, whilst confined to the desk. The old hurdle maker used often to laugh, and say " he should make a man of me; I was only a gentleman before." And, to be candid, I really felt there was a great deal of very important truth about his sarcastic way of putting the matter.

" I had made up my mind to finishing the twelve months at hut-keeping; and did so. Afterwards I went to work at bush-work altogether. And it is what I experienced at this time that leads me to insist so strongly on the Australian colouies being the proper field for such adventurers as myself. I did not find the first habituation to work so easy. For ten days out of afortnight my hands were blistered, and when I waked in the morning I felt very stiff and tired. I could see plainly enough that if I had not begun with the two or three hours hutkeeper's work only a day, and then gone on to add to that two or three more with the hurdle-maker, I should never have been able to stand the regular twelve hours of ordinary bush-work. And yet, afterwards, such is the force of gradual initiation, I got into the practice of working fourteen and sixteen hours without inconvenience.

" The old man's job lasted about five months after I went to work for him altogether. Towards the latter part of it the timber near the station failed, and we had to go further out. After three day's search,—for timber for this sort of work must be very good, indeed—we found a place about seven miles off, on the side of the range of hills, where, there was sufficient in one spot to warrant us in pitching our hut at it.

" There was no human habitation within seven miles of us ;no road or path to us. When we went to and fro ourselves, we travelled merely by the natural land marks ; so far along the mountain, then down a particular gully, then through a forest of one particular sort of timber, then taking to the creek bank, that led eventually to the piece of country on which the head station lay. Once on the open plain we coul i see the farm, and make to it by the eye.

" In Australia, the days are not so long in summer nor so short in winter, as they are here. Our time of rising in the summer used to be about six a.m., and our hours of leaving off work, about eight p.m. First, we went to work for about an hour, then had our breakfast and smoked our pipes ; next, we worked till about noon—our clock; the sun alone ; (but then, unlike the sun of England,it was almost as regularly up in its place to be referred to at noon as a church clock): then came dinner, and a rest of an hour; then another spell at work, till about half- past four, then lunch ; and then a very leisurely hour .or two ,of work to finish the day. Then the last meal of the day. and a lo mge on the grass by the fire all the rest of the evening. Of a moonlight night we used to go out and catch 'possums. Sixty-four skins of these richly furred animals sewn together for me by one of the shepherds, for the charge of a pound of tobacco, (four shillings)furnished me with a fur rug of about nine feet by seven, which lasted statedly for a blanket, and, when traveling, for both bed and blanket, nearly four years. When doubled, it would turn any quantity of rain that could fall on it. I have laid out, wrapped in it, on the high open grounds

of the mountains, without a fire, under heavy hoar frost, and when I awoke found myself as dry and warm as if I had lodered in the best bed of an hotel.

" The worst part of our fortunes was the distance we had to fetch our water. The spring where we got it was full a quarter of a mile ofF, and below us, so that we had to bring it up on our heads, in a five gallon keg.

"At length the job was completed. At settling, we had nearly thirty pounds a piece to take, from the time we began to work on equal shares. The old man, as he had done for years, betook himself to the first public-house he could find. I staid a day thinking he might come on ; but when I found he was bent on not stirring, I left him, and wandered on by myself in search of another job.

"By this time I had become completely weaned from my former occupations. If a S3- dney merchant had now said to me—Here is a situation of a hundred a year for you in my office ; or—There is a job at my farm at which you can earn a hundred a year ;—I should certainly have taken the latter. The thought of the confinement and discipline of an office life was become repugnant to me. I liked to feel that I was my own master, and could take a week or a fortnight's holidays, or a leisure day when

I chose,

" Looking for a job, too, in Australia, is a very different thing from what it must be in England, and the old countries generally, where the working people are very poor. The traveller, there, strolls off with his blanket, or 'possum cloak, rolled and slung over his shoulder; and if he has money to keep himself in tobacco, may traverse the whole length and breadth of the country, without feeling the want of a penny further. If he finds not what he is in search of at this farm, he goes on to the next, and almost wherever he goes in the bush, he is sure of a night's lodging, and a welcome to such as the hut he may happen to go into affords."

Such a search ouv " pioneer " found himself compelled to undertake for some time without success. He records his observations of human nature during1 this interval,and bears testimony to the habits of almost patriarchal hospitality which mark the bushmau of yesterday contrasted with him of to day.

" The variety of characters to be met with in the colony on such rambles as these is not less surprising than amusing. The same may be said of the adventures through which their various forms of character have led them in their course through life. At one hut you meet with a lad transported for some petty crime from the mining districts of Lancashire and Cornwall, as unintelligible in speech as the aborigines, and more uncouth and ignorant in all that belongs to man's great study—man ; for the latter are remarkably penetrating and keen, and full of insight into man, and his passions and motives. Along with him you find stationed, perhaps, as the other shepherds, an acute London thief, or a Dublin Jack Keen, up to every artful dodge, and capable of taking your measure, so far as his own purposes are concerned, at the first glance he takes of you. Along with these, probably as a hut-keeper, is stationed a plain, simple, free emigrant lad, just arrived. And it is remarkable how perceptible is the benefit to them all, which the friction of character produces. The uncouth lad, rallied by the townsmen, soon begins to get his wits about him ; the sharper, with no one at hand that it needs a second thought to circumvent and manage, and possessed of all natural necessities, grows simple and straightforward; whilst the new emigrant, on his part, begins to collect a sort of personality around himself, and learn the shrewd discrimination of the convict, whilst learning at the same time to value still more his own position as an honest man. "At another hut, where you stop for the night, you meet with an old convict, who, in his younger days, was a dragoon, and fought through ten or twelve years in the continental wars ; or a foot soldier transported from the East Indies; or a veteran tar. Sometimes there is a young 'Australian lad, shepherding in his own country. Occasionally you come upon a hut, where a little emigrant family is all located in one group —a father and mother, a couple of sons and a daughter. But these huts are not in favour with bushmen when they are travelling. The inmates, new to the country, and grouped too strongly to give in rapidly to a change in their habits, almost universally manifest a selfishness and inhospitality natural enough where great penury prevails, but felt by old bushmen to be very much out of place where both food and wages are so plentiful and easily obtained, and where house-room costs nothing. There is no piece of advice that should more urgently be proffered to the emigrant labourer than not to be inhospitable. If he should be so, he will soon find his name up all round the part of the country where he may be stationed; and when he comes to visit neighbouring huts himself, he will find himself re- . ceived with glum silence, and suffered to walk out just as he walked in. If, on the other hand, he manifests none of that selfishness, he will pass on without difficulty into the ranks of his equals."

After a digression in favour of the healthiness of Australia, the inherent antidotal property of the atmosphere towards pulmonary and hepatic diseases, and the beneficial effects of the habitual simplicity in food of Australian settlers, he again proceeds with his personal adventures :

" When I had been travelling in search of a job for about a fortnight, I confess it was only the sentiment of moral honesty that kept me very anxious about soon finding one. The weather was delightful, all my load was my opossum cloak and an extra shirt; the natural scenery I passed through varied for ever into new and more attractive landscapes—now wild and grand among the mountains, now in the lowlands richly green, parklike, cheerful ,- now consisting of forests full of gigantic trees, making the surface bare by their perpetual shadow ; now of little snug grassy nooks of valleys, with their solitary hut at the foot of some part of the surrounding range that hemmed them in. While at every hut there was a resting place, and an hour's yarn ; or peril ips even a pause, soon after noon, for the rest of the day and the night; all the hut-keeper's stories and his idiosyncracy to study till the shepherds or stockmen came home, and then theirs. And really some of the tales which some of them could tell of their lives past, and many observations on the world and its ways which they made, were well worth listening to. Of course there sometimes came in more disagreeable elements of various sorts. " I never got benighted except on one occasion, and then, through the mistake of a man who had directed me. He had told me of a station on the opposite side of a range, and I considered I could make it easily by a little after sundown. It turned out, however, either that he was greatly mistaken as to the distance, or I had mistaken my way by following a wrong gully in rising to the summit of the mountain. It was just sunset when I reached the top of the ridge. The remaining light barely sufficed me to trave-se the table land, till I found the point where I could see in the plains beneath the river for which I was making, and discover the long ravine of about seven miles' length of descent, that led down to it. It must have been midnight when I reached the mouth of the ravine opening out on the lowland forests. When I arrived there surely enough I found the station, but it was forsaken. Not another was within a dozen miles, so I was fain to content myself with taking up my quarters in the empty hut. So far, there was not much the matter, I could easily have gone without a supper, and got a breakfast in good time at the next hut by starting at daybreak. But to my extreme mortification and misery, when I came to look for water I found there was none. The creek >vas dry, and on throwing a stone into a well they had dug, of twelve or fifteen feet deep, I found that also was dry. Otherwise I should have certainly found a dry sapling, and clambered down into it, and chanced getting up again—so intolerably thirsty w«s I after nearly twenty-five miles'walk, without water, ami a dinner of salt beef. I shall never forget that night. Of course I knew very well that when there was no water in the well, and none in the creek, there was none anywhere on a' sandy surface. Yet I could not refrai.i from seeking. Full half a dozen times I set to and searched, yet every time my common sense told me it would be labour in vain. Towards morning, however, with rest and the coolness of the night air, and no doubt, also the moisture which the system in its then state would so eagerly imbibe in breathing air loaded with thick fog, my thirst went quite off; and after a couple of hours sleep, I set off with the first light, and made good my way to better quarters for a breakfast. And having thus once more put to rights the bushman's main spring—his stomach —I took what further sleep I wanted.

" At this station, or rather farm in its first stage, I was lucky. A large barn and a stackyard had just been undertaken by a rough bush carpenter, aud he wanted some one to work with him, so I chimed in with him as soon as he came in from the mountain, where he had been looking for the necessary timber."

Plain, but pointed is the moral of this " unvarnished tale. It places perseverance at the head of the colonist's catalogue of virtues, and likens it to his guardian spirit, ever at hand with support and consolation, in an earthly sense at all events. It describes the growth of an energy ultimately indomitable, and of a roughly clothed but sincere kindliness, even in the lonely wild, apart from the Christian influences which are recognized as the sources of true charity. The bonds of brotherhood appear, at any rate, to be knit more closely together amid the silence of the back country, than in the midst of the services of religion and within the sound of the church-going bell; and it seems that is only when the links of society are disunited, that proud and pur-blind man discovers his depeudauee upon his fellow-man, and sees the true value of neighbourship. Selfishness sleeps in the solitudes of nature, to awake only amid the hum of the busy multitude.