AUSTRALIA'S NATIVE GRAMARYE. (Sydney Bulletin.)

Otago Witness, Issue 2650, 28 December 1904, Page 71

AUSTRALIA'S NATIVE GRAMARYE. (Sydney Bulletin.)

Gramarye? Yes. Wire-fencing and iingbarking, secular education and female suffrage notwithstanding, there is> an Australian gramarye — an illusion, a transformation ; an Unknown and Unperceivable busy amongst things, to the confounding of our understanding. It shows big at times. Water, lakes of it, where no water should bf — where no water is. Clouds and mists imitating, impersonating water, in unexplainable fashion. The whole earth's surface rising and falling, vanishing utterly, aivt becoming suddenly and miraculously revealed ; cattle taking on the size and shape of camels ; mountains melting away _from sight as blocks of metal in a crucible. Swagmen, two miles away on a dusty road, bearing down like monsters out of Elfinland. Strange dooms, moreover, following on .curses, explicit as deserved. „ . Most weird and wonde»cful of these latter was the dying of Billy Mills, on the Mulligan. A gin had died at the camp a mile away from Billy's shanty, and tht other poor wretches were hanging about, afraid of something. Billy came blustering across the creek and in amongst them. "Why not get alonga camp? Only dam fool stay here !" They shivered and muttered. An old hag crooned out, "Kee-kee-kee-ee." "Bunkum," said Billy ; "you 'fraid o' ghost belong Mary, I put -him down." And he spurred his horse across the grave. Then did the old hag break out in a torrent of words evil-sounding. I asked One-Eyed Peter, piloting me across to the Upper Paroo, what she meant. Petei was a station black, but with a, lot of the old stuff about him. Be answered, "No good. I think it long time before Billy Mills come down off horse." That same day as he neared home Billy saw a couple of strange horses in his paddock, and set out to run them, into the yard. He rods hard and cursed hard, fjr those strangers were cunning outlaws. Suddenly the missis on the verandah saw him fall right forward and grip his horse round the neck. He stayed that way. ! The horse shook himself, and made for the stable. It was a terrible job to get Billy clear, for he was stark dead, and his fingers knit like the strands of a spliced wh'e rope. Ihe doctor who came out and cut him up said a plain :as>e of heart failure. But Gee-Eyed Peter knew nothing about heartfailure, neither did 1 that old gin who spoke the doom.

Better beloved is the gramarye of Nature, the effects wrought by elementary beings of sport with Avhat of old were termed the elements. The mirage is one of these. Scientific talk about the sky mirrored on heated air strata or distant water reflected from the sky, refracted rays, and consequent distorted visions is all very well to those who have not seen it, ridden alongside it ; felt a horse bear away towards it, and pulled him off with difficulty. The mirage is a lake of gramarye. The beings who order such things make it for their sport and our delusion or destruction. There is some dreary plain country north of the Lachlan and west of Cond'obolin, where the mirage has seemed to me to appear most perfect in its illusion. It is a land of very gracious greenery in a good season, of dull grey horror in a bad. The plains touch the far-away horizon of sunset and sunrise over some leagues, but more frequently they are broken by belts of box, beyond which is the scrub. I rode therjfc once in a bad time, when the crows weitP sleek. On the outer track, there was no water at times within 30 miles, and no lake within a hundred. There was neither grass nor scrub nor food nor shelter for man or beast. In the morning the sun got up, and -ere he was a handspike high you could feel him rejoicing a,s a giant to .run his course ; asserting that the heavens and the earth were his own, smiting sore and relenting not. While the day was young, the elementary beings, the bodyiess ghosts of night who fool sincere spiritualists and people who pry about the frontier of things imrevealed, began to join in the game, and there was the gramarye of the water-ghost oi the plain. It is of no use talking about a reflection of the sky. The sky was steel ; that water-ghost softly blue as a wild lobelia bloom. The sky was still as death ; that watei rippled ever its whole surface, and

lapped on the dull-grey face of the plain. A lone tree was reflected ; and I do believe if one could have challenged the genii with the proper wo*"d, fairy boats should J have appeared there, and Lorelei visions fit to luje wise men to a ghastly end. There is no water above or below any horizon to resemble it. There is nothing known to ns in Heaven above or earth below of which it can be a reproduction. Ifc is a waterghost, the work of water-sprites, the very same, may be, who have been imprisoned down in the great cretacean caverns for untold centuries, and who wait the touch of the divining rod of man to break forth rejoicing and gladdening. All gramarye, the mirage, whatever science may assert. And just beyond the mirage where the ' scrub begins, nnllee first, then mulga. I happened on another bit of gramarye, about which science so far has no word whatever. , There is a snake out there variously named, i Copper, saltbush, and myall snake. It is j not more than a three-foot fellow, with a vicked, flat head and a switched tail, a sort of dirty olive-green in colour, with settles coppery -tipped, nearly all copper about the head. The brown snake (Dielrenia superciliosa), probably, taking on ' the colour of its habitat, as snakes do. But j it has got hold of something else that I I'teds explaining. '"Not that one," said Jaeky, the blackfellow ; "not that one," as the drover swung his whip over the devil-thing lurking in the dust. Next instant the whip came down, and there was a devil divided and the two ends dancing. "S«8 by-and-bye," said Jacky, -and kept clear of us the rest of the day. At night He made a camp of his own, and I went over to get it out of him. j Jacky's word was, "Know plenty, when ' that fellow mate come along." We laughed, but about midnight Jem's dog, who wasn't ! easily fooled himself, and took no stock in fooling other people, set up a row. , A. ■volley of barks, then a roar and a rus'ii, a worrying of something, and a yelp. A i blazing firestick showed us a "mate blonga I that fellow" ; just such a snake as Jem j had cut in two, broken-backed among the ! ashes ; and the old dog locking sick. Jem's | language, as he turned the old fellow over I and sucked the bite, was strong, doubtless, ; as St. Patrick's, if not so effective ; and we ! harl hard work to keep him off Jacky, j whom he charged with " 'ticing the dam j snake along." Jacky did but know, and , warned us fair enough ; but what sort of gramarye is it which enables and impels a j creature like that io follow a track 15 I miles, and then permits him to be baulked by a doo;? Possibly, however, it was only a coincidence. Stretch away a few hundred miles farther j north, and you come occasionally on a bit ! of country whereon some achievement of j black magic might well be expected. The • Moonlight on a bare, grey plain of death, brigalow fringes the plains .out there, ferced, as it seems, with brigalow, is fit to inspire another Dante or a Dore illustrating him. There is not such a ghostly , tre& in this world as. the brigalow. in the moonlight. A sheeted ghost seems each , one of the long, ragged line, a ghostly arm. j each limb thrust out pointing. There is • neither shelter nor sustenance nor consola- . tion nor comfort in that bush, and verily I had rather not be there to see, if gramarye should begin to work under the influence ( which brought it forth. Blackfellow orgies in bora ceremonies might fit in with it well enough. It- is hair-bristling to think what the gramarye of the drought-stricken brigalow land might be. Some of the Undine clan work a rare ! gramarye in the valley of the Yarra, not more than five-and-twenty miles outside the city of Melbourne. Oh, dear old Yarra of those regions' Lovelier stream never flowed out of wooded hills. Will any be left, since good and noble old Paul de Castella died, to guard as a sacred thing the golden, wattle borders of thy banks? But I would speak of a ferlie now which not unfrequently in the spring and autumn months of the year appears when the valley broadens out at Yering and St. Huberts. The mists gather there on many nights of the year, and they are as the dew of Hermon to the vines clothing the low foothills, putting into their berries the soul of that wine whose bouquet is as of violets, whose matvre juice- is soft as velvet on the tongue, and whose flavour lingers on the palate as a sweet dream in memory. But we speak now of other things, of the gramarye which is worked in that mist sometimes. Methinks, then, a group of Undines must conspire and say, '"Let us make a show for mankind, let us spread a robe of faery over the commonplace of her upper world. ' For there are" mornings when, if you should i be housed on the Christmas hills whteh ovex*look all that valley, an unmistakable glimpse of fairyland may be won, and, if you be fit for such things, kept in memory for ever. Under the white moon in the early morning hours the fairy folks spread a great white sheet. It is miles in leng^n and in breadth. It covers a score of little hills and all the vineyards. It reaches half-way up the sides of Juliet and Nunda, guardians of the valley's head. It is awfulseeming in that white light and absolute stillness ; death-like ; a floor whereon ten thousand ghosts might dance. Oh, ye*, there is gramarye in it unmistakable. With the dawn the Undines begin to play. Our dimensions are not sufficient to enable us to hear and) interpret their voices. But never doubt they laugh as they heave and sport beneath the mist, like old Norse Jotuns tossing the massr clouds. . For the mist stirs, then break* into billows over its whole surface. You, needs must, taking the evidence of your I own senses, declare it to be actual flurl. | You doubt it— what? As if in response '. j some Khulebiorn heaves a mass against I the mountain side. And what are all your Coogee and Bondi surf spurts in comparison? White foam shoots up a hundred feet, and takes from the low sun's rays a rainbow glory. And that is but mist and i

{4g disturbed by the wind), you would say? Go to ! The merry play may last for an hour, and then the master oi the revels bids all to rest, and the sun deals with the mists at Jiis will. Gathers them up, fold by fold, fleece by fleece, takes, them gently from the hill tops, revealing first the trees, plume-like, mystic above the broken se : i still lingering. Next the hills and • the house roots and the vineyards and the orchards ; and thus slowly all the commonplace matter of fact of the world's plain day. otill, let us pity him who can forget, therein the gramarye of the dawn. I hold that occasional dawning on X arra glen to be infinitely more spiritual, wonderful, delightful, than any geyser play of Maoriland. Those mud and stone-charged mighty jets are but tne results of -the struggles and the heart throbs •of an Eneeladus fast chained below, liiis ferlie of ours is of fairyland, • where rides tue fa : ry queen. And oh ! marvel of completeness, there lived a while on the oraes and in the scaurs of those wild hills a milkwhite do*. I believe there is also some common pi ace and satisfactory account of her ; but when, crossing the bared field of the mists and climbing through the ferns to the fores" landis, I saw first her wide, soft, tender eyes and coat of snow there was some loosening of knees and lifting of hair. Whj could but remember My sand is run, my thread is spun, This sign ooncemeth -, ie . The West of Victoria, the old Australia (Felix, from Auripiles to tihe Elephant and Blowhard to Shaclwell, has much, of gramarye. The powers of the nether dee-? 5 ! heaved up these hummocks on a date which lies not behind many scons. You have but to put up a 50ft adit in the sides of some of them to come at the scoriae. And those powers meant desolation. A broad field of desolation beneath the grim bastion of the brrampians, with those lona hills as monuments, asserting "Here conqueredi the enemy." That was black art, but on it came- he gentle gramarye, which converted traprock into chocolate mould, and in due season clothed that mould with grass, and over the grass lightwood and sheoak (sacred to our gramarye the sheoak, as even the old mistletoe-festooned forest king of fche old land to that of the Druids). I remember one evening inexpressible in its greenery. Light rain had fallen, and would fall again, but now the almost horizontal sun's rajs smote through and> over everything. Th-* whole earth face was a single emerai-'I, shaped of the gods. Presently out of the east came a summer shower, and gramary%s again. Iris formed as it seemed almost within arm's length, and as the rain beat back in spray from the ground — lo ! iris in a sphere. I saw it, scientists explained it, and a son of Belial declared it to be due to the very same cause which makes the sun dance in the eyes of good Irishmen on Easter morning. He was foolish as ths scientist. "Tt> was gramarye. 411 these things, and many more, I, wa (forthe're is still. a, remnant), have seen, fell, known, and seeing, feeling,' knowing, have not been afraid with any amazement. Who shall help, save, deliver usjtf a time come 3 when, heart cold), soul sick, and due responsive chords of feeling drunk, we see but as others see, and" know but as others know, and without their solid consolations. That Lethe of hellish stagnation seems to lie just without the threshold at timss. The glory comes, the glory goes, the wer of mystery is spun, and the beings of mys tery should appeal. But woe's me! I do but see a Iream within a dream, The hilltop hoarsed .with pines. The gods grant that such times as these may also be wfch things that pass, foi their permanence were the second death — F. M. (N.S.W.)