THE FUNNY HALF-HOUR.

Woodville Examiner, Volume 3, Issue 282, 10 September 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE FUNNY HALF-HOUR.

By Silas Snell. ON RAFFLING. There is being fostered in this young country of glorious promise a class of entertainment, which, if not crushed in its youth, will eventually prove a great blighting incubus upon a prosperous and happy people. We allude to the raffle. In the rural districts it is making itself particularly felt. Away back, where the voracious wild rabbit, and the prolific thistle, erstwhile, were the only daily trials and troubles, the man with a gun to raffle is now an established fact. He has gone to settle. He is not there for the purpose of reclaiming the wilds, or tilling the fruitful soil; he finds it a more lucrative business to be an ailing man, with a large family and an unfailing supply of household fixings and useful articles, to put up to games of chance ; and he works up the sympathies of the trusting farm labourer, and the fresh country milkmaid, and other parties engaged in pastoral pursuits. He offers to them, as a legitimate speculation, the opportunity of possessing a weakeyed, girth-galled, rawboned, sorel horse, of great age and complex infirmities, for five shillings an opportunity ; and, to excite a spirit of investment in the rural breast, he surrounds his little venture with an air of entertainment. He offers to the speculators, purely out of love for them, ’cause he’s losing money on that horse, some light repast, unlimited bush rum, and the ravishing strains of a windy concertina, that they may dance and make merry when the neighbors gather together to cast for the dismal equine ; and they take him up every time, and before the night is spent, he puts up the family clock, the spring mattress, and the wood horse, reserving a throw for himself and the baby, and

winning back things with unswerving accuracy.

What can our country hope to be without a prosperous agricultural class ? She may worry along without Bishop Moorhouse, but bereave her of the hard-working, productive farmer, and she’s a lone widow at once ; she’ll have to take a back seat among the nations of the earth, a bankrupt, a failure ; and, ere long, her highways and byways, which now hum with life, will be blended into the solemn silent wilderness, where the paddy-melon and the easy-going savage alone can live with any degree of comfort. You see we are ever thinking of our country ; we can’t sleep of nights for musing and fearing she will go wrong whilst we are otherwise engaged ; and in this raffle propromoting party, this merciless extortionist, we detect an evil which beats the destructive bunny and the drought in one innings. He is a parasite preying upon the rough selectors, the pioneers of what should prove a stable agricultural interest; and if he is not put down by Act of Parliament, and held down with something heavy, he will acquire all their working capital, and leave the tillers of the soil with no alternative but to wander back to the towns, and join the police force ; and he’ll sail for home with his ill-gotten gains, and become a C.M.G. and a representative Australian; and the gum-tree will stand unrung, the scrub will luxuriate, and the back-blocks be desolate ; then smash goes the country! We are no alarmist; the evil is upon us ; the leaven is working; federation, annexation, decentralisation and irrigation, fade into insignificance beside the burning question of raffle suppression. We have been through Victoria from stem to stern, and in every country settlement we have found the raffler doing good business. There is not the street organ, the nigger minstrel, or the exciting circus, to afford the people chaste entertainment at reasonable

rates, but the rafller is there ; he is living on a selection, which he is too lazy to till; he has got his large family with him, and his little dart is toiet it be known, far and near, that he is dying of heart disease, rheumatism and physical decay, that the doctors say he must be kept calm and cool, he must not exert himself ; to split wood, or handle a refractory plough would simply be death to him, and he follows the doctor’s advice, and is the fattest man for ten miles round ; and when he offers fifty of the neighbours an arm-chair, and a night of revelry, at half-a-crown a head, they rally up to assist the poor invalid, and partake of the only carousing the district affords, and they depart early in the morning, out of pocket and totally unfit to follow their calling, and the rafller counts his proceeds and talks to his missus of retiring next year,