FACTS, FANCIES, QUIPS & COMMENTS

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 4, 27 January 1909, Page 43

FACTS, FANCIES, QUIPS & COMMENTS

FROM THE AUSTRALIAN PAPERS.

Timothy Coghlan holds his job as New South Wales General Agent against all coiners. The dapper Tim with the snappy eyes, voracious appetite for figures, and knack of writing interesting despatches, has captured Premier Wade, and is to be given a further term in London. Starting at eighteen years of age in the public service, Tim worked his way from a high stool in the Works Department to the post of chief figur* fakir in thirteen years. Which dispels 4he idea that merit goes unrewarded in the service of the State. Great enthusiasm is being aroused by the forthcoming competitions of the grand Commonwealth Eisteddfod, which takes place in the Sydney Town Halt next Easter, starting on April 5,1909, and extending over eight days and eight nights. Applications by the score are being received from all the States for copies of the syllabus ami entry forms. The greatest amount of interest seems to he centred in the Grand Champion Choral Contest, for which event the prize-money totals £175 but the 70 other items on the programme, which include r-010 events for vocalists, instrumentalists, elocutionists, dancers, etc., each have a large following. The prize money totals over £l,lOO. & Kidd had taken a tremendous amount of trouble with his C hristmas turkey. He had (bought it When it was young and impressionable, and had brought it into hid family, so to speak, and devoted himself to the task of feeding it up. He did all in his power to induce it to accept the Omar philosophy of “eat, drink and he merry, for tomorrow we die.” and with some success. The bird responded quite'' gratefully, and grew and put on flesh W a manner that tilled the Kidd household with happiest anticipations. Then on£"morning Mr. Kidd arose to find •that liio turkey was gone. Some suspicion a'ttSehed to Sin Fat, the gardener down by . the creek, and a policeman went to investigate, and found the decapitated -’turkey hanging in Sin’s shed. The turkey, was seized.' ”Wha’ fo’?” yelled the indignant Celestial as hr was hauled off.' ••Wha’ fo’? Turkey he chase line, ine‘ kill urn in self-defence. He hit me first.’ But Sin Fat got three months >ll the same. <&><s►s> Sydney Harbour is invariably infested with sharks’during the summer months, and from present indications it would seem that the current season is likely to be an exceptionally busy one for those professional aiwl"amateur fishermen who regard the destruction of these monsters :o a business ahd a sport respectively, t he, sharks reported so far have not been more' numerous than, those who visited the harbour during the corresponding period of last year, but they have certainly on the average been larger. Early last slimmer ’s< bools of grey nurses, one of the 1 eaid'voracious varieties', could b* seen cruising around on the surface of the water. They .were mostly small ami inoffensive, and there was no record of any of them attacking human beings or small boats. This year, however, the man-eating blue pointer seems to have largely increased in numbers, ami has already been seen in the head waters of Middle Harbour and the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers. Recently, a monster measuring 18 feet was noticed cruising around the pilot steamer at her moorings in Watson’s Bay. and greedily devoured food that was thrown over the vessel’s Mde. It kept swimming around the steamer until a piece of floating paper became foul of its'dorsat tin .and it then treated the spectators to a fine exhibition <»f rage in endeavouring to get rid of it. St lashed the water furiously into foam, and leaped a couple of times almost clear of the water. Not long ago a Wat Bon’a Bay resident, Thomas Farrell, who was pulling in a dinghy in Parsley Bay, was attacked by a pointer, the length of which he estimated at 15 feet. It’ waM first seen unpleasantly close to his small craft, and he endeavoured to drive it off with a paddle. This seemed to infuriate lt t and it lashed the dinghy with its tail

and almost jumped aboard. Farrell bent to his oars with much energy, coming to the conclusion that he would be safer on dry land; but the shark evidently had marked him as prey and swam in small circles at lightning speed around the dinghy. Suddenly it disappeared, ami Farrell reached the beach. Just as he jumped ashore the dorsal fin reappeared quite close in shore in shallow water. Dr. Reid, who resides at Parsley Bay, seeing Farrell’s danger, went out in his motor launch to render assistance if necessary. Two gentlemen went to Parsley Bay for a morning the other day, and before entering the water themselves, threw in a small dog a few feet from the shore. The puppy had no sooner struck the water than he gave one yelp and disappeared. A swirl of water at the spot indicated that the dog had made a breakfast for a shark. & & Following are some of the names suggested for the new Federal Capital of Australia in a compteition run by a Sydney newspaper:—Alexandra (after the Queen), Alberton (after the first name of the King), Althing (meaning the supreme Parliament of Australia), Apollo, Austral City, Banksia (after Sir Joseph Banks), Barton, Calumet, Carrington, Ceres, Chamberlain Ctiy. CooeeCoinmons, Commonwealth City, CooksBanks (sent in by VV. S. Percy, the well known comedian). Edward and many modifications of the same name. Federal ia, and many similar plays on the word Federation, Flinders Vale (after Flinders, who named Australia), Gladstone, Hopetoun, Hume (the name of the explorer who first set foot on the chosen spot), Invincible, Jersey. Kalinina (a native name meaning beautiful), Kingsland, and half a , dozen other similar names with ‘ King” in them, La CTozia (said by the person who sent it in to be euphonius and fending itself to story and poetry), Linlithgow, Mannuwalkinnina ( a native word meaning wood and water, though one might have readily l»een forgiven for imagining such a formidable looking construction to have embalmed much more), Marton (after the birth place of Captain Cook), Night-’ ingale, six or seven suggestions in which the principal ingredient is the cognomen of the late Sir Henry Parkes and, finally, Pomona (the goddess of friuts). The judge has still to make his award. s><£s> A COUNTRY TEACHER’S WAIL. How f wish those officials who find fault with us for refusing to take country schools had to live my life for a. few months? .My scholars’ ages range from four and a half to fourteen years. I am expected to teat h them according to the most modern methods, and get. as good results as schools with properly equipped infant rooms and a staff large enough to give each class separate instruction, and I am responsible for the progress of every one of them. The older children are dull, without a particle of ambition. Of the thirty, only two have ever seen the sea, a city or a railway train. They have no stan

dards of comparison. My days pass in a feverish endeavour to teach aeven classes, train and supervise inefficient monitors, form a school library, make a garden (with an insufficiency of water ami a soil all gravel) and arouse the interest of the parents io the pitch of con trihuting to the decoration snd equip nient of my school. But alas! the people of Budgeree take a 10l of rotis ing and the cost so far has come out of my own pocket. I am so fagged at the end of the day that I have not the •mental energy for solid reading, were the books procurable. A ( arneg’ ? institute would be useless to me, seeing that an opportunity of getting to Hie town occurs so rarely. $> THE GIRL WHO MARRIES A DAIRY FARM ER. The Australian girl who marries a dairyman (and the practice is quit(‘ common) takes on a very hefty contract. With well-intentioned but fatally mistaken notion of ■‘helping the farm along,” she starts right away to milk, side by .side with Fier husband. She has no servant to do the housework; so this is what she is attempting: - (1) To do a man’s work on the farm. (2) To do a woman’s work in the house. (3) boar a baby. For the average woman, the last two are any amount of responsibility. To try and tack the first on to it is murderously unfair, both to the mother and to the baby. After about three hours’ hard labour in the cow-yard, the woman faces a solid day’s housework. As a rule, she does her own baking, and, of course, her own washing. Then, at 5 o’clock, just when she is done, in both senses of the word conies another two and a half or three hours in the muddy cow-yard. It is no wonder then that a majority of the young farmers’ wives are old before they are young. It is pleasing to hear that there is a. steadilygrowing prejudice amongst the better class of young dairymen against allowing their wives in the . cow-yard at all, save on emergency. Still, a few weeks ago, a girl at Kyogle was married one day, and the next day .went oul .with her husband to milk a herd of 72 cows. PLENTY OF FUN IN LIFE. ‘Gilrooney”: Life i.-n’t all dark shadows and sour grapes and bad tobacco. Indeed it is overflowing with happy and boisterous events. Recently at Lobar (N.S.W.) I kindly invited 'myself one hot Sunday afternoon to a ( hinese Feast of the Dead, held in the local cemetery. It was a most enjoyable function. A score of Chinest* of various degrees of social standing and dislocated English drove Out in vegetable carts and other conveyances to the scene of festivities and dry bones. They brought, a large pig, baked whole, and a queer assortment of cakes, fruit, lollies, cigarettes, and gin. After spreading the murdered pig and the rest of the feast, on the ground in the shade of a convenient tree, and burning many tapers at the. foot of the grave (or it may have been the head, for the ( liinese generally do things backwards, and«so, likely enough, they are are dead backwards), each mourner knelt on a bag. and made strange moans and im a nt a tions. ’Phen one of them, who isemned to be a sort of local Li Hung < hang, stalled the dead Berkshire seve-

ral times with i large knife, and cut off his right ear and nostril; and everybody remained fearfully silent, for now the departed spirits had returned, and were gorging themselves at the pork feast Next Lu Hung Chang gave a signal, which meant that the dead Celestials had fed sufficiently, after which the company ate the pig and the sundries. •> TAI L BULLOt K YARNS. c Chip”: 4 ‘Talking of bullocks,” said Jim, “reminds m«» of an old bullock that the cook used to pitch to when nil hands was out working. It was a long way t-o the water, and the cook he used t;> let. the old bullock drink out of the bucket when the cove was coinin’ with a fresh load ot water. This old bullock had terrible curly horns, an’ one day when the cook was late comm’ Isiek, the old bullock smells tin' damper burnin’, so ’e walks up, turns his head, lifts the lid off the camp oven with her horn, pubs it down, and turns over the damper. He’d the curliest horns y’ever seen. He puts on the li t again, an* after hnuvsin round i bit, he comes back, lifts off the lid, taps the damper with his hoof, and reckoned by the sound it was done enough; so h* hooks a. horn into it, ami stands it on edge to cool.” “ Did he scrape the black off ? ” asked a sculler who was listening ” No,” said Jim, ” he didn't scrape no black off’. And then the assistaiit-snr veyor remembered another bullock m eident where Surveyor O’Briggs had found the unfortunate beast with a leg jammed under a root on the steep side of n creek. The root was cut away and the bullock released. A few days atfer O’Briggs left •his instrument standing while all hands looked for a certain peg. Much time Was spent, but no peg found, ami the party sat down for lunch. Looking up, O’Briggs saw. to his horror, that the rescued bullock had put his head under the transit instrument, and was walking away with it balanced on his horns'. He was reckoning up the price of a new instrument, when he saw the bullock stop, and gently deposit the transit on its legs on the ground. He rushed over to in spect damages, and not only found t.hc machine uninjured, but exactly over the peg he had spent half a day I Joking for. WHERE ILLUSTR.VriNG PAYS The American illustrator is a lord Chas. Dana Gibson took a contract (hit netted him £20,000 in four years. Max field Parrish gets £2OO for each of his drawing». From ‘‘Harper’s” Howard Pyle receives £2OOO a year for a portion of his time, and his average income is £4009. As an art-editor for three days every week he was once paid £7200 a year! Joiin 'l’. McCutcheon, a cartoon isf on the Chicago ‘‘Tribune,” gets cm honorarium of £4OOO a year, or £I I per laugh. Outcault, who does the ‘‘Bus ter Brown” inanities, made £20,000 .i year for several years. “llarper’H” pays .E. A. Abbey £3OO a drawing. Howard (’handler Christy is said in one year to have macle £ Iff,(MIO, and Harrison Fisher made £4OOO in seven months. “Collier’s” pays big pri.es, £lOO a picture to 1.-ouis Loeb and F. X. Leyemleeker, while Will Bradley receives £2OO a month ?to art editor of that weekly. The enormous sums received for advertisements in the .States, enable these magazines to pay such enormous screws. The Australian priceo are, on the whoh*, somewhat lower, also those in N?w Zealand