An Outback Marriage

The spring--the glorious hill-country spring--was down on Kuryong.

All the flats along Kiley's River were knee-deep in green grass.

The wattle-trees were out in golden bloom, and the snow-water from

the mountains set the river running white with foam, fighting its

way over bars of granite into big pools where the platypus dived,

and the wild ducks--busy with the cares of nesting--just settled

occasionally to snatch a hasty meal and then hurried off, with

a whistle of strong wings, back to their little ones. The breeze

brought down from the hills a scent of grass and bush flowers. There

was life and movement everywhere. The little foals raced and played

all day in the sunshine round their big sleepy mothers; the cattle

bellowed to each other from hill to hill; even those miserable

brutes, the sheep, frisked in an ungainly way when anything startled

them. At all the little mountain-farms and holdings young Doyles

and Donohoes were catching their horses, lean after the winter's

starvation, and loading the pack-saddles for their five-months' trip

out to the borders of Queensland, from shearing-shed to shearing-shed,

A couple of months before they started, they would write to the

squatters for whom they had worked on previous shearings--such

quaint, ill-spelled letters--asking that a pen might be kept for

them. Great shearers they were, too, for the mountain air bred

hardy men, and while they were at it they worked feverishly, bending

themselves nearly double over the sheep, and making the shears fly

till the sweat ran down their foreheads and dripped on the ground;

and they peeled the yellow wool off sheep after sheep as an expert

cook peels an apple. In the settled districts such as Kuryong,

where the flocks were small, they were made to shear carefully;

but away out on the Queensland side, on a station with two hundred

thousand sheep to get through, they rushed the wool off savagely.

He was a poor specimen of the clan who couldn't shear his hundred

and twenty sheep between bell and bell; and the price was a pound

a hundred, with plenty of stations wanting shearers, so they made

good cheques in those days.

One glorious spring morning, Hugh Gordon was sitting in his

office--every squatter and station-manager has an office--waiting

with considerable impatience the coming of the weekly mail. The

office looked like a blend of stationer's shop, tobacconist's store,

and saddlery warehouse. A row of pigeon-holes along the walls was

filled with letters and papers; the rafters were hung with saddles

and harness; a tobacco-cutter and a jar of tobacco stood on the

table, side by side with some formidable-looking knives, used for

cutting the sheep's feet when they became diseased; whips and guns

stood in every corner; nails and saws filled up a lot of boxes

on the table, and a few samples of wool hung from a rope that was

stretched across the room. The mantelpiece was occupied by bottles of

horse-medicine and boxes of cartridges; an elderly white cockatoo,

chained by the leg to a galvanised iron perch, sunned himself

by the door, and at intervals gave an exhibition of his latest

accomplishment, in which he imitated the yowl of a trodden-on cat

much better than the cat could have done it himself.