Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

and at the fall of the hammer, loud was the gratulatory voice, amid the waving of hats and caps.

On one of the lots to be sold was the cottage of a widow, who had several children. One person only had the want of feeling to bid against her, when, I think it was Captain Lonsdale who exclaimed loudly, "77. per acre for the widow!" and there was no further opposition. The allotment was sixty acres. The sections on each side of it sold, one of them for more than 307. per acre, and the other for 407. or more.

Mr. Archibald Tom, one of the three first settlers of Australia Felix, had a famous sheep-run, and when it was offered for sale, some person of the name of Murray, who had a spite against him, ran up the price of it from 12s. per acre to betwixt 4l. or 57. Ten per cent. on the purchase had to be paid immediately on the fall of the hammer; but to the surprise of Mr. T., when he offered payment, the sum, more than 300%., had already been subscribed by his friends of the Melbourne club, and paid. These were pleasant instances of the good feeling and gentlemanliness of the Austral Felicians.

With this sale the fate of our temporary settlement of Tentville was decided. One after one the tents were struck, and the fires sadly died out. Over the new country we were widely scattered; some to sheep-stations, some to their new houses in Melbourne and the suburbs, others to their purchases at secondhand, not being able to purchase of the Crown; widely were we scattered, and reclusively settled down, to contend with the rugged elements of a new land in the solitude of the wilderness, adapting ourselves to novel modes of existence, and exchanging old customs and habits for new.

Our tent stood to the last; and for awhile we lingered on alone. To feel at the final breaking up of our long-associated and friendly little community, as though we had severed the last link of English society; as though there was nothing immutable, nothing substantial in the nature of things. We had, to use a sea-phrase, "cast off the painter," and were out at sea in the world; and there fell upon us a deep sadness, and sense of desolation.

90

SETTLERS' LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IN AUSTRALIA.

"After seeing a great deal of very bad land, my brother wished us to locate ourselves on the south side of the River Yarra. This I attempted to do, but was out-bid by the colonial speculators, who merely buy land to re-sell it. Yet so it happened, after these disappointments, that I bought the allotment of ninetyfive acres, where I now reside, at the Government sale, June 10th, 1840. It was said by many to be one of the most lucky purchases of the whole sale. The situation is delicious; the soil tolerably rich; the slopes most graceful. The windings of the Yarra in full prospect, both near and far off, are beautiful. Some twenty or thirty bell-birds are ringing a merry peal within_hearing. White cockatoos are sitting on the old gum-trees, and parrots are flitting about gorgeously numerous."

[ocr errors]

So I wrote on the 2nd February, 1841. But previously something had to be done. It was on the 2nd of October, 1840, that we took possession, and began to reside on our newly-purchased location. At that time Melbourne and the district were at the very acmé of their prosperity; all was activity: all the drays and the workmen were fully employed. A drayman, with a horse and dray, considered it poor work to get only six pounds per week. Our weather-boarded cottage had been prepared by my nephew in Melbourne, ready for putting up on the farm, when we could get it conveyed there. To engage a drayman and dray for that purpose, we had canvassed the town and its suburbs days and days in vain. At length, after a fortnight's incessant search, we found a person from the country willing to cart up the house, four miles, four loads of it, for six pounds: this he did with his dray and oxen in four days.

When we reached the location-and the roads are none of the best, to say nothing of the Merri creek, the bed of a torrent, full of rough stones, then partially flooded-we found ourselves in a wild open country, our cottage to be the only one for miles. To get our house materials to their intended site, was a task of no small difficulty, the face of the land being covered with growing trees, or with partly-burnt timber, boughs, and with rank kangaroo-grass. After many pauses, grave considerings, turnings and backings, with considerable skill and patience in the driver, and aided by especial good fortune, load after load was conveyed to the spot safely. Only we had one accident on the way, and small accidents become great privations under some circumstances; what the sea, that remorseless element, had spared to

SETTLERS' LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IN AUSTRALIA.

91

us of glass and tea-things, were, by one unfeeling jolt of the dray amongst the rocks, thrown, and the basket holding them, to the ground in pitiable ruin. The fragments lie to this day under a monstrous gum-tree by the road-side.

Here we had employment enough before us in the wilderness. Our house was in about a week erected. The first night that we slept in it, it was but partially roofed, and the bats made free to flit about over our heads, and the moon and stars to peep in ; the one with bland smiles, the others apparently regarding us with prying eyes.

When our wood-work was completed, there also wanted brickwork-a chimney to make our abode convenient and comfortable. Here again was a new difficulty. I ran here and there to persuade people for good money to bring us the required number of bricks. It was worth nobody's while: nobody would do it. Well, we had been woodmen, house-carpenters; we grew weary of begging to have that done, for which we must also pay handsomely. We set ourselves industriously to find clay, and found it too; yes, and made a brick-mould and bricks. Yes, and we burnt them too. Pretty figures we were, both during the making and the burning of the bricks; and many a hearty laugh we had at ourselves, saying, "What would our English friends say if they saw us. But the bricks were good bricks; and my nephew, one of the most ingenious as well as industrious men in the world-and considerate too-had not neglected to bring a bricklayer's trowel with him; and, like a good Jack-of-all-trades, he built the chimney, and did it so cleverly, that it passed muster with the world's other chimneys.

This carpentering and brick-making, this house-building, was done after all somewhat grudgingly, for the gardening season was passing by. Nevertheless, we dug up the ground for a garden between whiles, planting fruit-trees, setting potatoes, peas, &c. Then and after we made a large and useful garden, only it was not fenced in, for we had no time to do that. We trusted that our vigilance and that of our two faithful dogs, would be a fence for it until we could make one. Then we had to begin landclearing. The steep fronting the Yarra had many large stones in it, and to get out these, and also in many parts of the garden, was the labour of weeks. Then to cut down the timber, gum, box, she-oak, and wattle-trees, was an Herculean task.

Whilst this was progressing wearily, day after day, at pleasant leisurely intervals, we saw with delight the rapid and plentiful growth of garden vegetables. These fully answered our expectations.

Day after day it was no slight army of trees against which we had to do battle; we had to fight hard with them to gain possession of the soil, for the trees in those days were giants. I then felt thankful, knowing well how to appreciate my advantages, that having been born and brought up on an English farm, all kinds of tools, agricultural and others, were at home in my hands. There was a world of work, digging to lay bare the roots, felling, and then cutting the boles and boughs up with the saw and axe. Such of the boles as were good for anything we cut into proper lengths for posts; splitting and mortising them for that purpose. Rails also we had to get when there were any boughs straight enough. Some of the trees were of unconscionable girth, six or eight yards in circumference. Immense was the space of ground that had to be dug away to lay bare the roots. And then, what roots! they were too large to be cut through with the axe; we were compelled to saw them in two with the cross-cut saw. One of these monsters of the wild was fifteen days burning; burning night and day, and was a regular oxroasting fire all the time. We entirely routed the quiet of that old primæval forest solitude, rousing the echo of ages on the other side of the river, that shouted back to us the stroke of the axe, and the groan and crash of falling gum-trees. Night never came too soon, and we slept without rocking. Then what curious and novel creatures,-bandicoots, flying squirrels, opossums, bats, snakes, guanas, and lizards-we disturbed, bringing down with dust and thunder their old domiciles about their ears. Sometimes, also, we found nests of young birds and of young wild cats; pretty black creatures, spotted with white. The wild denizens looked at us wildly, thinking, probably, that we were rough reformers, desperate radicals, and had no respect for immemorial and vested rights. It was unnatural work, and cruel; especially when, pile after pile, we added to our other ravages, the torment and innovation of vast fires. The horrid gaps and blank openings in the grand old woods seemed, I felt at times, to reproach us. It was reckless waste, in a coalless country, to commit so much fuel to the flames. Timber, too, hard in its grain as iron almost, yet ruddy, and more beautiful than mahogany. No matter, we could not eat wood; we must do violence to our sense of the beautiful, and to Nature's sanctities; we must have corn-land, and we, with immense labour, cleared seventeen acres. On one occasion I was laid up for a fortnight, keeping my bed part of the time, having been struck by a falling tree. I had to change almost immediately my linen; wringing wet with the perspiration of that blow's agony.

Still the most vexatious circumstance of that misery was the lost time. I got over it at length, and then came other troubles. Our garden now began to look beautiful, and promised abundance. Cattle which had at first approached and annoyed us, had for some time past kept aloof, all but one incorrigible, immense, ugly, raw-boned, death-poor bullock. This monster-bare-bones had the largest horns ever seen, and was, we judged, turned out into the wilderness to die. Die, however, he would not. He took a fancy to us and our garden, and haunted us perpetually. Day and night he kept us apprehensive. We drove him away for miles; a little time elapsed, and he was with us again. We tried to make him cross the river, but in vain; for we thought, once on the other side and we should have done with him. Many times we determined to kill him, but the thought of his being some one's property deterred us. He was an everlasting annoyance to us, and we found to others also. One day I was giving him a chasing, making the old bones rattle in his hide, when an Irishman, miles from our place, accosted us with, "Blood o' life, sir, don't dhrive the likes of him. Hither away; its the little sleep we gets for the thought of him! it's sure it is. He'll drop his dead carkiss at weere door some of these days, with a coorse to him. and bother us out of house and home, with the stink of him!" Sure enough it was that we were indebted to this man's dread, for his quick recurrence to our whereabout. We drove him to them and they to us: at last he disappeared, as he came, altogether. Another bugbear, or, as Sir Walter Scott would say, "bubbly-jock," shortly after took his place. Here we had not old age and ugliness to contend with; our new enemy was a large, square, heavy, slow, shorthorned Durham bull. Our gaunt apparition had done us little mischief; not so our ponderous new-comer. Early one morning, on our issuing from the back-door, there lay a few paces off our ill angel of a Manningtree beast, digesting threescore of our fullgrown cabbages. There lay the solid rascal, ruminating about the few that he had left, and his look was at once innocence and self-satisfaction. I could have stabbed him! But then he was a

famous imported animal-a gentleman of a beast; the palmbearer away, and prize honoured, of cattle shows. Maybe he was carried away bodily by that taste of cabbage in the wilderness-the air feeling "unusual weight" to his old English haunts, the stall of some Duke of Portland or other wealthy cattlebreeder. We showed him no respect, however; but with a long hay-fork, filed sharp for the purpose, gored him to a great distance. How he did make the earth shake beneath him, and his

« AnteriorContinuar »