Such is Life | Page 5

I hooked Fancy's
rein on a pine branch, pulled the pack-saddle off Bunyip, and sat down
with the rest, to screen the tea through my teeth and flick the diligent
little operatives out of the cold mutton with the point of my
pocket-knife.
There were five bullock-teams altogether: Thompson's twenty;
Cooper's eighteen; Dixon's eighteen; and Price's two teams of fourteen
each. Three of the wagons, in accordance with a fashion of the day,
bore names painted along the board inside the guard irons. Thompson's
was the Wanderer; Cooper's, the Hawkesbury; and Dixon's, the
Wombat. All were platform wagons, except Cooper's, which was the
Sydney-side pattern.
To avoid the vulgarity of ushering this company into the presence of
the punctilious reader without even the ceremony of a Bedouin
introduction--(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be
responsible for it): a form of introduction, by the way, too sweeping in
its suretyship for prudent men to use in Riverina--I shall describe the
group, severally, with such succinctness as may be compatible with my
somewhat discursive style.
Steve Thompson was a Victorian. He was scarcely a typical bullock
driver, since fifteen years of that occupation had not brutalised his
temper, nor ensanguined his vocabulary, nor frayed the terminal "g"
from his participles. I knew him well, for we had been partners in
dogflesh and colleagues in larceny when we were, as poets feign,
nearer to heaven than in maturer life. And, wide as Riverina is, we
often encountered fortuitously, and were always glad to fraternise.
Physically, Thompson was tall and lazy, as bullock drivers ought to be.
Cooper was an entire stranger to me, but as he stoutly contended that
Hay and Deniliquin were in Port Phillip, I inferred him to be a citizen
of the mother colony. Four months before, he had happened to strike
the very first consignment of goods delivered at Nyngan by rail, for the
Western country. He had chanced seven tons of this, for Kenilworth;
had there met Thompson, delivering salt from Hay; and now the two,
freighted with Kenilworth wool, were making the trip to Hay together.
Kenilworth was on the commercial divide, having a choice of two
evils--the long, uninviting track southward to the Murrumbidgee, and
the badly watered route eastward to the Bogan. This was Cooper's first

experience of Riverina, and he swore in no apprentice style that it
would be his last. A correlative proof of the honest fellow's Eastern
extraction lay in the fact that he was three inches taller, three stone
heavier, and thirty degrees lazier, than Thompson.
I had known Dixon for many years. He was a magnificent specimen of
crude humanity; strong, lithe, graceful, and not too big--just such a man
as your novelist would picture as the nurse-swapped offspring of some
rotund or ricketty aristocrat. But being, for my own part, as I plainly
stated at the outset, incapable of such romancing, I must register Dixon
as one whose ignoble blood had crept through scoundrels since the
Flood. Though, when you come to look at it leisurely, this wouldn't
interfere with aristocratic, or even regal, descent--rather the reverse.
Old Price had carted goods from Melbourne to Bendigo in '52; a
hundred miles, for £100 per ton. He had had two teams at that time, and,
being a man of prudence and sagacity, had two teams still, and was able
to pay his way. I had known him since I was about the height of this
table; he was Old Price then; he is Old Price still; and he will probably
be Old Price when my head is dredged with the white flour of a
blameless life, and I am pottering about with a stick, hating young
fellows, and making myself generally disagreeable. Price's second team
was driven by his son Mosey, a tight little fellow, whose body was
about five-and-twenty, but whose head, according to the ancient adage,
had worn out many a good pair of shoulders.
Willoughby, who was travelling loose with Thompson and Cooper, was
a whaler. Not owing to any inherent incapacity, for he had taken his
B.A. at an English university, and was, notwithstanding his rags and
dirt, a remarkably fine-looking man; bearing a striking resemblance to
Dixon, even in features. But as the wives of Napoleon's generals could
never learn to walk on a carpet, so the aimless popinjay of adult age can
never learn to take a man's place among rough-and-ready workers.
Even in spite of Willoughby's personal resemblance to Dixon, there
was a suggestion of latent physical force and leathery durability in the
bullock driver, altogether lacking in the whaler, and equiponderated
only by a certain air of refinement. How could it be otherwise?
Willoughby, of course, had no horse--in fact, like Bassanio, all the
wealth he