[Editor: This is section 6 of “Barcroft Boake: A Memoir ”, by A. G. Stephens, published in Where the Dead Men Lie and Other Poems (1897).]
[Writing from Mullah]
At the date of the next letter (November, 1888), Boake is busily employed at Mullah.
… For the last three weeks we have been camped out lamb-marking and mustering, and I have not been in at the station once during that time except one day to get a fresh horse. We are working very hard at the camp from four o’clock in the morning to dark. I shall be glad when it is over and we can settle down again.
Boydie went to Sydney last Monday. He was very glad to get out of the dust and heat. My word! it is getting hot now. Last Sunday, at four in the afternoon, it was 98° in the shade. It is a terror working in the yards now, but it is nothing to what we got putting out a bush fire the other day. We were all drafting when Will Chapman came galloping up to tell us there was a fire coming across the paddock about a mile away. We all made a rush for horses, and galloped off like mad along a swamp where the grass is four or five feet high, and as dry as a bone. There was a wall of fire coming across like the side of a house. You could not get near the front of it, so we had to start at the sides, and one would rush in with a bush and beat it out till the smoke drove him back, and then another would take his place. After about half an hour I was nearly dead. It was a boiling hot day to start with; and what with the heat of the fire, and smoke, and no water, it was worse than anything I ever experienced before. We stopped the fire by lighting another one in front, and letting it burn back…
I am still doing the same old ride round the paddocks. I generally take a rifle now, and shoot kangaroos when I see any…
Have a stiff neck from sleeping in the verandah last night. I always sleep there now, so as to get up early. One does not want bed-clothes. I just chuck a rug down and a pillow, and camp on that; and as the day breaks I saddle my horse and off.
The only things that disturb me are the ’possums. They run up and down the verandah and squeak the whole night. One ran up and sat on the eave of the house, and incautiously let his tail dangle over the edge, and I sneaked up and caught hold of it — and if he didn’t jump! He must be going yet.
A month later (10th December, 1888), Mullah is waiting anxiously for the drought to break. Boake writes to his father —
… I don’t feel the heat nearly so much as I expected: in fact, I can stand it with much less inconvenience than I could the cold of Monaro. The only thing I feel is the thirst: I never seem to be satisfied.
Times are pretty easy now. Most of the work is over among the sheep, and all I have to do is to ride round about twenty miles of the boundary and see that no sheep are getting bogged at the water. I generally make a start about four in the morning, when it is cool, and get back about ten o’clock. After that, as a rule, I have nothing to do for the rest of the day except pass the time reading, unless I feel inclined to take a ride round the lagoon about sundown…
A characteristic letter from Boake to his father may be quoted in full.
Mullah, Trangie,
29th December, 1888.My dear Father, — Your last letter must assuredly have miscarried, as it is two months or more since I heard from you. From the tone of your letter I should say that the world is treating you better than hitherto. It is about time too.
So there is another inhabitant added to this continent. Poor little beggar! I wonder if he will ever wish he had never been born, like most of us do. I think it is a natural consequence of being face to face with Nature so continually, but the great mystery of human nature often comes before me as I ride about. It seems to me so sad and so disheartening — to toil, with the knowledge of the vanity of it all in our hearts. Civilisation is a dead failure: it only brings these truths more forcibly before us: a savage never thinks of these things.
I have been reading a book that gives expression exactly to the ideas I have been trying to set down here. It is one of Rider Haggard’s, called ‘Allan Quatermain.’ This, and the one to which it is a sequel, are really worth getting if you want a real good soul-stirring account of a battle told in most animated and picturesque language. But the best part, to my thinking, lies in two pages of the introduction, which is a sort of little philosophical essay in itself.*
I have very easy times now — far too easy , in fact. The less I have to do the more time I have to grumble. Good hard work — physical labour — is the best panacea imaginable for a discontented mind. When I used to be in the yards in the heat and dust all I would think of was how to do the work well and expeditiously and have done with it; but now, from eleven o’clock in the morning I have absolutely nothing to do but kill time. I am up early, and my riding is done by ten or eleven; and I find it very hard to pass the time away; but I believe this will all be over soon, as the stock out back will be in great straits for water soon, and then our joy begins.
I have read your advice, and I wish for your sake and Grannie’s I could bring myself to follow it. But oh! I should smother if I were to go back to Sydney again: I should have no heart. There is a curious phenomenon in stock-breeding called ‘throwing back.’ After years and years of careful breeding, you will sometimes find a beast born with all the characteristics of the original stock. In the same way, I believe some of the wild blood of our savage Irish ancestors has been transmitted to me. At any rate, my home is in the bush; and as no good is to be done but on the confines of the settled country, that is where I hope to go within the next year.
I had just finished a letter to Grannie this afternoon just before receiving this of yours. I enclose a slip of paper for her in this. Give my love to all. — Your affectionate son, BARTIE.
(By the bye, I have dropped that, and now adopt the commoner one of Thomas.)
By April, 1889, the monotony of life at Mullah had become unendurable, and at the beginning of May Boake left on a roving expedition northwards. He was accompanied by two brothers named Boyd, one of whom has been previously mentioned as coming with him from Monaro. All three were young and strong, used to a bush life and eager for adventure; and they proposed to carry out Boake’s idea of going ‘on the confines of the settled country’ where ‘good is to be done’ — that is, where work was easier to obtain, and wages were higher. Moving by easy stages, on 10th May they had reached Brewarrina, some 200 miles from Mullah, on the main stock road from Queensland. Here they ‘spelled’ for a few days, proceeding then towards Barringun with an eye open for a job with travelling stock. And on 16th June Boake writes from Thylungrah, in Queensland, saying that he is going with a drover to the Diamantina to bring back a mob of cattle.
* I quote a few sentences to show the drift of this:— ‘Ah! this civilisation, what does it all come to? … It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilisation are identical … Civilisation is only savagery silver-gilt … So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilisation fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, that she perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky, and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore; to let his poor struggling life mingle for awhile in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly, moving energy of her of whom we are,’ etc. — Ed.
Source:
Barcroft Boake, Where the Dead Men Lie and Other Poems, Sydney (NSW): Angus and Robertson, 1897, pp. 180-184
Editor’s notes:
Ed. = an abbreviation of “Editor”
Grannie = (also spelt: Granny) an abbreviation of “Grandmother”
mob = a large group of animals, especially used when referring to cattle, horses, kangaroos, and sheep; also used to refer to a group of people, sometimes — although definitely not always — used in a negative or derogatory sense (possibly as an allusion to a group of dumb or wild animals), but also used in a positive sense (e.g. “they’re my mob”), especially amongst Australian Aborigines
paddock = a field, pasture, or plot of land which is surrounded by fencing or a defined boundary
’possum = an opossum or “possum”, a tree-dwelling marsupial species native to Australia; opossums are actually those animals of the Didelphimorphia order of marsupials (which are colloquially known as “possums”), whilst the term “possums” technically refers to those animals of the suborder Phalangeriformes, of the Diprotodontia order of marsupials; however, the two are often confused as being the same animal; the confusion arises from when Joseph Banks (the botanist with Captain Cook’s expedition) thought the Australian marsupial was an opossum, as it looked similar to the American opossum
Rider Haggard = Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925), an English author (known as Rider Haggard, or H. Rider Haggard); he was born in Bradenham (Norfolk, England) in 1856, and died in Marylebone (London, England) in 1925
See: “H. Rider Haggard”, Wikipedia
spell = a rest, or a period of rest (“spell” refers to a period of time, but was also used to refer to a period of rest, due to the common phrase “to rest for a spell” and variations thereof)
spelled = rested [see: spell]
station = a large rural holding used for raising livestock, usually sheep or cattle (a pastoral property); can also refer to the principal homestead and main business centre of a pastoral property
See: “Station (Australian agriculture)”, Wikipedia
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