When Sydney Lawson left home to take up new country for himself, there happened to be no tutor at Wonga-Wonga, and so Harry and Donald were allowed to go with the young squatter, both to keep them out of mischief and to enlarge their “colonial experience.” Besides, they would be of as much use as, at least, a man and a half. The boys were away for months, but they never grew tired of their long holiday, although they often had to work hard enough in it. It was the thought that they were doing real man’s work, and yet holiday-making at the same time, that made the holiday so jolly.
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Just after sunrise one calm bright morning, the little expedition started—Sydney, Harry, Donald, and King Dick-a-Dick’s heir-apparent, “Prince Chummy,” on horseback, and in charge of a small mob of horses and another of cattle, and two old hands in charge of the bullock-dray that carried the baggage, stores, tools, nails, horseshoes, arms, ammunition, &c. “Jawing Jim” and “Handsome Bob” were the sobriquets by which these two old hands were known—both given on the lucus a non lucendo principle, since Jim scarcely ever opened his mouth, and Bob was nearly as black, and not nearly so good-looking, as Prince Chummy. Jim was a Staffordshire man, and Bob was a Cockney. They were both good bushmen, but they had both been sent out for burglary, and therefore they may seem to have been strange guards for the commissariat-waggon, though the spirit-cask had another cask outside it as a precaution against furtive tapping. But for one thing, they were pretty well under the eye of the rest of the party; and for another, each watched the other like duplicated Japanese officials. There was a long-standing rivalry between them. Each sneered at the other’s home exploits. When Jem did open his lips to any one except his bullocks, it was generally to launch some sarcasm at Bob, but in a tongue-fight he was rarely a match for the ugly Londoner, whose lonely bush life had not cured him of his Cockney glibness.
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All the Wonga-Wonga-ites mustered to see the little party off—Mr. Lawson riding with it for a mile or two. There was a little confusion at starting. A young imported bull strolled up, angrily snuffing and pawing, as if jealous of the superior size of the bullocks; and just as they had begun to obey Jim’s very strong language and oft-cracked long whip, the little bull took a mean advantage, made a mad flank charge on the middle yoke, and threw the whole line into disorder. Thereupon Bob, who had made himself comfortable on the flour-sacks in the dray, began to chaff his comrade, in his own elegant style, on his clumsiness.
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“Call yourself a bullock-driver?” Bob was saying, when an old shoe that Mrs. Jones had thrown after Harry hit Bob in the face.

He was going to abuse Mrs. Jones then, but Jim growled out,

“Doan’t get inta a scoat, lahd! It hit thee wheer tha ken’t be hoort,” and Handsome Bob had to subside into his flour-sack couch again, silenced for once.

With much cracking of whips, trampling of hoofs, clanking of chains, jingling of tin pots, grinding of wheels, and creaking of pole and yokes, the expedition at last fairly got under way. We watched it go down the rise, across the flat, and through the slip-panels that led into the bush beyond; and then, when we could see nothing but the dust above the tree-tops, Mrs. Lawson and Mrs. M‘Intyre, who was visiting at Wonga-Wonga, went into their bed-rooms—perhaps to pray for their boys’ safety.
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I saw them start, but can only relate their adventures from what I heard of them when the boys came back.

The settled country through which they passed would have seemed wild enough to most English people, accustomed to hedged-in little fields, fitting like patches in a patchwork quilt, with roads and lanes curving between them, and railways running over them in the most rural places. In this “settled country” there were miles without a fence, and our pioneers generally camped out at night; although, when they came to a public, or an “accommodation-house,” with a paddock, about sundown, they would have a night between sheets for a change, and when they chanced to halt near a head-station at nightfall, they could make sure of hearty hospitality, although not always of a bed. As they went on, the country seemed wilder and wilder to their eyes, although perhaps we should not have seen much difference.
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When I went out to New South Wales, I expected, from what I had read in guide-books, to see capital convict-made roads running through the colony everywhere. What I found was a tolerable bit of road reaching as far as Parramatta (not twenty miles from Sydney), but beyond that there was nothing that we should call a road in England. Deep ruts running right across the road; grey logs that the mail-cart used to bump over, and black jagged tree-stumps that it used to graze against; the smoothest bits of road like a ploughed field; unbridged creeks; “corduroy” causeways of tree-trunks across swampy places;—that is what I remember of Australian up-country roads in dry weather; and in wet weather they were chains of ponds, with marsh that swallowed you to the ankle, and bog that gobbled you above the knee, intervening; and bogged blue-bloused dray-drivers sitting here and there on the tops of their loads of wool-bales, smoking in sullen resignation, like mariners in the tops of gradually-sinking wrecks.
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At last, however, our pioneers came to the end of even such roads as these, and had to trust to rare cattle-paths, the sun, the compass, and “gumption” for guidance. They had reached the march-land on which the white man, who has grown nearly as wild, meets the black man who has not been tamed, and shoots him or poisons him with strychnine-damper for spearing his flocks and herds, and sometimes gets speared by him in return. On the last run our pioneers crossed they met a stockman who was herding cattle with pistols in his holsters and a carbine in his hand. A strange wild-looking fellow was this stockman. He wore a rain-blackened, sun-bronzed, cabbage-tree hat, with a jetty, greasy cutty pipe stuck into the discoloured band; a faded, stained, white-seamed red shirt, buckled round him with a chapped brown belt; and tattered moleskin trousers falling in vandyked fringes over rusty gaping boots. One of his stirrup-leathers was made of knotted green hide. His face was just the colour of his hat—the little of it that could be seen peeping through a foot or two of coarse black hair like a guardsman’s bearskin. He had lived so long by himself that, when he first began to talk to the new-comers, he stammered like a bashful girl. He soon recovered his tongue, however, and the first thing he asked for was tobacco. They were smoking tea on that station, owing to the long time the drays that were bringing them fresh stores had been delayed upon the road. When Sydney gave the man a fig or two of colonial tobacco, and another of glossy Barrett’s twist, he pounced upon them as if he could scarcely believe his eyes. The American negrohead he put away jealously in his trousers-pocket for special occasions, and then began to slice and rub up the dull-green saltpetery colonial tobacco, as if he was famishing for want of a “proper smoke.” As it spluttered in his pipe he told the strangers some strange tales about the blacks. They had sighted them several times before this; but, as the blacks had always bounded off like so many kangaroos as soon as they were sighted, our pioneers had begun to think that they would not have much to fear from them.
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“Don’t you believe it,” said the stockman. “They’ll be on ye when you’re least lookin’ for ’em, the sneaking divils!”

This is one of the stories he told about the blacks, and from it you will see that white men can be quite as bloodthirsty in those wild parts:

“When we come up here, two er the chaps that the cove hired was brothers. I niver seen brothers so fond er each other as them two young fellers was. Strappin’ young fellers, though they was new to this kind er work. They’d been knockin’ about, an’ was glad to git anythin’ to do, I guess. Wal, one day Tom—that was the youngest—was down by the creek yonder, lookin’ arter a duck, or summat er that. Me an’ Fred—that was the eldest—was up on the rise beyont, lookin’ arter the bullocks. All of a suddent we heerd a cooey.
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“‘That’s Tom,’ says Fred. I didn’t want him to tell me. It worn’t a bit like a black feller’s.

“‘He’s come to grief,’ says I, for it sounded like that, an’ down we galloped to the creek full pelt. Jist as we got into the scrub we heard another cooey, an’ presently another, fainter an’ fainter like. Wal, we hunted about, an’ onder a grass tree we found poor Tom with a spear stickin’ into him.

“‘Mother—poor old gal!’ he says, when we come up to him, an’ Fred was kneelin’ by his side. I guess he was the old gal’s pet, and Fred had promised to look arter him when they come out, or summut er that. Anyhow Fred looked like a very divil.
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“‘Which way?’ says he, lookin’ about an’ cockin’ his gun. ‘Who was it, Tom?’ says he, with his face as white as ashes.

“Poor Tom had jist breath enough left to say ‘Black Swan,’ an’ then the blood bubbled out er his mouth, an’ he was dead, an’ his brother a-blubberin’ over him like a gal over her sweetheart. I let him blubber for a bit to ease hisself, but he was ser long about it that I gives him a nudge with my foot. ‘Come,’ says I, ‘Fred, git up—that ain’t no good,’ says I.

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