PERILS OF A COUNTRY CORRESPONDENT.

Dunstan Times, Issue 760, 10 November 1876, Page 3

PERILS OF A COUNTRY CORRESPONDENT.

Every career iu life has its crosses, as a member of the betting fraternity very justly remarked iu our hearing lately. Country correspondents of the press are not exempt from the operation of this indistinguishing law. Who the correspondent is who writes from among their little circle those striking letters, putting facts so tersely and uncompromisingly, and occasionally lotting just the cracker end of a sentence fall on the back of someone who has been kicking (locally) over the traces, is quickly known. If the correspondent be a married man, ot course his wife is in the secret, feels her station as the spouse of the powerful correspondent of—say the Queenslander—and does not see the point of hiding her influence entirely under a bushel. Where is the use, she very reasonably thinks, of being able to influence public opinion and “ show up” people’s tricks, unless thf-y know of it, and bow before one’s awful might 1 So she just whispers it in the deepest confidence to Mrs Seville Cervice, wife of the P.M , who has been putting on airs of superiority, and to a few other ladies who have assumed a tone of equality, which is quite out of place, considering everything In three weeks, it follows, as a matter of course, that if you were to tell a working bullock on the town reserve that Mr So-and-so was the local correspondent of the Queenslander, the beast would poke you in the ribs with his horn, wink his sleepy eye, laugh in your face, and remark that Queen Anne was dead, and he heard a milking cow blowing tiie news you brought more than a week ago, and that every native dog in the scrubs round about knew it by that time Thenceforth the correspondent’s life becomes a burden to him. If he writes that there is good grass anywhere about. Messrs Sheepsize, Beaulock, and other squatters in the neighborhood, make it their business next court dav, when they come to sit on the bench to step over and swear at at him for being such a officious as to bring all the travelling stock in Queensland round that way to eat them up, and get boxed with their flocks. If then, on the contrary, records the fact that both grass and water are scarce, Mr Bawbee, the storekeeper. comes round for settlement of that Utt’e account, and inquires in a sardonic manner, if he is fond of making a fool of himself, and frightening every hit of trade out of the place, since not a carrier or drover will come near alter reading his lies in the paper. The reader may fill up the blanks with seasoning to taste, and both squatter and storekeeper go about I persuading everybody that the unhappy correspondent, who has told nothing but the truth, and has l ouched only the comparatively safe subject of the weather, is doing M s best to ruin the district. Then perhaps he writes a funny story of the P.M. and the lock-up keeper’s wife, carefully guarding against recognition of the real parties, and the editor happens to be drunk when that comes in—editors are always drunk—and the funny story escapes being cut out. Every body knows what happens then. Every man, woman, and child in the place gets mixed in the business somehow ; the storekeeper does a brisk business in horsewhips ; 5 females go into hysterics within 24 hours, 11 men get drunk and 32 swear. Somebody comes and says highly-spiccd things to the correspondent.—whose wife somehow gets the business so entanged that she imagines her husband has been offending as well as the P.M, and wants a separation—and the correspondent knocks him down ; is joyfully arrested by the lock-up keeper in his other character as constable, can find no one to bail him, and consequently is “coifed at through a grating for five days by the indignant spouse of the lock up keeper, aud finally is heavily fined by the P.M. and Messrs Sheepsize. Beaulock, and Bawbee, J P.’s, in petty sessions assembled Queenslander.