AUSTRALIAN BUSH LIFE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4648, 14 January 1924, Page 3

AUSTRALIAN BUSH LIFE.

TRIALS OF ISOLATED PIONEEBS. Therp are epics of the remote outback, stories of dauntless pioneering aw.,y out ou the fringe, that will never be told (says the Sydney Morning Herald). Occasionally, however, such stories are related quite casually in the course of a letter, for example. Sister Helen Cousin,.a Queensland girl, Gained in Prince Alfred Hospiuil left Sydney a few months ago for Hall’s Creek, Kimberley, on the northern fringe of Western Australia, in order to join Sister Olive Bennett, also of Queensland, a,t the Nursing Hjne of the Australian Inland Mission, founded eleven years ago by the Presbyterian Church of Austialia, to promote in various ways the welfare of tire isolated settlers, regardless of creed. The work of Sisters Cousins and Bennett consists, chiefly, in waiting for any sick people who may be brought along. At times, again, they have to journey out to patients who cannot he removed. The waiting is worse than the actual work, even with all its hazard of travel and discomfort. • The remoteness of the place at which these two Queensland girls are stationed is better understood from the fact that, even with the new aerial mail, letters often taken longer to reach Sydney from Hall’s Creek than letter.?. from London, because of the infrequent coach services where they have io be called into commission, and the floods.

Sister Cousin had not been long at Haft's Creek when a man came in from outback, asking her to go out to a case .nearly one hundred miles away. The man motored hereto his. station. 25 miles out, and the next day the head stockman took her another 35 miles along her journey in a four-in-hand buggy. The thirl day they bumped over another 36 miles of track until sundown.

The nursing sister had at last reached her destination —a tworoomed slab cabin, lined with coarse hessiajn. and with a primitive kitchen detached. A few goatskin mats graced the earth floor. Here away out in the never-never Sister Cousin was greeted by the woman who had summoned her to her aid—a lonely but delightful mother with her baby, fourth days old, making her seventh child. Sister Cousin’s presence in that obscure and primitive slab home for a week swept like a flood of sunshine through the little family. The eldest boy, aged 12, had not long returned from Wyndham, more than 200' miles away. There he had gone with his father droving 800 head of cattle. Long before reaching Wyndham the father became quite blind through cattle blight. The only other white drover took ill with fever, and upon the youngster rested the responsibility of controlling the great mob of cattle and the black boys. Travelling by day, the boy took his four hotirh’ watch over the cattle at night, and got them through to their destination.

The pathetic part of the lives of this little family is their lack of any schooling. The mother tries to teach ■them in her spare time, but she can do little, as she was bom in Kimberley, and is self-taught. The lessons which Sister Cousin gave the youngsters when she wajs there for a week they had never heard, and as soon as she opened her eyes of a morning she was insisted with an insistent demand for more games. At the end of the week there was a sorrowful parting. Sister Cousin left the mother and the baby quite well, and went back to her duty at Hall’s Creek, taking the eldest girl with her for a holiday. On one occasion the conversation of one of the little girls in this lonely little family took a theological turn. “ Doesn’t God ever get a sleep ?” she asked Sister Cousin, and she followed up with the question whether He coitild hear them talking at that moment. “Yes," she replied. With the mental alertness of a city youngster, and in the phraseology of that ‘great stretch of cattle country, the little girl embarrassed the nursing sister with the question, “Well, what about the Wyndham mob ? How can He hear the mat the same time ?” Such is the simple, yet stirring, story told by Sister Cousin in a letter to the superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission (the RevJohn Flynn) in Sydney. Such is the wojk of the mission.