A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8400, 15 April 1907, Page 5

A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

(By.ALBERT DORRINGTON, Author of ".Along the Castlereagih/' "Children of the Gully," etc)

.(Published by. special arrangement.— Copyright reserved). I*—CHOOSING A ROUTE. .'London! The,name has a bell-Jifce isound for many.people. To others it lis a bugle-note calling eternally across the five oceans. I have heard it ,in\the solitudes the Diamantina valley; it has »walked beside me in the camping grounds of 'the Gulf when fever and .loneliness stalked from the mangrove skirted inlets and ti-tree swamps. Lmeight years we had saved enough money to answer the call, eight years of economical strife with a big, clanking leg-chain on.our little ambitions. And the day icame. . . . One man advised us to travel via Valparaiso and over the Chilian Andes anto Argentina. Australians and NewiZealanders, he said, wanted to,hear .something about, the chilled beef question, the pastoral and ■mining .outlook of the prosperous Republic. Now, the Chilian Andes .are very well in their way, and one .doesn't mind an occasional condor'Jfor .breakfast, hut the average Australian jibes at the NewcastHe-Valpar-siiso-Shanghai-route where the opiumdosed crimp-house men are occasionally shovelled into the bunkers with the coal.

So one had to discard the Argentina a*oute and scan the map anew. The Port Arthur-Manchurian trip, via Moscow, and St. Petersburg, looked inviting, especially when we all remembea'ed Lio Yang and Mukden, and the tremendous Russian and Japanese armies that hurled themselves and the toilers' money at each other for many months. We thought that Mukden would be a nice place to see. We longed to hear about the 12-inch shells that used to whizz through the refreshment-room every. time General Kuropatkin came up for a basin of bear broth. We had almost decided on the Port Arthur journey until a Chinaman told me that the North Pole is a cheerful, well-ventilated suburb in comparison with Harbin and the Trans-Siberian railway, during the winter months. John inquired casually if I had eyer worn a wolf-skin coat padded with rubber to keep the wind from shaving itself against our shoulder-blades. I smiled and postponed the TransSiberi.m holiday indefinitely. After driving many innocent sheep from one end of Australlia to the other, I did not feel inclined to start a fashion in wolf-skin coats. A climate that permits of an occasional calfskin vest or pyjamas at mid-day is more to my liking. I tad vise the Moscow Tourist Bureau to leave out all mention of wolf-skins when catering for Australian patronage Finally, we decided that the Red Sea route, with its blinding sand storms and mirage-haunted deserts was better than a packet of snowstorms, especially when we heard that the authorities at Naples provided volcanoes in their scenery. A gentleman who has travelled extensively to id me that volcanoes are splendid things for keeping away mosquitoes. leaving Sydney!

A cool breeze was blowing over Sydney on the morning of departure. Only a week before we had been fighting bush fires on our boundary fence. Now everything was changed. No more greenhide beaters; no more sap-scalds! We were bound for England where the grass won't burn even if you spray it with kerosene in mid-summer. It's a grand thing to picnic in a country where people can throw matches at one another without setting their best girl's paddock ablaze. Sydney is a well-to-do place. It wears a gorgeous crown of red tiles on its forsshores. It is a city of iced drinks and time-payment motorlaunches. The people certainly appear more comfortable than the backcountry dwellers. The men hold up the skirts of their waterproofs when it rains, and the women look upon 12guinea gramaphones with splendid indifference.

Arriving at the Circular Quay we beheld the outlines of the .vessel that was to carry us North. Her huge stern almost bulged over the footwalk; her yellow funnels towered above the adjacent six-storey buildings. The Quay was crowded. Bush and city people thronged the Orotava's decks. Here and there a suntanned couple from the back-blocks caught one's eye, joy in their hearts and a ticket to London in their purses. Near the funnel-stay was a woman from Coonamble; her five stalwart children around her, bushscarred, sun - bitten, hardy as brumbies. Their father had sold his share in a mine and they were off to join him in England. The steamer's street-like decks dwarfed everything. Aboard an ordinary coastal steamer a small man may preserve his dignity. But once on the deck of a modem liner, a sixfoot man becomes a midget; his height is bossed by the giant funnelstacks, and his friends have to pick him out with binocular or by the colour of his hair.

The decks of our departing ship would have borne the fleet of little vessels which accompanied Colombus across the Atlantic. The Almiranta and Capitano, that brought De Torres and Pero de Quiros to the Australian seaboard 300 years ago, could have been stowed comfortably in our fore and after holds. Yes, if circumstances had permitted, I would glad ly have thrown my belongings aboard an 80-ton fore-and-aft rigged schooner moored almost alongside. There was Romance and Mjistery about her rakish tophamper. Her smoky galley and newly-painted deck-house, with the broken shell-cases lying near the alley-way, suggested, island-trading. A kanaka cook peeped from 'the cuddy. ... It is not good to look twice upon an island-bound schooner when London calls. A couple of travelling bushmen leaned over the Orotava's rail and gazed steadily at the oily waters of Sydney Cove. Hitherto the Murrumbidgee was the finest strip of water they had ever seen, and they spoke

earnestly concerning the height and' power of deep-sea waves. One of them, a married man evidently, .was. "of ©pinion that the sea froth would, climb over the rail and moisten the.; babyNever saw so many babies on a: ship. There were three in our cabin —put there by mistake—and a couple at the foot of the stairs playing with, the steward's parrot. Some of the. ■first saloon babies were travelling, with professional nurses At sea the.professional nurse is supposed to re- - strain and hammerlock her small i charges, whenever they attempt to swallow the ship's brasswork or man , the lifeboats. While hundreds of grown-up people were .saying good bye on deck, the little ones were iiitiviiucing themselves to each odier below. It grieved one to see i-o many fine babies rushing from Au; tralia—even for • a brief space. In the steerage and saloon were.several gold miners from Queensland. —"bound for a spell on the wet," as they termed it. There are certain people from Maoriland and Tasmania: who regard a yearly trip to London as the cheapest way of spending aholiday. In the third-class wereplenty of well-to-do wheat farmers and small settlers, anxious to get away from the eternal grind of selection life after the recent good seasons. "We mightn't get another chance," laughed a North Coast man. "Three years back I was burnt out and barely escaped with the wife and children. I think we managed tosave a horse-rug to cover ourselves with. To-day I'm off to London, and I'm going to have a time. Did L bring the wife? My word I did.. She's travelling second saloon with' the youngsters. Eh? oh, the steerage; is "good enough for a wayback, liket me. It's time the old gi.l enjoyed, herself."

We had a great send-off. It seemed; as though the whole of New South Wales had come to see the last of their relations. Even the policeman wavedjiis hand as the big vessel left the wharf.

Suddenly a wire-haired man was observed tearing along the wharf waving a strip of blue paper in the "Is there any one named M'Guinness aboard?" he shouted. "There's-thirty-nine weeks' rent owing!" Everyone on the steamer glanced' at his neighbour suspiciously, but it is terribly difficult to tell a man'sname by the shape of his hat. No one had seen or heard of M'Guinness. The ship's officers were certain that M'Guinness was not on board, nor any hardened person capable of owing thirty-nine weeks.' rent. It takes a lot of big machinery, and big deck fittings to surprise Australians and Maorilanders. Adjoining our cabin was a Wilcannia man who had never seen anything bigger than a fish-punt or a corduroy bridge. Yet in less than twenty-four hours he was intimate with the mysterious working of a 6,000-ton steamer. The'day after leaving Sydney he explained to me the difference between a slovenly-banked fire and a properlysliced camel-back. He held forth enthusiastically on the ways of deepsea ships of patent man-killing fire draughts and bunker-space. He spoke learnedly of the difference between Bulli and Newcastle coal, how to use a slice-bar, and how to hit a Lascar under the chin with a shovel when he runs amok in the hot weather.

' The head and eye of that Wilcannia sheep-breeder impressed us considerably. If young James Cornstalk is typical of his kind, I feel sure that Australia will have small difficulty in manning her own fleet when the day arrives. People tell us that we don't take to the sea. Personally, I have learned more in ten minutes from a fifteen-year-old Australian boy anent the workings of a big ship than it was possible to acquire by months of hard reading. The South Coast of New South Wales is bleak and mountainous. Vast tracks of spotted gum forests and treeless ridges face the long Pacific swell. Here and there a chrome-ixLoured promontory stretches its sea-washed hip into the thunderous surf, innumerable gull- ' haunted islets crowd under our bows ; geese-like mollyhawks and shags trail inshore to where the sea frets and whitens under the frowning cliffs. . "It is always raining in the South hills," said a Bega man. "I have known it to spill down for months until the wild scrub cattle were fairly driven into the homestead paddocks. Funny," he went on, "how hard rain will tame old mountain bulls and brumbies. I've se m wildeyed Outlaws tramp in andvstand shivering under the sheds afer a long spall of cold, wet weather. You see, the wild life has not entirely eradicated the stable instinct in them. You couldn't get within miles of them in fine weather. Yes, and I'll tell you how heavy rain affects the blacks one of these days." (To be Continued).