VI. AN AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT.

“What a set of crawlers you are in Jerry’s Town, Mr. Howe!” said Harry Lawson to me, one frizzlingly hot day. I was staying in Jerry’s Town then, and Harry had ridden in to meet the mail, and take back the Wonga-Wonga newspapers and letters. “I shouldn’t like,” Harry went on, “to live in a town. I should feel choked with such a lot of houses about me. Father talks about England sometimes, but I’m sure he likes the colony twenty times better. Houses everywhere, and all the little bush you’ve got left cut up into paddocks! I wouldn’t live in England if you paid me for it. You brag about your horses, but they can’t run against ours, when they do come out. I wonder they live out the voyage, from the way I’ve heard you coddle them. Look at our horses—they don’t want corn and cloths, just as if they were babies. You can ride them for a hundred miles, and turn them out to grass all in a sweat, and yet they’re as fresh as paint for another hundred miles next day—aren’t you, Cornstalk?” said Harry, proudly patting the damp neck of his favourite steed.
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Harry was always very fond of “cracking up the colony,” but he was especially inclined to do so that forenoon, having had his temper somewhat irritated (although he protested that he was as cool as a water-melon) by the hot wind that had been blowing for three days. I have been in glassworks, and close by the mouths of blast-furnaces, but the heat of an Australian hot wind is worse than theirs. The perspiration it brings out does not cool, and the warm beads are licked up the instant they ooze out upon the forehead and the cheeks. If a vitrifying brick could feel, it would sympathize with a “new chum” in an Australian hot wind. When the “southerly buster” comes after the hot wind, rushing with the chill still on from the South Pole, I have seen people ripping open their shirts to let the cold breeze blow right round them. The hot wind, too, makes the eyes smart and itch dreadfully.
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When Harry was talking to me that day—shamming that he did not feel the heat in the least—a good many people in Jerry’s Town had got “the blight.” Their eyes were bunged up just as if they had been fighting, though they did keep on dabbing rags dipped in alum-water up to them. And then, as if the blight was not bad enough, flies got into the corners of the eyes, and sucked away with their thirsty probosces. I have heard of a Frenchman who committed suicide because, as he left a letter to say, he was “so bothered by the flies that life was not worth keeping at such a price.” I think that foolish man must have been an Australian immigrant. The flies at the time I am telling you about were really a dreadful nuisance in Jerry’s Town. They buzzed about one’s head like swarming bees, they covered one’s back like a shirt of mail, at mealtimes they made the chops and steaks look as black as if they had been smothered in magnified peppercorns. It was hot then. The mercury stood at a good bit over 100° in the shade: it was almost impossible to find out what it stood at in the sun without getting a sunstroke. At every corner poor dogs were lying with their tongues out askew, panting like high-pressure steamboats just about to blow up.
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For some time we had seen a few dark clouds on the hilly horizon, and heard the low rumble of distant thunder. Oh, how we hoped that the storm would work up our way, and drench us; but for months not a drop of rain had fallen in our parts. Even in Jerry’s Town we began to feel anxious about our water-supply; both the creek and the Kakadua had sunk so low—the creek had become a mere straggling chain of very shallow ponds—and so many bullocks, and sheep, and horses had been driven in, or had found their way, from long distances round, to drink up what water there was to be had.
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The tall emu, with its hairy rusty-black feathers, is a shy bird, and, though Jerry’s Town was a very quiet little place, an emu had not been seen within a dozen miles of it for years; but during that long drought the emus stalked right through Macquarie Street in Jerry’s Town to get to the water. Some of them were shot; one of them was so very thirsty that it let itself be knocked on the head like a “booby,” through its anxiety to crook its long neck into the creek; but the poor birds were not nearly so fat as they generally are. They were half-starved as well as parched with thirst. Very little oil (emu oil is a Bush all-heal) was got out of them when they were put into the pot. I dare say you have often growled over wet English weather—especially when it put off a picnic or a cricket match—but, you see, people in Australia are not as ready as you are to say,
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“Rain, rain, go away,

And come again some other day.”

Sunlight is a very beautiful thing, but when it threatens to kill one it does not seem so beautiful.

When Harry made the polite speech to me I quoted at starting, I was lounging, smoking, in a rocking-chair on a verandah, and could not help feeling that I must look very much like “a crawler” to the upright little fellow who looked down on me from the top of Cornstalk, with his leather letter-bag strapped across his grass-cloth jumper. He had ridden ever so many miles through the hot wind, and was going to ride back ever so many miles through it, and yet he gave himself the unconcerned airs of a young salamander.
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“My word! you are a lazy lot,” he proceeded presently. “Nobody here seems to be doing anything but smoking and nobblerizing. There’s a whole mob of fellows shouting for spiders and stone fences at the ‘Macquarie Arms,’ and the ‘Royal,’ and the ‘General Bourke,’ and when I came by the police-barracks I saw the sergeant and all the constables with their coats off under the fig tree in the yard—half of them asleep, and the other half smoking. What do you think that lazy old pig Reynolds was doing? I had to take a message to him from father about some Court House business, and when I got to his place I couldn’t make anybody hear. So I went in and poked about till I got down into that little cellar of his where he keeps his beer, and there was old Reynolds, with all his clothes off, on the bricks, and his Chinaman pitching water on him out of a bucket. He’s a nice fellow to be Clerk of Petty Sessions! If Englishmen can’t stand our climate, they oughtn’t to come to it, and then expect us to pay them wages for shirking their work.
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“There’s old Biggs, the postmaster. He’s been long enough in the colony, you’d think, to get used to it—he might almost have been one of the First Fleeters—and yet he kept me waiting ever so long for my letters. He was ‘so overcome with the heat,’ poor man! in lifting the mail-bag out of the cart, that he had to go and nobblerize at the ‘Royal’ before he felt equal to opening it. I declare little Marston, the mail guard, is the only fellow I have seen in Jerry’s Town to-day with a mite of go in him—though he is an Englishman. But then they say he used to be a lieutenant in the army. Look there, Mr. Howe: your English officers, that you think such heavy swells at home, are glad to get us to employ them as mail guards, and milkmen, and things like that. I wonder how little Marston likes carrying a carbine and lugging about the letter-bags.”
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The heat, although he professed not to care a pin for it, had so plainly affected Harry’s temper that I invited him to get off his horse and finish his abuse of things English in the shade of the verandah. At first he loftily declined to dismount, but he did get down, and stayed chatting with me so long that I could see he did not quite relish the thought of his hot ride home. Harry’s was not cooling conversation. Marston had told him of dozens of teamsters that the mail had passed on the road “stuck up” round dry water-holes and fast-drying fords, with three-fourths of their bullocks dead, and the others so weakened that they could only get upon their knees when they tried to rise from the ground. Harry had had a chat, too, with a bullock-driver who had managed to struggle on into Jerry’s Town that morning.
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“He looked just like a black fellow,” said Harry, “with the dust and the heat; and he says that up the country on M’Grath’s Plains there is not a drop of water to be got for fifty miles any way, and the sun and the bush-fires have burnt every bit of grass right down to the roots. The country looks as black as if it was covered with cinders, he says, and there are cracks a foot wide in the ground.”
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Things were not much better at Wonga-Wonga, Harry informed me. Most of the water-holes were dried up, and bulls and bullocks, cows and calves, sheep and lambs, brood-mares and foals, were lying rotting round them, with crows and carrion hawks feasting on their carcases, or else half buried in the sticky mud at the bottom which the sun was baking as hard as brick. The sheep that were left alive were lying panting under the trees, too languid even to bleat; and the bullocks were standing crowded together in what had once been swamps and chains of ponds, bellowing dolefully, or lashing off the flies in silent despair. Mr. Lawson, and Sydney, and the overseer were riding about in search of grass and water, so that they might not “lose all the beasts,” and everything in the garden and cultivation-paddocks was shrivelled up into tinder and touchwood. That morning, as Harry rode in, he had seen parrots and lories gasping like fishes out of water on the grey branches, and falling dead, as if they had been shot by the sunbeams, when they tried to fly across the open. When Harry galloped homewards at last through the blazing light and the fiery air, it seemed strange that he did not drop to the ground like the parrots.
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We had had bush-fires in our neighbourhood for some time, but that night the bush seemed to be alight for miles all round Jerry’s Town; and next day, although the flames were not so plain (until the sun had gone down again), grey and black smoke dimmed even the blazing sun, and rolled in stifling clouds into the little town. When everything is dried up as things get dried up in an Australian drought, a lucifer match, or the ashes of a pipe, carelessly thrown down, may set square miles of forest on fire; an old pannikin or an empty bottle may act as a burning-glass, and do the same; and sometimes, for the sake of the luxuriant young grass that will spring up where old withered grass has been burnt, when the rains come, settlers selfishly set fire to it, if the wind is not blowing towards their homesteads, reckless of the loss of life and property they may cause—it is impossible to say how far beyond. That night and day (as I guessed at the time, and as I learnt afterwards) were a dreadful night and day for my Wonga-Wonga friends. Mr. Lawson, and Sydney, and the tutor, and the boys, and a good many of the men too, sat up all night. The women and girls went to bed, but they couldn’t go to sleep, the air was so stiflingly close and smoky, and it was so startling when they looked out of their bed-room windows to see the flames leaping redder and redder out of the brooding and rolling smoke-clouds. The moon was up, but her light—made bloody by the lurid atmosphere through which it seemed to have to force its way—only gave a still more uncanny look to the landscape.
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Poor Miss Smith was half wild with fear, and Mrs. Lawson and her girls, although they did not show their fear so much, were really more frightened at heart, perhaps, because they understood better what their fate would be if from one quarter or another a roaring bush-fire rushed down right upon them. Not much breakfast was eaten at Wonga-Wonga next morning: haggard, pale faces looked anxiously across the table at one another.
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Thicker and thicker the smoke rolled in; the heat every moment grew hotter. The head-station sheep were still in their hurdles, gasping for breath. What was the good of sending them out into the burning bush, even if the shepherds would have gone with them? The men stood about watching the fires, and wondering what was to become of them. They would have made a rush for Jerry’s Town, and Mr. Lawson would have sent all his womenfolk thither too, but the bush was on fire between the station and the township. Harry and Donald, of course, were scared like other people, but—boys are such queer little animals—in the midst of their fright they could not help feeling pleased that they would have no school that day, and so they half enjoyed the general consternation.
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The hot wind was blowing directly from the north, driving the roaring, crackling flames and the suffocating smoke before it. If it had kept in that quarter, the house, and huts, and outbuildings at Wonga-Wonga would have been in great danger, since the broad road of destruction which the fierce fire was eating through the bush would have passed within a furlong or two of the house, and that and its belongings might easily have been gobbled up with a side-lick or two of the bush-fire’s forked tongues. But when the wind veered about half a point towards the northwest, the Wonga-Wonga people thought it was all up with them. The rushing fire was now steering straight at them like an inevitable express train. The blinding, throat-tickling, lung-clogging smoke-clouds rolled in denser and denser. In spite of the sunlight, the grey clouds spat out pink, and russet, and golden flame plainer and plainer. Flocks of wild cockatoos flew wildly screaming overhead, making the already scared tame cockatoo grovel like a reptile as they flew by. Singed kangaroos and wallabies bounded over the garden fence. Dingoes, looking more cowardly than ever, but cowed into tameness, put their tails between their legs and slunk into the barn. Snakes wriggled along half roasted. Mobs of horses and cattle went by like a whirlwind and an earthquake in a mad stampede. Poor stupid sheep, their small brains quite addled by terror, ran hither and thither purposelessly, stood stock-still to let the flames catch them, or plunged right into the flames. It was an awful time; but so long as the merest chance of life remains, it is the best policy, and our duty to Him who gave us our lives, to do our best to save them, if they can be saved without disgrace.

“THE RUSHING FIRE WAS NOW STEERING STRAIGHT AT THEM.”
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Mr. Lawson and Sydney spirited up the men, most of whom were “astonied” like the sheep. They thought that a doom was coming down on them which it was hopeless to fight against, and so were inclined to hang down their arms helplessly. To the astonishment of all, John Jones—the “sheep,” as his fellows were fond of calling him—behaved more pluckily than any of the other men. Besides his own life, he had his wife’s and his children’s to battle for; he was conscientiously devoted to his master’s interests; and moreover, he seemed pleased at getting a chance of proving that, though he couldn’t sit a buck-jumper, he could play the man better than those who jeered at his clumsy, timid horsemanship, when he and they had to confront a common peril on equal terms.
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On roared and rushed the fire. Where there was scrub the earth seemed to be belching smoke. In the bush the giant boles of the gum trees stood up, grimly showing through their winding-sheets of smoke, and holding flags of flame in their gaunt arms. If any water had been left in the creek, the inhabitants of Wonga-Wonga would have plunged into it, even if they had run the risk of drowning in it. But there was not enough water left in the creek to wet the sole of the foot. On and on, with a roar and a crackle like that of huge crunched bones, as the trees toppled over into the under-smoke, came the fire from the north-west; and in the opposite direction, and on both sides, the bush was also on fire.
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Mrs. Laws on gathered her girls, and Miss Smith, and Mrs. Jones and her little ones, and the other woman servant, about her in the keeping-room, and there, in a voice clear, though it trembled, she prayed, in the midst of a chorus of wails and sobs, for resignation, and preparation for the apparently certain fate, and yet for help to her husband and her boys and the men, who had mustered to give the inhabitants of Wonga-Wonga their last chance. In the line of the on-rushing fire there was a dried-up maize-paddock, which, if it once fairly caught, would bring the fire right down upon the station buildings. If that could be kept unburnt, the fire might just possibly pass them by.
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Harry and Donald, I heard afterwards from Mr. Lawson, were just as brave as Sydney (and that was a good deal for Mr. Lawson to say, since he was very proud of Sydney) in this “beating-out” business. Fence-rails had hardly been torn down for weapons to fight against the fire, before the sapless crop caught. Men and boys (Mr. Lawson, Sydney, Harry, Donald, the tutor, and John Jones, in the van) rushed at the flames, mowing right and left, and striking down, like Highlanders with their broadswords. Donald had Highland blood in him, and wielded his timber claymore so courageously, and yet so coolly, that those who saw him felt half inclined to cheer him, in the very face of the quickly crackling flames that were changing, as if by magic, the withered maize into red ashes. Harry was as courageous as Donald, but he was not as cool. He would have been smothered in the smoke into which he had heedlessly plunged, if Sydney had not dashed in to bring him out. Tall men as well as Harry were struck down by the heat of the fire and the heat of the sun combined. John Jones got a sunstroke that knocked him down as a butcher knocks down an ox. The horsebreaker took hold of poor John’s head, and the tutor took hold of poor John’s legs, and between them they dragged him off the blazing heap of maize-stalks on which he had fallen face downwards. Mr. Lawson, who had a great respect for honest John, rushed up then, and stopped beating-out for a minute or two, to carry him as far as possible out of harm’s way—if any place at such a time could be called out of harm’s way. Then Mr. Lawson rushed back again, slashing away and giving the “seventh cut” with his wooden broadsword, as if he wanted to make up for lost time, and after him, up to the thickest of the fire, dashed Sydney, and Donald, and Harry, still giddy from the smoke he had swallowed.
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The men, too, fought the flames with almost desperate daring, but, in spite of what any one could do, they gained on the paddock. More than half of it had been consumed when the wind slanted to the N.E. farther and more suddenly than it had veered to the N.W. The fire went by the head-station buildings, gobbling up an outlying hut or two, and many a rod of fencing; but the house and most of the huts, the barn, store, wool-shed, &c., were only blistered.
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Mr. Lawson, nevertheless, was a good deal poorer at night than he had been when the morning dawned through the ominous banks and wreaths of smoke; but when he gathered all his people together in the evening to return thanks to the good God for their great deliverance, he felt happier, perhaps, than he had ever felt before in his life. The house verandah was the place of common worship. The air was still stiflingly close, and poor little “salamander” Harry fainted as he leaned his scorched face against one of the half-charred verandah-posts. Sydney carried him to bed, and heroic Harry had to submit to the indignity—fortunately without being conscious of it—of being “tucked in” and kissed, not only by “dear mamma and the girls”—theirs he would have considered, perhaps, rather over-fussy, but still legitimate attentions—but also by Miss Smith and Mrs. Jones.