Gripped By Drought

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Following that lesson, overstocking was the nightmare of the careful sheepman. As a margin of safety Mayne, and Feng immediately before him, had kept seven great paddocks empty of sheep; and now, instead of seven, in three months’ time Mayne would have but three. The mention made by MacDougall of the difficulties already felt by the small men was instantly appreciated by his employer.

  “How many is Westmacott running on his place?” he asked.

  “He reckons he’ll shear eight thousand.’“

  “Phew! Eight thousand on twenty-seven thousand acres!”

  “Yes. Like Mr. Feng, he hung on to his hoggets expecting the market to rise.”

  “He’ll crash this year if it doesn’t rain.”

  “Decidedly–unless he does what Chidman once did.”

  “What did Chidman do?”

  “He went over one of his stations, and he saw that the three thousand head of cattle were getting mighty poor on account of the dry season. Nineteen months it had been without rain. He says to the manager: ‘Give all your men guns and ammunition. Get out and draft off two hundred of the best breeders and six of the best bulls, and have every other beast shot. You can then sack all your men and carry on with one blackfellow. We can buy more steers and breed ’em when the season changes, but we can’t grow scrub-trees in less than a hundred years, even if we plants ’em; and if we go on carrying them three thousand beasts, in twelve months’ time, even if it does rain, the place won’t carry five hundred. So shoot ’em!’ That’s Westmacott’s only chance. Get out and slaughter three thousand five hundred of his eight thousand sheep, if he can’t sell ’em at any price, or even give ’em away.”

  “You’re right, Mac. He can’t safely carry more than four thousand five hundred on his place.”

  “On the Tuesday before the shearing the flocks began to move into the key paddocks precisely as battalions taking positions in the line before a battle. The ewes and the lambs were to be the first to go through the shed, for the first shorn would be the first to travel to the western paddocks over country not quickly eaten out by moving flocks. The shortage of feed now had become an urgent problem. When the shearing was in full swing the flocks would travel almost over the same ground once they passed White Well, where was the strange bottle-neck caused by the resumption of land by the Government for closer settlement. Before the shearing was half through the scarcity of sheep feed between the bottle-neck and the shed would be acute, because the preceding flocks of sheep travelling to and from the shed would have taken it all. That bottle-neck, caused by the bite being taken out of Atlas to form the small holding owned by Westmacott, had always been a source of worry.

  Feng Ching-wei cut short his holiday to relieve Barlow of the ordinary office work, thereby permitting the old accountant to concentrate wholly on the records connected with the shearing.

  On the Wednesday the Government House cook decided that no longer could she put up with “the highfalutin ways of the missus, who ought to know better than interfere in the kitchen, ’specially when there was a housekeeper”. She left by the mail-car that night, and only after Feng himself had used persuasion did Mary O’Doyle consent to cook for Government House.

  “Orl right, Mr. Feng, as you ask me I’ll go. But you tell ’er to pass in a menu she wants put up, and tell ’er that if she comes into my kitchen and cuts red-’ot cakes like she did to Emily Johns, I’ll pick ’er up and sit ’er down on the ’ot stove. I takes my orders from Mrs. Morton.”

  “It will be all right, Mary,” Feng said in his suave manner. “We’ll get a cook for Government House as quickly as possible. I’ll ask Mrs. Mayne not to interfere. We must make due allowance for her inexperience of bush ways.”

  Thursday saw the arrival of the shearing contractor and the wool-classer. They were quartered with the bookkeeper and the jackeroos, and were cooked for by Todd Gray. Later that day two cars and two trucks arrived, crammed to capacity by shearers and shed hands. Henceforth beyond the creek all was noise: the shouts of laughter of men certain to earn good cheques, the cynical hoots of the whistle on the huge steam-boiler that would drive the machinery and was in charge of one Gus Jackson. A meeting of the men was held in the long dining-room of their quarters, and after prolonged uproar a cook was elected, as well as representatives to act for them in case of dispute with the management. That night from their quarters came the sounds of many accordions and mouth-organs.

  The work started the following day, the morning being devoted to sharpening the shear combs, men casting lots for positions along the “board”, and getting the hydraulic presses in good order. The actual shearing started after the noon rest-hour, undertaken as a trial run; for, whilst the shed hands were paid by the week, the shearers worked by contract at two pounds five shillings per hundred sheep shorn.

  On Saturday morning came a real burst of activity, followed by quietude that afternoon and Sunday. Monday the shearers started practising for the highest individual tally. The receiving pens inside the giant shed were full of sheep. The outside yards were full. Snow-white, dazed sheep, minus their fleeces, began to trickle through the outlet doors of the shed. They were almost the first of a vast army. The presses whirred and thumped, and tumbled out iron-hard packs of compressed wool, each weighing some three hundred pounds. The men now were working like galley-slaves, not driven by the whips of slave-masters, but by the competitive urge of amassing money quickly.

  2

  The river of wool flowed slowly eastward to the shed. Men on horses mustered paddocks west and south of Forest Hill, gathering the sheep into classified flocks, moving a flock at a time eastward to the hut and yards at Mulga Flat, when the riders stationed there took charge of it and moved it to White Well, whence the stockmen there stationed delivered it to the shearing shed, and returned with a shorn flock that eventually was passed along the run into one of the western salt-bush paddocks.

  Calm, brilliant weather, diamond day succeeding diamond day, night by night frosty and indescribably silent. All day long, save meal and smoke hours, the huge shed vibrated with whirring machinery. From the adjoining yards and pens the complaining bleat of sheep mingled with the rising grey-brown dust. Driven by yelping dogs and bellowing horsemen, sheep in their hundreds arrived full-fleeced and slow. The same horsemen and the same dogs departed, driving hundreds of sheep snow-white, but marked by the tar covering shear wounds and with spirits lightened as their bodies had been lightened. Every day that first week twenty-four shearers passed twenty-four hundred sheep through the shed.

  Todd Gray now rose at four o’clock every morning. He had some fourteen men as well as the occupants of the barracks to cook for, with now and then a party of stockmen quartered on him for a night. He baked bread for Government House, an excess of duty, to lighten the work of Mary O’Doyle, who had to produce for the fastidious Ethel dishes requiring much time.

  Barlow was kept busy mostly adjacent to the shed. He had to check, brand, and weigh the bales of wool for dispatch to the railway by motor-lorries and two camel-drawn wagons. Feng Ching-wei worked on the station books and issued stores. Naked to the waist, Slim Jim, with a mate as herculean as himself, laboured at the wool presses, steadily piling up a cheque. Mayne was everywhere. They saw him in the shed. The branding men and yard men saw him among the sheep outside the shed. His car flashed over the outback tracks, and the men with the travelling flocks were visited.

  It is doubtful if there was a man within the shed or out on the huge run who felt or visualized the inner romance of this annual period of feverish activity. Sheep–tens of thousands on Atlas; tens of millions throughout Australia–were being stripped of their fleeces. There is romance in lumber and in wheat, but they are dead commodities. This industry was a living one, for every eight to eleven pounds of wool came from the back of a living animal, on whose breeding thousands of pounds of money had been expended, and both money and thought lavishly spent on its care and upkeep.

  Frank Mayne now was seldom at home with his
wife and boy.

  As his father before him, he was no drill-clothed veranda squatter.

  With Little Frankie, now able to walk short distances, often Ethel and the child wandered about the homestead lawns and orange grove, and sometimes out among the homestead buildings, looking in on Feng, who took them into the ration store and permitted Little Frankie to discover preserved ginger or a box of candy procured especially for him. Twice they crossed the bridge over the deep creek, now quite empty of water, and visited Todd Gray whom, of all her husband’s employees, Ethel most favoured.

  The short, fierce-eyed cook both times came limping toward them from his sizzling stove, set before them a little lunch of cakes, and from a nail beneath Little Frankie’s name took and filled a half-pint pannikin no man dared to touch. The pannikin was the child’s badge of representation among the men. And always, whilst they were seated at the long table, Todd Gray waited on them without deference, but with obvious regard for Little Frankie, to the great amusement of his mother. Ethel Mayne was beginning unconsciously to adapt herself to her new life.

  At both visits Todd Gray said:

  “He’s a star of the first magnitude, madam. He’s brighter than all the Cepheids, ’deed he is!” “The Cepheids!”

  “Too true. They’re the stars having a luminosity ten thousand times greater than the sun.”

  This caused Ethel’s eyes to open, but she refrained from comment. Todd’s reference to the stars, as well as mere hints of knowledge of other equally recondite subjects, created slight disapproval in her mind. It seemed wrong that a common working-man should have knowledge of such an order; but, like many other things she had discovered in Australia, human ethics were topsy-turvy. How hateful was the phrase, “Jack is as good as his master”!

  Already she suspected that, in this land of her adoption, some Jacks were superior to their masters.

  Only once did she pay a visit to the shed, where she was escorted from end to end by the “Boss of the Board”. She was introduced to the wool-classer. Slim Jim, appearing as some monstrous gargoyle, grinned at her, and him she snubbed in a manner that failed to hurt him because he did not understand it. Amid the long rows of shearers beneath the overhead running gear, she was silently introduced to the “gun” shearer.

  “What are you going to do to-day, Blue?” shouted Ethel’s escort.

  Blue showed even white teeth in a smile.

  “I’m taking it easy to-day,” he said. “It’ll be about a hundred and fifty.”

  “How many can you shear in a day?” Ethel ventured.

  “Oh, round about two hundred. I once did three hundred in one day to win a bet.”

  She smiled at him when she left. She thought he deserved it.

  Just a common man, she knew, but rather good-looking. She knew she had made an impression on him.

  3

  On August 26th there came a break in the diamond days, a break that had been long and eagerly sought. The shearing had proceeded smoothly, for the few complaints the shearers’ representative had laid before Mayne had been quickly settled to the satisfaction of both sides.

  The 26th fell on a Sunday, and very often, on this day of the week, Frank Mayne sauntered along the river bank and climbed to the Seat of Atlas, high in the giant gum tree on the high ground below the homestead. This afternoon, when he seated himself on the sawn square of red-gum, his mind was conjuring memory and forming pictures of the long ago, when Old Man Mayne occupied the seat and he, Frank, played about on the floor of the rail-protected staging. From the dim past the strong voice of Old Man Mayne sounded in Frank’s ears:

  “Bring your troubles to the Seat of Atlas, lad. Here you are far above the world, to look down on it as one of the Gods of Olympus. It’s surprising how small troubles become when you look at ’em from a height.”

  Abstractedly Mayne filled and lit his pipe, then stared out over his kingdom. His pipe had become all the more valued a companion since to please his wife he had given up pipe-smoking in the house, where, however, he could smoke expensive cigarettes in some of the rooms.

  The dark carpet of the bush stretching to the horizon was almost unbroken by the plain. The far distant windmill was not revolving for lack of wind. Apparently just the near side of it, but actually several miles distant, a column of red dust rose high, steady and persistent. It was not one of the sudden dust columns caused by a miniature “willy-nilly”; it was, as he well knew, caused by a flock of sheep which had left White Well that morning for the shed. To the south-west, and much nearer, a second dust column indicated the position of a shorn flock which had left the shed that morning.

  After weeks of clear sky, that afternoon a belt of cirrus clouds, so light that the sun was seldom dimmed, drifted slowly to the north-east. A whispering north wind. hinting of the tropics, rustled the gum-leaves and brought to Mayne’s nostrils the haunting perfume of gum-wood burning on the fires of the Atlas homestead. He could hear the voices of men shouting whilst they fished in a deep hole farther down the river, guessing that one of them had hooked a big fish. Sometimes a dog barked, sometimes a swooping flock of galahs or cockatoos screamed at him, whilst almost continuously the kookaburras from far and near laughed and cackled and chuckled: the devil himself in their mocking jeers.

  This day Mayne’s chief worry was the state of the Adelaide meat market, and the sheep market in general. The nine thousand wethers that Feng had not sold at the beginning of the year were, luckily, still in fair condition, and now the wool was off them he was prepared to sell at fifteen shillings per head. But the current price was about eleven shillings, and if it rained within a week or two the price would be almost sure to jump again to eighteen or nineteen shillings. If it rained! That was the kernel of his problem. If he held, and the rain did not come, the price would drop further still.

  At normal times there was no difficulty in disposing of the surplus ewes and rams of the famous Bungaree stud to the small station-owners and selectors; but now none dared buy, even if money was available, and all wished to sell, uncertain of the climatic prospects of the summer. To Mayne, as to Westmacott and others, to slaughter sheep to save the bulk of the flocks when rain might come at any hour was unthinkable then and always. Chidman’s drastic methods might suit cattle-owners, but would not find favour with sheepmen whose backs were hard-pressed against the wall of ruin. Mayne was now faced with selling his surplus stock at any price offered, or holding on the gamble of rain within a month.

  As a point in his favour against a generally vexing position it was certain that, despite the dry summer, autumn, and winter which were passed, despite the poor condition of the flocks, the percentage of lambs had been extraordinarily high. Atlas would shear this year a post-war record number of sheep. This was truly significant, since reports from Bradford and Continental wool centres hinted that the prices for this season’s wool would be higher than had ruled the year before.

  The situation indicated to Mayne that what he might lose on the roundabouts–otherwise surplus stock-he would gain on the swings of increased wool production and higher prices. Of a certainty his wool cheque this year would be large, and if only he could sell off his surplus sheep it would obviate what was coming to appear the necessity of seeking an advance from the wool brokers if rain did not fall soon. The twenty-one thousand pounds to the credit of Atlas at the beginning of the year had shrunk to three thousand. The annual labour costs amounted nearly to five thousand pounds, taxes about four thousand, the shearing contractor would require nearly three thousand, and his ration account would quite reach that figure. Rent, rates, insurance, motor expenses, and horse feed would account for the balance. If the coming spring proved to be rainless, he would have to start hand-feeding the flocks, and then his expenses would mount in earnest.

  For all this the problem was not one of life or death. If even the previous year’s wool prices were maintained, the value of the present clip would more than cover his future expenses. It was a problem almost too common, one
repeatedly presented to a pastoralist, and finally solved in accordance with the personality of the sheepman to whom it was presented.

  As his father before him, Frank Mayne had the gambling streak in his soul. The father never would have made Atlas if he had been a cautious man, and the son would not have retained the great property had he been faint-hearted. The Australian industries of wool and metals have been created by gamblers, fearless men always ready to take a chance.

  Mayne decided to take a chance.

  4

  A problem of less urgency, yet still demanding a solution, was one nearer his heart. It was nothing less than the gradual dispersion of the illusion he had cherished regarding the continued and continuous happiness of marriage. Two years now it was since he had married Ethel after a whirlwind courtship. From the first moment he saw Ethel Dyson, looked into the dark pools of her inscrutable eyes, felt his man’s nature attracted and thrilled by her femininity, he had loved her with so great a passion that all which had gone before in his life was wiped out.

  Yet, even so, marriage with Ethel had not been quite what he had expected, hoped for. Never once had his wife accepted his embraces without reserve, or with abandon. Time after time he sensed that she held him, if not at arm’s length, at half arm’s length. Finding her cold, unresponsive, all his fire failed to warm her. She had changed even from the woman she had been. Whilst not positive, he inclined to the belief that the change dated from the coming of Little Frankie. Never demonstrative, Ethel, before that terrible hour, had evinced a restrained, gay insouciance brought out by the wonder of their honeymoon and the shower of gifts he rained on her.

  For a while his mind dwelt in that beautiful past, and idly, hardly conscious of the observation spurred by habit, he noticed how the cirrus clouds were now showing a south-western edge, beyond which the sky was clear.