Shearing in the Riverina Part 2

"Come in, Jackson! Your tally is so-and-so. Is that right?"

Jackson.--"I suppose so."

"Cook and store account, so much; shearing account so much."

Jackson.--"And a good deal too."

"That is your affair," said Mr Gordon, sternly enough. "Now look here!

You're in my opinion a bad shearer and a bad man. You have given me a great deal of trouble, and I should have kicked you out of the shed weeks ago if I had not been short of men. I shall make a difference between you and men who have tried to do their best. I make you no allowance of any sort, I pay you by the strict agreement. There's your cheque. Go!"

Jackson goes out with a very black countenance. He mutters with a surly oath that if "he'd known how he was going to be served he'd ha'

'blocked' 'em a little more." He is pretty well believed to have been served right, and he secures no sympathy whatever. Working-men of all cla.s.ses are shrewd and fair judges generally. If an employer does his best to mete out justice he is always appreciated and supported by the majority. These few instances will serve as a description of the whole process of settling with the shearers. The horses have all been got in.

Great catching and saddling-up has taken place all the morning. By the afternoon the whole party are dispersed to the four winds; some, like Abraham Lawson and his friends, to sheds "higher up," in a colder climate, where shearing necessarily commences later. From these they will pa.s.s to others, until the last sheep in the mountain runs are shorn. Then those who have not farms of their own betake themselves to reaping. Billy May and Jack Windsor are quite as ready to back themselves against time in the wheat-field as on the shearing-floor.

Harvest over, they find their pockets inconveniently full, so they commence to visit their friends and repay themselves for their toils by a tolerably liberal allowance of rest and recreation.

Old Ben and a few choice specimens of the olden time get no further than the nearest public house. Their cheques are handed to the landlord and a "stupendous and terrible spree" sets in. At the end of a week he informs them that they have received liquor to the amount of their cheques--something over a hundred pounds--save the mark! They meekly acquiesce, as is their custom. The landlord generously presents them with a gla.s.s of grog each, and they take the road for the next woolshed.

The shearers being despatched, the sheep-washers, a smaller and less regarded force, file up. They number some forty men. Nothing more than fair bodily strength, willingness and obedience being required in their case, they are more easy to get and to replace than shearers. They are a varied and motley lot. That powerful and rather handsome man is a New Yorker, of Irish parentage. Next to him is a slight, neat, quiet individual. He was a lieutenant in a line regiment. The lad in the rear was a Sandhurst cadet. Then came two navvies and a New Zealander, five Chinamen, a Frenchman, two Germans, Tin Pot, Jerry, and Wallaby--three aboriginal blacks. There are no invidious distinctions as to caste, colour, or nationality. Every one is a man and a brother at sheep-washing. Wage, one pound per week; wood, water, tents and food "A LA DISCRETION." Their accounts are simple: so many weeks, so many pounds; store account, so much; hospital? well, five shillings; cheque, good-morning.

The wool-pressers, the fleece-rollers, the fleece-pickers, the yardsmen, the washers' cooks, the hut cooks, the spare shepherds; all these and a few other supernumeraries inevitable at shearing-time, having been paid off, the snowstorm of cheques which has been fluttering all day comes to an end. Mr Gordon and the remaining "sous-officiers" go to rest that night with much of the mental strain removed which has been telling on every waking moment for the last two months.

The long train of drays and wagons, with loads varying from twenty to forty-five bales, has been moving off in detachments since the commencement. In a day or two the last of them will have rolled heavily away. The 1400 bales, averaging three and a half hundredweight, are distributed, slow journeying, along the road, which they mark from afar, standing huge and columnar like guide tumuli, from Anabanco to the waters of the Murray. Between the two points there is neither a hill nor a stone. All is the vast monotonous sea of plain--at this season a prairie-meadow exuberant with vegetation; in the late summer, or in the occasional and dreaded phenomenon of a DRY WINTER, dusty, and herbless as a brickfield, for hundreds of miles.

Silence falls on the plains and waters of Anabanco for the next six months. The woolshed, the washpen, and all the huts connected with them are lone and voiceless as caravanserais in a city of the plague.