Free Bush Studies by Barbara Baynton

barely noon, yet she had twice emptied the water bottle “shogging” in the iron bracket.
    The train dragged its weary length again, and she closed her eyes from the monotony of the dead plain. Suddenly the engine cleared its throat in shrill welcome to two iron tanks, hoisted twenty feet and blazing like evil eyes from a vanished face.
    Beside them it squatted on its hunkers, placed a blackened thumb on its pipe, and hissed through its closed teeth like a snared wild-cat, while gulping yards of water. The green slimy odour penetrated to the cattle. The lustiest of these stamped feebly, clashing their horns and bellowing a hollow request.
    A long-bearded bushman was standing on the few slabs that formed a siding, with a stockwhip coiled like a snake on his arm. The woman passenger asked him the name of the place.
    â€œThis is ther Never-Never—ther lars’ place Gord made,” answered one of the drovers who were crowding the windows.
    â€œBetter’n ther ’ell ’ole yous come from, any’ow,” defended the bushman. “Breakin’ ther ’earts, an’ dyin’ from suerside, cos they lef’ it,” he added derisively, pointing to the cattle.
    In patriotic anger he passed to the guard-van without answering her question, though she looked anxiously after him. At various intervals during the many halts of the train, she had heard some of the obscene jokes, and with it in motion, snatches of lewd songs from the drovers’ carriage. But the language used by this bushman to the guard, as he helped to remove a ton of fencing-wire topping his new saddle, made her draw back her head. Near the siding was a spring cart, and she presently saw him throw his flattened saddle into it and drive off. There was no one else in sight, and in nervous fear she asked the bagman if this was Gooriabba siding. It was nine miles further, he told her.
    The engine lifted its thumb from its pipe. “Well—well—to—be—sure; well—well—to—be—sure,” it puffed, as if in shocked remembrance of its being hours late for its appointment there.
    She saw no one on the next siding, but a buggy waited near the sliprails. It must be for her. According to Sydney arrangements she was to be met here, and driven out twelve miles. A drover inquired as the train left her standing by her portmanteau, “Are yer travellin’ on yer lonesome, or on’y goin’ somew’ere!” and another flung a twist of paper towards her, brawling unmusically, that it was “A flowwer from me angel mother’s ger-rave.”
    She went towards the buggy, but as she neared it the driver got in and made to drive off. She ran and called, for when he went she would be alone with the bush all round her, and only the sound of the hoarse croaking of the frogs from the swamp near, and the raucous “I’ll—’ave—’is—eye—out”, of the crows.
    Yes, he was from Gooriabba Station, and had come to meet a young “piece” from Sydney, who had not come.
    She was ghastly with bilious sickness—the result of an over-fed brain and an under-fed liver. Her face flushed muddily. “Was it a housekeeper?”
    He was the rouseabout, wearing his best clothes with awful unusualness. The coat was too long in the sleeve, and wrinkled across the back with his bush slouch. There was that wonderful margin of loose shirt between waistcoat and trousers, which all swagger bushies affect. Subordinate to nothing decorative was the flaring silk handkerchief, drawn into a sailor’s knot round his neck.
    He got out and fixed the winkers, then put his hands as far as he could reach into his pockets—from the position of his trousers he could not possibly reach bottom. It was apparently some unknown law that suspended them. He thrust forward his lower jaw, elevated his pipe, and squirted a little tobacco juice towards his foot that was tracing