Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/514

 their existence to some unexplained ordinance of Dame Nature, whose enfans gatés they are. Her forest children they. Lords of the Waste, roamers through wood and wold, formulating thus a world-old protest against the dulness of respectability, the greed of industrialism, the selfishness of property.

Products as well of the careless ordering of new countries as of the stern discipline of older communities, small wonder that they should have arisen in this brand-new, scarce century-old Austral land of ours, hugging the South Pole and dissevered from many of the formalities of civilisation. Small wonder, I say, that amid our pathless woods and sea-like plains, with every natural advantage and conceivable aid from the habits of a migratory, restless, centaur-like population, these unlicensed tax-gatherers should have appeared. Thus the profession and practice of what is now called 'Bushranging' occurred at a very early period of Australian history. The term easily grew out of the natural desire of the escaped felon, desperate from harsh treatment, or perhaps merely averse to toil, to hide himself in the woods which then surrounded the settlements.

The old English words 'wood' and 'forest,' 'copse' and 'thicket,' had been superseded by the comprehensive colonial term 'bush,' doubtless suggested by the close approximation to 'scrub' or 'jungle,' which the interminable eucalyptus wilderness then presented to the first emigrant Britons. 'The bush' came next, as more fully comprehensive and explanatory, signifying something analogous to the Dutch-African 'veldt,' not necessarily woodland, but the waste lands of the Crown generally. This nomenclature must have mystified later arrivals considerably, much of the so-called 'bush' being composed of plains nearly, and in some cases altogether, without timber of any description.

The wandering robber, necessarily 'a burgher of that desert city,' came then, by general consent, to be described as a 'bushranger.' The term was even Latinised, as the philologist may discover by reading the description in St. James's Church, Sydney, on the tablet placed there to commemorate the death of Dr. Wardell, of 'Wardell's Bush,' Petersham, slain in the early thirties, 'latrone vagante' (sic). The first robbers were in all cases convicts. For the small