Page:Melbourne Riots (Andrade, 1892).djvu/59

Rh keep them well fed for a month, three good colonial ovens, plenty of kitchen and other utensils, a good supply of axes, spades and other implements, a careful assortment of garden seed that could he planted as soon as the ground was prepared, ten healthy-looking cows, and a few dogs. Such a collection was itself enough to make the plucky band feel some confidence in the undertaking, and the cheerful faces of the many earnest women and men who had come to see them off was just the best thing to increase that confidence.

It was night by the time the party reached their destination; and if their departure was cheerless, their arrival was still more so. But men used to ‘roughing it’, do not get appalled at trifles; and they thought little of the inconvenience of stopping at the station for the night, where they managed to keep off the cold by the assistance of the tents they had with them, for although the weather was bitterly sharp there had been no rain there, and they did not find it so very uncomfortable as they might have done. At daybreak, Mr. Martin conducted them to one of the adjacent farms, where they found drays waiting in readiness for them to take their luggage to their own farm.

The men were not long in reaching their destination; and as the morning was a fine one they had a good opportunity to look around them and inspect their future home. The place they had chosen was very nicely situated only a short distance from the shore of the lake, and the position was one admirably adapted for the object they had in view. Certainly the place was not seen in its prettiest aspects; the recent oppressive summer had made the place wear a very desolate look, and there were not many evidences of vegetable life about. There were a few farms here and there, looking a little brighter than the great waste around them; but even they did not seem to receive the careful attention they might have had bestowed upon them, for they were not particularly well cultivated, but had evidently suffered their share of the parching dryness of an Australian summer, and looked even then as if they could advantageously do with a goodly supply of the clear water that lay at such a little distance from them. There was not even a decent forest to relieve the dead monotony of the scene, but only here and there a little timber struggling to survive the destructive attacks of man and nature's hot blasts. Now and then an aboriginal or two could be observed, the last remnants of a dying race, fast hastening to obliteration together with the crumbling civilization that had strangled it and was now strangling itself. Hares and rabbits were there in abundance, as many a farmer knew to his sorrow; and the wood ducks were so plentiful that the settlers found them a constant source of destruction to their crops. Wild fowl were there in immense numbers forming easy sport for the settlers' rifles; and the black ducks, teals and wild geese sported themselves over the quiet scene in crowds quite astounding to city eyes. And every now and then the settlers would catch sight of some of the bronze-winged pigeons which are so plentiful in the district. But it was the soil itself, the sandy chocolate soil beneath their feet, that appealed strongest to the new visitors. It was the first little spot of land that they—the rescued, expropriated