Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/175

 They began and ended work when they pleased, and there was always the chance of a great success, which gave the pursuit the subtle fascination of gaming. It was work, they were accustomed to say, in which a gentleman or a Republican could engage without any sense of humiliation, and many gentlemen had engaged in it. From the diggings I made my way to the regions of squatting. The open country was charming, and often presented scenes which the native artist will certainly make memorable hereafter. The ordinary landscape in a pastoral district is a plain, bordered with low broken hills, and dotted with the sparkling lightwood or wild cherry, or the dingy gum-tree with fragments of its bark swinging like the rags of a tatterdemalion. In an agricultural district a common scene consists of undulating hills of rich chocolate soil running down into long grassy valleys, or succulent meadows, fattened by the great fertilisers, rain and sunshine. It is a blessed land, seamed with gold, fanned with healthy breezes, and bathed in a transparent atmosphere like the landscapes of Guido. When men of Northern energy and perseverance possess this gracious soil we shall see marvels. The newcomer can scarcely look upon these charming landscapes without seeing them in imagination studded with warm farmhouses, with here and there the sparkling villas for which they seem to be expressly framed; but a generation must pass, fertile in wise laws, before we shall see these results. At present a few men possess and degrade this noble territory. The squattages I have visited make a strange contrast. You may sit down to table with a sheep farmer in a dirty wooden shed which he calls his homestead, and dine, if you can, off coarse mutton killed too soon and cooked too soon, moistened by tea without milk, in the midst of a region of pasturage, or with fiery brandy and mawkish water, and bread without leaven, the whole placed on the table by a slovenly man with bare arms and uncombed hair, who has cooked the meal in an outhouse reeking with sheepskins and where half a dozen shepherds are recreating themselves with tobacco; or if fortune be land, you may happen on a charming cottage, deeply verandahed and sheltered with plantations of European shrubs. These are the homes of squatters who settle down with their family,