Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/68

44 seemed, as if the whole vast silence of the forest was shaken. A second tree that we saw felled measured one hundred and fifty-eight feet to the first fork.

The woodcutters are paid by the load that the bullocks draw, the bare trunk of the tree when its branches have been lopped off. We were told that they can make as much as £6 a week. The cost of living does not amount to much more than 25s. a week for a single man, as he can board sumptuously at the Hall for 22s., and the price of lodgings is about 1s. 6d. This leaves a considerable surplus, and in Big Brook there is no means of spending money. In consequence, men occasionally go off to the nearest town when they have amassed a small capital, and stay there till it is all spent, and they have nothing to show for it. They work eight hours a day, and everything is regulated by contract. They are of various nationalities, but all of magnificent physique. While we were waiting to remount our railway trucks, a team of forty-eight bullocks passed, dragging one enormous log of twenty tons weight, the drivers cracking their long whips, screaming and leaping into the air in a frenzy of inarticulate excitement that somehow conveyed a meaning to the bullocks. Soon after we began the return journey we passed through a belt of