t Noonoon folk boasted their
own individuality, smacking somewhat of town and country and yet of
neither. Some of the older ones patronised the flowing beards and
sartorial styles "all the go way up in Ironbark," yet if put Out-Back
would have been as much new chums as city people, and were wont to
regard honest unvarnished statements of bush happenings as "snake
yarns"; while the youths of these parts combined the appearance of the
far bush yokel and the city larrikin, and were to be seen following
the plough with cigarettes in their mouths.

The small holdings were cut into smaller paddocks, the style of fence
mostly patronised being two or three strands of savage barbed wire
stretched from post to post. This insufficient separation of stock was
made adequate by the cattle themselves carrying the remainder of the
white man's burden of fencing around their necks, in the form of a
hampering yoke made of a forked tree-limb with a piece of plain
fencing-wire to close the open ends. This prevented them pushing
between the wires, and it was a pathetically ludicrous sight to see
the calves at a very tender age turned out an exact replica of their
elders. All the places opened on to the roads like streets; and to go
across country was a sore ordeal, as one had to uncomfortably cross
roughly upturned crop-land, and every few hundred yards roll under a
line of barbed wire about a foot from the ground, at the risk of
reefing one's clothes and the certainty of dishevelment. To walk out
on the main roads and stumble over the loose stones ankle-deep in the
dust was torture. Some averred they had known no repairs for ten
years, and that they were as good as they were, because to have been
worse was impossible. Walking in this case being no pleasure, I
bethought me of riding for gentle exercise, and inquired of Grandma
Clay the possibilities in that respect.

"Ride! there ain't nothink to ride in this district, only great
elephant draughts or little tiddy ponies the size of dogs," she said
with unlimited scorn; "I never see such crawlers, they go about in
them pokin' little sulkies, and even the men can't ride. In my young
days if a feller couldn't ride a buck-jumper the girls wouldn't look
at him, an' yet down here at one of the shows last year in the prize
for the hunters, the horses had to be all rode by one man; there
wasn't another young feller in the district fit to take a blessed moke
over a fence. I felt like goin' out an'