the neighbour says he must be
getting home. "Stay and have some dinner! Man alive! Stay and have some
dinner!" says the selector; and so the friend stays.

It is a broiling hot day in summer, and the dinner consists of hot
roast meat, hot baked potatoes, hot cabbage, hot pumpkin, hot peas, and
burning-hot plum-pudding. The family drinks on an average four cups of
tea each per meal. The wife takes her place at the head of the
table with a broom to keep the fowls out, and at short intervals she
interrupts the conversation with such exclamations as "Shoo! shoo!"
"Tommy, can't you see that fowl? Drive it out!" The fowls evidently pass
a lot of their time in the house. They mark the circle described by the
broom, and take care to keep two or three inches beyond it. Every now
and then you see a fowl on the dresser amongst the crockery, and there
is great concern to get it out before it breaks something. While dinner
is in progress two steers get into the wheat through a broken rail which
has been spliced with stringy-bark, and a calf or two break into
the vineyard. And yet this careless Australian selector, who is too
shiftless to put up a decent fence, or build a decent house and who
knows little or nothing about farming, would seem by his conversation
to have read up all the great social and political questions of the
day. Here are some fragments of conversation caught at the
dinner-table. Present--the selector, the missus, the neighbour,
Corney George--nicknamed "Henry George"--Tommy, Jacky, and the younger
children. The spaces represent interruptions by the fowls and children:

Corney George (continuing conversation): "But Henry George says, in
'Progress and Poverty,' he says--"

Missus (to the fowls): "Shoo! Shoo!"

Corney: "He says--"

Tom: "Marther, jist speak to this Jack."

Missus (to Jack): "If you can't behave yourself, leave the table."

Tom [Corney, probably]: "He says in Progress and--"

Missus: "Shoo!"

Neighbour: "I think 'Lookin' Backwards' is more--"

Missus: "Shoo! Shoo! Tom, can't you see that fowl?"

Selector: "Now I think 'Caesar's Column' is more likely--Just look at--"

Missus: "Shoo! Shoo!"

Selector: "Just look at the French Revolution."

Corney: "Now, Henry George-"

Tom: "Marther! I seen a old-man kangaroo up on--"

Missus: "Shut up! Eat your dinner an' hold your tongue. Carn't you see
someone's speakin'?"

Selector: "Just look at the French--"

Missus (to the fowls): "Shoo!