one has to go and haul him home. I'm about
full of him, and I'm going to leave home before next Christmas, or my
name ain't what it is. Mother says the kiddies would starve if I leave;
but Stanley is coming on like a haystack, I tell him, and he does kick
up, and he ought to be able to plough next time. I ploughed when I was
younger than him. I put in fourteen acres of wheat and oats this year,
and I don't think I'll cut a wheelbarrow-load of it. I'm full of the
place. I never have a single penny to my name, and it ain't father's
drinking that's all to blame; if he didn't booze it wouldn't he much
better. It's the slowest hole in the world, and I'll chuck it and go
shearing or droving. I hate this dairying, it's too slow for a funeral:
there would he more life in trapping 'possums out on Timlinbilly. Mother
always says to have patience, and when the drought breaks and good
seasons come round again things will be better, but it's no good of
trying to stuff me like that. I remember when the seasons were wet. It
was no good growing anything, because every one grew so much that there
was no market, and the sheep died of foot-rot and you couldn't give your
butter away, and it is not much worse to have nothing to sell than not he
able to sell a thing when you have it. And the long and short of it is
that I hate dairying like blue murder. It's as tame as a clucking hen.
Fancy a cove sitting down every morning and evening pulling at a cow's
tits fit to bust himself, and then turning an old separator, and washing
it up in a dish of water like a blooming girl's work. And if you go to a
picnic, just when the fun commences you have to nick off home and milk,
and when you tog yourself on Sunday evening you have to undress again and
lay into the milking, and then you have to change everything on you and
have a bath, or your best girl would scent the cow-yard on you, and not
have you within cooee of her. We won't know what rain is when we see it;
but I suppose it will come in floods and finish the little left by the
drought. The grasshoppers have eaten all the fruit and even the bark off
the trees, and the caterpillars made a croker of the few tomatoes we kept
alive with the suds. All the cockeys round here and dad are applying to
the Government to have their rents suspended for a time. We have not
heard yet whether it will be granted, but if Gov. doesn't like it,
they'll have to lump it, for none of us have a penny to bless ourselves