"Every day must seem the same," said others:
every one agreeing that life out-bush was stagnation, and all marvelling
that we did not die of ennui.
"Whatever do you do with your time?" The day Neaves's mate left was
devoted to housekeeping duties - "spring-cleaning," the Maluka called it,
while Dan drew vivid word-pictures of dogs cleaning their own chains.
The day after that was filled in with preparations for a walk-about, and
the next again found us camped at Bitter Springs. Monotony! when of the
thirty days that followed these three every day was alike only in being
different from any other, excepting in their almost unvarying menu: beef
and damper and tea for a first course, and tea and damper and jam for a
second. They also resembled each other, and all other days out-bush, in
the necessity of dressing in a camp mosquito net. "Stagnation!" they
called it, when no day was long enough for its work, and almost every
night found us camped a day's journey from our breakfast camp.
It was August, well on in the Dry, and on a cattle station in the
Never-Never "things hum" in August. All the surface waters are drying up
by then, and the outside cattle - those scattered away beyond the
borders - are obliged to come in to the permanent waters, and must be
gathered in and branded before the showers scatter them again.
