A Little Hospitality, A Day Or Two Of Mutual Understanding, And We Have Become Part Of The Other's Life.

For bush hospitality is something better than the bare housing and feeding of guests, being just the simple sharing

Of our daily lives with a fellow-man - a literal sharing of all that we have; of our plenty or scarcity, our joys or sorrows, our comforts or discomforts, our security or danger; a democratic hospitality, where all men are equally welcome, yet so refined in its simplicity and wholesomeness, that fulsome thanks or vulgar apologies have no part in it, although it was whispered among the bushfolk that those "down in their luck" learned that when the Maluka was filling tucker-bags, a timely word in praise of the missus filled tucker-bags to over-flowing.

Two hundred and fifty guests was the tally for that year, and earliest among them came a telegraph operator, who as is the way with telegraphic operators out-bush invited us to "ride across to the wire for a shake hands with Outside"; and within an hour we came in sight of the telegraph wire as our horses mounted the stony ridge that overlooks the Warloch ponds, when the wire was forgotten for a moment in the kaleidoscope of moving, ever-changing colour that met our eyes.

Two wide-spreading limpid ponds, the Warloch lay before us, veiled in a glory of golden-flecked heliotrope and purple water-lilies, and floating deep green leaves, with here and there gleaming little seas of water, opening out among the lilies, and standing knee-deep in the margins a rustling fringe of light reeds and giant bulrushes. All round the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms tall grasses and forest trees, with here and there a spreading colabar festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine. Sunny blue reflected, with the gaunt old trees, in the tiny gleaming seas among the lilies, while everywhere upon the floating leaves myriads and myriads of grey and pink "gallah" parrots and sulphur-crested cockatoos preened feathers, or rested, sipping at the water grey and pink verging to heliotrope and snowy white, touched here and there with gold, blending, flower-like, with the golden-flecked glory of the lilies.

For a moment we waited, spell-bound in the brilliant sunshine; then the dogs running down to the water's edge, the gallahs and cockatoos rose with gorgeous sunrise effect: a floating gray-and-pink cloud, backed by sunlit flashing white. Direct to the forest trees they floated and, settling there in their myriads, as by a miracle the gaunt, gnarled old giants of the bush all over blossomed with garlands of grey, and pink, and white, and gold.

But the operator, being unpoetical, had ridden on to the "wire," and presently was "shinning up" one of its slender galvanised iron posts as a preliminary to the "handshake"; for tapping the line being part of the routine of a telegraph operator in the Territory, "shinning up posts," is one of his necessary accomplishments.

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