Station was face to face with the year's work, making preparations for
the year's mustering and branding - for with the lifting of the Wet
everything in the Never-Never begins to move.
"After the Wet" rivers go down, the north-west monsoon giving place to
the south-east Trades; bogs dry up everywhere, opening all roads;
travellers pass through the stations from all points of the
compass - cattle buyers, drovers, station-owners, telegraph people - all
bent on business, and all glad to get moving after the long compulsory
inaction of the Wet; and lastly that great yearly cumbrous event takes
place: the starting of the "waggons," with their year's stores for
Inside.
The first batch of travellers had little news for us. They had heard
that the teams were loading up, and couldn't say for certain, and,
finding them unsatisfactory, we looked forward to the coming of the
"Fizzer," our mailman, who was almost due.
Eight mails a year was our allowance, with an extra one now and then
through the courtesy of travellers. Eight mails a year against eight
hundred for the townsfolk. Was it any wonder that we all found we had
business at the homestead when the Fizzer was due there?
When he came this trip he was, as usual, brimming over with news:
personal items, public gossip, and the news that the horse teams had got
most of their loading on, and that the Macs were getting their bullocks
under way. Two horse waggons and a dray for far "inside," and three
bullock waggons for the nearer distances, comprised the "waggons" that
year. The teamsters were Englishmen; but the bullock-punchers were three
"Macs" - an Irishman, a Highlander, and the Sanguine Scot.
Six waggons, and about six months' hard travelling, in and out, to
provide a year's stores for three cattle stations and two telegraph
stations. It is not surprising that the freight per ton was what it
was - twenty-two pounds per ton for the Elsey, and upwards of forty pounds
for "inside." It is this freight that makes the grocery bill such a big
item on stations out-bush, where several tons of stores are considered
by no means a large order.
Close on the heels of the Fizzer came other travellers, with the news
that the horse teams had got going and the Macs had "pulled out" to the
Four Mile. "Your trunks'll be along in no time now, missus," one of them
said. "They've got 'em all aboard."
The Dandy did some rapid calculations: "Ten miles a day on good roads,"
he said: "one hundred and seventy miles. Tens into that seventeen days.
Give 'em a week over for unforeseen emergencies, and call it four weeks."
It sounded quite cheerful and near at hand, but a belated thunderstorm or
two, and consequent bogs, nearly doubled the four weeks.
