Explore "My Brilliant Career" by Miles Franklin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Men only, and they merely on business, came to Barney's Gap -- women tabooed the place. Some of them told me they would come to see me, but not Mrs. M'Swat, as she always allowed the children to be as rude to them as they pleased. With the few individuals who chanced to come M'Swat would sit down, light his pipe, and vulgarly and profusely expectorate on the floor, while they yarned and yarned for hours and hours about the price of wool, the probable breeding capacity of the male stock they kept, and of the want of grass -- never a word about their country's politics or the events of the day; even the news of the "Mountain Murders" by Butler had not penetrated here. I wondered if they were acquainted with the names of their Governor and Prime Minister.
It was not the poor food and the filthy way of preparing it that worried me, or that Mr. M'Swat used "damn" on an average twice in five minutes when conversing, or that the children forever nagged about my father's poverty and tormented me in a thousand other ways -- it was the dead monotony that was killing me.