Up the Country: A Saga of Pioneering Days

The general suspicion that old Pool must have been sent out was well founded. His only crime, however, had been that of ignorance. Son of an English farm labourer wretchedly poor, he and some lads from his village had sallied forth on foot one night to see the lights of Liverpool. They had chanced to reach there at the time of a disturbance and, running to see what the crowd was about, they had been rounded up and sentenced to transportation to the colonies. What chance had the bewildered boy--penniless, friendless, rooted up? Illiterate, how could he know in what letter his name ended? He gave it as Jim Pool. Poor writing on the part of some clerk made it Jim Peel and, as such, he was assigned to a Scottish settler beyond the Cole River. Here, with nothing and no one to tie to, he lived in a kind of hard loneliness which confirmed his natural tendency towards silence. For lack of the most elementary medical attention, he even lost an eye. But he learned a great deal about sheep and cattle, and about trades useful to a settler, and he became as well acquainted with the bush as an Aboriginal. Shy, untutored, but industrious and dependable, he worked his sentence out without mishap, and, when free, became a stockman for a settler near Berrima. Here, in time, he married and was allowed to run his stock with that of his master. As soon as he had the means, he went up the country to Maneroo and began to find his feet a little as a stockman and bushman.

He never volunteered the story of his youth to his family, nor did they ask for it. His wife taught her children all she knew herself--that is, the Lord's Prayer and the alphabet. Much later, he raised no objection to Bert's and Charlotte's cultural campaign, and their introduction of Miss Mayborn, who took possession in a way as unexpected and unbelievable to herself as to Pool.