Up the Country: A Saga of Pioneering Days

The day after the wedding Mrs Mazere set out for her daughter Isabel's at Mungee, a good seventy miles away over the spur of the Great Dividing Range in a slightly south-western direction from Bool Bool. The bride and groom were to escort her and spend a couple of nights at Mungee as a wedding holiday.

If Mrs Mazere had had to supplement Charlotte's bridal deficiencies, the Pools had to fill gaps in Philip Mazere's resources, which were limited owing to his father's disinheriting propensity. This they willingly did. Bert, Charlotte's eldest brother, a youth of seventeen and already one of the most resourceful, daring and accomplished bushmen in those parts, was to conduct the party. Bert, who had never had a collar and rarely a shoe on him till Charlotte's wedding, was only a shade less knowledgeable in bush lore than the Aborigines, from whom he had received some tuition. To lose, drown, freeze or frighten him in all the south-eastern portion of the unconquered continent which had cradled him and been his playground was considered inconceivable. Any stream swimmable by a horse he could ford by that means, he could bottom holes that most men were afraid to bathe in, he could snare if not shoot anything that ran on the earth or flew above it, and he could seize deadly serpents by the tail and dash out their life on a tree trunk--or if no tree or stick was at hand, he could despatch them with whip or surcingle. And though these and a score of other accomplishments were common to all bushmen worthy of the name, Bert's prowess was already legendary.