Explore "White-When-He's-Wanted" by Andrew Barton Paterson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Buckalong was a big freehold of some 80,000 acres, belonging to an absentee syndicate, and therefore run in most niggardly style. There was a manager on 200 pounds a year, Sandy M'Gregor to wit -- a hard-headed old Scotchman known as "four-eyed M'Gregor", because he wore spectacles. For assistants, he had half-a-dozen of us -- jackaroos and colonial-experiencers -- who got nothing a year, and earned it.
We had, in most instances, paid premiums to learn the noble art of squatting -- which now appears to me hardly worth studying, for so much depends on luck that a man with a head as long as a horse's has little better chance than the fool just imported. Besides the manager and the jackaroos, there were a few boundary riders to prowl round the fences of the vast paddocks. This constituted the whole station staff.