Dead Man's Camp by John Arthur Barry — Read

One lurid summer, in 1873, I was crossing over from Saint George's Bridge, on the Balonne, to Mitchell, on the Maranoa. I had been to a rush at Malawal, N. S. W., but as it proved a rank duffer, got up by the local storekeepers in a last effort to keep the township in existence, I made back again by ‘The Bridge,' on chance of getting a job of droving with some of the mobs of sheep or cattle always passing through the Border town, bound south from the Central and Gulf stations.

Queenslanders will remember that summer, on certain days of which men were stricken down in dozens, and birds fell dead off the trees in the fierce heat.