Ends of The Earth by Mary Gaunt — Read

Andrew Latimer gave a long sigh and shifted his bluey uneasily from one shoulder to the other. He was just a little out of his reckoning, and he had not been within sight of human habitation for a couple of days. In this desolate country, stations were few and far between. At Yalla Yalla he and his mate had got enough flour and salt meat, they reckoned, to carry them on to the lonely station that lay half-way to Port Vincent, and since leaving there they had met no signs of settlement. They did not expect to meet any.

A man in the bush must have a mate, but Andrew, looking at his, wondered with a sudden imperious wonder how the Fates had ever thrown him, a man of birth and education, with this forlorn, foul-mouthed old wreck. Possibly it was the case in which extremes meet. He, with his Oxford training, had been superior to the average bushman, just as Wall-eyed Bill had been inferior, and so the two friendless ones had drifted together. He had looked at Bill thoughtfully that last night at Yalla Yalla, and in the morning, finding a broken triangle of looking-glass hung against the slab wall of the travellers' hut, he had looked at himself equally thoughtfully.