A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip

When you travel over the great western country, with the solitary question of water in your mind (and you don't want a piece of string tied round your finger to keep it slipping from your memory), you realise the grim, dogged fight that has been made by the men who have settled there. Thousands of creeks and gullies vein this region, just the same as in other parts; but they are treacherous affairs to the stranger, who is lured by the promising lines and clumps of timber to search for potholes, such as his "inside" experience leads him to expect. There are rivers, too, draining vast areas of one State, and moistening hundreds of miles of another. They start far north with a roaring flood, and are exhausted and lost in the immensity of their travels, or they end their long journey with a brown trickle that creeps into the Darling or Murray. When settlers along the upper reaches of eastern rivers are flooded, warning is sent to those far down to prepare for the coming rush; but the people at the lower end of the outback waterways only hear casually that a big flood has happened above them. Though it may sweep grandly for a couple of hundred miles, only now and again do they expect it to run in their part of the course. The great plain awaits it with parched lips. Thirstily, greedily, it drinks up the river.

The great bulk of the inland drainage courses underground, down the ever flowing subterranean channels. When you look at the surface courses after a dry storm, you cannot but think that any other kind of river is impossible without some gigantic scheme of afforestation. To the small settler, who wants to wet his whistle in a hurry, the underground river is hopeless. Still, he goes out, and prospers. One whom I knew well, after working for some years on the roads with a team, took up a dry selection in the Corner, starting with a few sheep. He passed in his checks in 1909, leaving to his widow and children a well watered estate and £32,000 in cash. He was a canny Scot. All he did to make his pile was to put down a couple of tanks in the midst of timber. Most western graziers made their tanks in the sun-baked, windswept open, so that the sheep, after drinking, wouldn't camp round the tank. Both sheep and tank suffered in consequence.