IS PRESIDENT S AUUHESS. 



tious come to naught against the breath ol' tlrought or thu ravage of the bush-fiie. 

 Lite becomes a long watching, with as much cynicism and fortitude as the watcher 

 can avail himself of, the turning of the great wheel of fortune, which deals out 

 failure to one man, and success to another, quite irrespeetivi. of their merits. 

 Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that a tone of cynical le\ity towards 

 life is the dominant note of Australian literature. 'Home' is just a place wher^ 

 one makes money or loses it, as the case may be,"' and so on. Xow the most 

 oppropriate label for this diatribe is just — "The Squeaker has squoken.'' Aus- 

 tralia surely offers no locus standi to such an undesirable alien as fatalism. But 

 fatalism harnessed to ignorance is a hopeless combination, which deserves no 

 (juarter from Science. Is there one returned soUiier who would deliberately say, 

 of the recent terrible war, that the incomprehensible deity known as "luck" ruled 

 everything in connection with it, the only drawback being that the huge armies 

 of the two sets of opponents had to engage in a death-struggle, in order to find 

 out which side the incomprehensible deity favoured, and intended to win .' Xo 

 wonder that Australia has never been in a position to export a snigU- hale of 

 wo<j1 or of sheepskins, a single hide, or a frozen carcase! No wonder, also, that 

 Australian bush-cliildren have never learned to sing "Home, Sweet Home; tliere 

 is no place like Home" ! And how delightful, by comparison, it must be for a 

 man on the land to live in a country where the thermometer is often down to zero 

 or lower, for weeks or longer at a stretch, and the culled stock need to be housed 

 and fed for about five months, more or less, out of the twelve ! 



Another writer, in reference to the 190'J drought, speaks of it as — "the 

 struggle of man against a relentless, cruel environment ; the sweeping away by 

 overwhelming odds of fortunes, won by years of toil ; of the barren mockery 

 of 'what has been,' of disaster, desolation and ruin ; of men stripped and wounded 

 fighting to the end with enduring pluck."" Why not emigrate to Siberia, Russia, 

 or Canaila. which are not troubled with droughts, but merely have luird winters? 



"Old Saltbush" (Walter Smith) in liis poem entitled "Drought: written in 

 1877, when the Drought was at its worst,"t furnishes another example. This is 

 really, though it is not what it was intended to be, the story of a squatter who, 

 after a run of good seasons, thought he would take a sporting chance for just one 

 year more, at any rate; or perhaps he tossed-up over it. But the drought came 

 when he was not expecting it, and caught him wholly uniirepared, with a full 

 complement of .stock ami sheep. It will be noticed that the starving animals are 

 not spoken of as crawling around the empty siloes, or the dricd-up dams, or about 

 the artesian bore, which is on strike, but only along the banks of the empty 

 "great stream-beds," where the "rotting carcasses'' are. The following is portion 

 of whJit the poet has to say about it: — 



lu the great streain-beils, nniddy hules 



Where once was water deep. 

 Ave filled with rotting carcasses 



Of cattle and of sheep ; 

 Aloni; the hanks in ghastly groups 



(FuU half their number gone) 

 The starving stock all feelily craw 1. 



Poor wrecks of skin and bone. 



Oh ! Demon Drought ! that sweeps away 

 The hard-earned wealth of years, etc. 



•Sydney Morning Herald, November 17th, 1908, in "On the Land" column. 

 fAustrallan Ballads and other Poems, selected and edited by D. Sladen, p. 2(il. 



