82 NEW ENGLAND (n.S.W.) ETC. 



rations and other necessaries of life to the persons who lived on 

 stations. The goldfields had attracted most of the men who had 

 been employed as shepherds, &c., and there were few of us who 

 had not to tend the flocks ourselves and to do all other kinds of 

 work when the occasion demanded it. Still we must have food 

 and clothing; wool bales and all implements which were wanted 

 for station work had to be obtained from the coast, and the 

 roads were in no case good, in many very bad indeed. 

 Before turning my attention northwards, I will briefly refer to 

 some of these. I have written enough already about the Port 

 Stephens road, which at that time was quite unfit for ordinary 

 wheel traffic, and the road to Port Macquarie which was 

 extremely rough and consequently was little used. 



Our best traffic road to the coast was the Great Northern, 

 which connected Morpeth and Maitland on the Hunter River 

 with Armidale, and thence led to the more northerly towns. 

 All the carriage of rations and stores was conducted by means 

 of bullock-drays, and these were sometimes occupied for three 

 months or even more on the trip to and from the Hunter. From 

 the station on which I resided we had to send our drays by 

 Walcha and Terrible Vale station to get onto the Great Northern 

 Road a few miles south of Uralla township. They then travelled 

 by Carlisle's Gully, Bendemeer on the Macdonald River, and 

 over the Moonby Range by an exceedingly rough track onto the 

 lower country near Tamworth. Thence they followed a course 

 at no great distance from the present Great Northern Railway 

 Line to Maitland. Not nmch of the track had even been formed, 

 and in wet weather the drays often went down to their axles in 

 the soft sticky clay. Most of the country from Uralla to 

 Moonby is granity, and this becomes specially boggy in wet 

 weather ; but by sticking to the track which was generally used, 

 and the surface of which was trampled into a fairly hard crust, 

 there was some chance of getting along. The sticky red soil of 

 the ridgy country was perhaps the most difficult to get through. 

 On one occasion, when I was taking sheep from New England to 

 Lake George, we lost our draft bullocks from our camp at 

 the Clay Waterholes, about ten miles south of Tamworth. 

 Fortunately for us, the pastoralists had plenty of room for 

 stock on their runs, and they left us in peace with our 

 8,000 sheep while for a fortnight the bullock-driver and I 

 scoured the country in search of the vagrants. We rode separa- 

 tely over a wide area of country, and took it in turn to camp 



