THE TOU'NS OF NEW SOUTH U'.-ILES. 269 



Bankers, public officials and others keep for awhile a metropolitan style, hut not beyond a 

 single summer; the languor of the hot North changes their manners before they them- 

 selves change the cut of their clothes. The two great businesses in Bourke are the 

 carrying of goods and the purveying of drinks. Every second shop seems to dispense 

 liquors, and happily, since the completion of the railway, many varieties of drinks are 

 brewed from the lemons and oranges and ice brought up by the daily train from the 

 coast. Bullock-teams, horse-teams and American coaches come into the town from all 

 points of the compass, and in the busy season the streets are lively with shearers with 

 pack-horses, and swag-men with all their estate on their backs, steam-boat hands, and 

 drovers from the Warrego, the Paroo, and the Bulloo. 



The shearers may have left their mountain homes at Monaro in midwinter, may 

 travel a couple of thousand miles, do good work, and then reach home again by harvest. 

 The swag-man may have walked the length and breadth of the colonies ; but the river- 

 men live, and hope to die, on the water. The drovers are the busiest and perhaps the 

 most interesting of all wild fellows who live at least sixteen hours out of the twenty- 

 four in the saddle, who bring down the big "mobs" of cattle from the rich pasturages of 

 Western Queensland, truck them at the yards a couple of miles out of the town, enjoy 

 in their own way their loose day or two, and then make back again. Strange experience 

 this for the cattle creatures as wild as buffaloes, who on their native pastures would 

 bolt from a man who should venture near them unmounted ; yet not less than fifty 

 thousand are trucked every year, long trains with the living freight starting city-wards 

 every day. In the near future this live-stock traffic may end, and a great slaughtering 

 and freezing establishment may be at work on the edge of the great pastures. If this 

 anticipated change takes place, Bourke may develope somewhat on the lines of Chicago. 



Nor is it necessary that the produce of the district should be confined to wool and 

 meat only. A glance at the Chinese garden, irrigated by an engine and a Tangye pump 

 lifting water' from two wells, shows that the soil will , grow anything peaches, grapes, 

 oranges, oats, cotton, tobacco, maize, and all sorts of vegetables. Three miles east of 

 Bourke the River is bridged, and from, the bridge the roads branch off to the border, 

 and over ten degrees of longitude to the great downs of Queensland and the Northern 

 Territory of South Australia. 



To the north lies the country of the springs, a remarkable tract running between 

 the Warrego and the Paroo, where the water breaks right through to the surface 

 sometimes through a stratum of pipe-clay, bearing up so much of that easily-soluble 

 substance as to be undrinkable and valueless, at others from a stratum of unsalted drift, 

 through limestone or ferruginous rock, overflowing pure, limpid, cool ; giving birth to a 

 verdant grass and reed growth, and making a rare oasis on the plain. Beyond the 

 springs lies a poor scrubby country, with a sparse supply of spinifex, and before the 

 rich downs of Queensland are readied is Barrigun, where ultimately the great Queensland 

 overland line will join that of New South Wales. 



Brewarrina is seventy miles east of Bourke on the left bank of the Darling. It is 

 somewhat similar to the latter both in architecture and design, and anticipates a like 

 future. To the north, towards the Queensland border, it commands a country infinitely 

 superior to the background of Bourke at least twenty thousand square miles of rich 



