On a Selection 43 



watered patches on their runs. Thus began a 

 feud between squatter and selector, which is vig- 

 orously maintained in some places at the present 

 day. In addition to the three hundred acres he 

 may obtain by purchase, the selector can "take 

 up" an additional area of three hundred acres on 

 leasehold, and may further expand his holding by 

 selecting in the name of his children under certain 

 conditions. By these expedients, the selection 

 can be made to assume very respectable dimen- 

 sions, and frequently its size hampers the selector 

 in the struggle upon which he enters to make for 

 himself and his family a home in the bush. 



In the vernacular of the bush, the selector is a 

 "cockie," and cockie is short for cockatoo farmer. 

 He is a cockatoo farmer because he works early 

 and late to clear a patch of ground, and plough it ; 

 then he sows his seed, only to wake at dawn the 

 next day and find his field white with cockatoos, 

 all busily devouring the grain. Those cockatoos 

 are the only crop he has, "of all his labour and 

 vexation of his heart wherein he hath laboured 

 under the sun." If not cockatoos, then rabbits, 

 or locusts, or drought interfere to deprive him of 

 the result of his work. 



The typical cockie' s hut is remarkable for the 

 size of its clay fireplace, which is usually the nu- 

 cleus of the structure. Planning on an ambitious 

 scale, the cockie builds his fireplace first, from 

 bricks made of puddled clay dried in the sun. To 

 this he builds a hut of two or three rooms, with 



