54 Australian Life 



vegetable, are always with him, and he sows his 

 seed without any certainty of reaping a harvest. 

 There is little cause to wonder that this uncer- 

 tainty has made the selector a fatalist with a creed 

 of "what is to be will be." His makeshifts, his 

 procrastinations, are only his preparation for some 

 final disaster, which may leave him beaten and 

 penniless, to take up the thread of existence 

 bravely in some new place. He fights doggedly 

 on, but he digs no garden, and plants no pleasant 

 shade trees around his bush home. He has an 

 ideal of a land where the seasons are regular and 

 life can be well ordered and arranged without the 

 necessity of pitting the work of a year against the 

 caprice of nature. Sometimes, when drought and 

 hard times press too severely upon him, he sells 

 out and emigrates to Canada, South Africa, or the 

 Argentine, in the hope of finding his ideal there. 

 But he usually struggles on, with the hope of bet- 

 ter times before him, fighting drought, bush fire, 

 and the mortgagee with a dogged courage worthy 

 of all success. The Australian newspaper man 

 delights to write of the selector as the "backbone 

 of the country," and, as usual, the newspaper 

 man is not far away from the truth. 



