THE OVERLANDER 191 



attentive to the speaker. They will club with him. 

 Like liim, they are capitaUsts. They have large sums 

 at their command, and, making heavy purchases of 

 store-cattle, they will add their mobs to his. They 

 will follow the route that he, it may be, has discovered, 

 and, arriving at their destination with a mob of cattle 

 and stock, at once change the situation of a district 

 or of a colony, give it a fresh impulse, supply cheap 

 cattle, develop the land, and make a fresh conquest. 

 On the back of this new occupations spring up, and a tide 

 of immigration begins to flow. Such men have earned 

 the gratitude of a whole people, which shows it by feting 

 them. They have become personages. Were this a 

 mythological age, they would be made heroes and 

 demigods. 



A few figures will show the magnitude of the opera- 

 tions engaged in by the Overlanders. On a trip a single 

 Overlander, of course aided by shepherds and bullock- 

 drivers, would carry with him 855 cattle, worth £8,550 ; 

 62 horses, worth £3,720 ; and 900 fat wethers, worth 

 £1,575 ; or, stock valued at £13,845. Did he take 

 sheep alone, he would drive sometimes from 6,000 to 

 12,000, worth from £10,000 to twice that sum. How 

 largely South Australia, for example, benefited by the 

 operations of the Overlanders appears from the figures 

 showing the stock taken from New South Wales to South 

 Australia in a period of fifteen months during 1839-40. 

 In that space 11,200 cattle, 230 horses, and 60,000 sheep, 

 valued at so great a sum as £230,800, were driven across 

 two frontiers into the young colony. It was after stock 

 had been driven as far as Adelaide that the name of 

 Overlanders was applied to the class.* 



In the last years of the fourth and the first of the fifth 

 decade, we are told, the track (we must not yet speak 

 of a road) from Sydney to Melbourne was " studded 

 with drovers of stock," and all drovers were armed. 



Sir George Grey saw the Overlander from the outside ; 

 later writers evolve him out of their inner conscious- 

 * GflEY, Journal, iL 



