STATION-PROCEDURES AND PROCESSES 217 



will be found in A. C. Grant and the descriptive writers, 

 or in Henry Kingsley and the novelists. These things 

 on such a scale are almost as threadbare as the descrip- 

 tions of them, and, if we look for novelty, the exhibition 

 of them on a large scale, we must betake ourselves to 

 the great cattle-runs of the Far North. There, on a 

 station 9,000 square miles in area, with 70,000 head of 

 cattle, bullock-mustering dwarfs all prior station-pro- 

 cedures of a like kind. When the six months' wet 

 season that stretches through the summer is at an end, 

 the first mustering-plant sets out for three weeks' work 

 on distant parts of the run. Six or eight stockmen, all 

 of them splendid riders, with as many blacks on un- 

 broken horses. A train of laden pack-horses, with a 

 supply of provisions and the mustering-plant, follows. 

 Behind these ride the cook and his blackboy, who seek 

 for a site for a dinner-camp. Then comes the fierce 

 work of the long, hot morning. " Over spinifex ridges, 

 down gorges and gullies, across spear-grass plains and 

 through ti-tree scrub " the cattle are mustered and 

 driven towards the camp. Then comes the cutting out 

 of the bullocks, and then are to be seen "wonderful 

 feats of horsemanship, wonderful handhng of the long, 

 heavy stockwhip, furious galloping and wheehng in 

 and around a great mob of ever-moving cattle, with 

 great tossing horns and pawing hooves." * 



* Sydney Morning Herald, April 30, 1910. 



