THE HOMESTEAD AND THE HOUSE 245 



the freshly felled and cut wood not having been seasoned. 

 The walls were hned with canvas. The rafters were 

 bare and the home of tarantulas, centipedes, and other 

 uncanny creatures. The bunks were made of sawn 

 saphngs, nailed against the slabs. The humpey, as such 

 structures are termed in Australia, had no windows 

 properly so called, but only openings, with rough slab 

 shutters in which the planks hardly joined. At first, 

 there was a huge slab chimney, with a large open fire- 

 place, hke a little room. But this soon caught fire, and 

 was replaced by a chimney of stone, where a fire was 

 kept fuelled by mighty logs. The house may have con- 

 sisted only of the two original, rather large, rooms, but 

 as children came, rooms opening on the verandah were 

 added to it. The verandah, imperative and indispen- 

 sable in all parts of Australia and in most parts of New 

 Zealand, ran along the whole front of the house, and it 

 had an earthen floor and log steps.* 



Commonly, the original building remained the prin- 

 cipal living-room, and rooms are successively added to 

 it, as they are needed, so that, as was wittily said, a 

 colonial house looks for all the world as if it " had come 

 out in penny numbers ! " Sometimes, however, it is 

 pulled down, and a cedar house, with kitchen and bed- 

 room wings, is built round a garden. Then there will 

 be a splendid broad verandah all round, with doors and 

 French windows and an iron roof. Even then the old 

 couple may live on in the old humpey, which may remain 

 detached, because they are used to the place, and 

 perhaps no longer feel equal to housekeeping on a larger 

 scale. Such a new house, though built of hardwood 

 slab, like the old house, would be carefully built, with 

 doors and French windows, and, though one-storeyed, 

 would be long, with a splendid broad verandah all 

 round and an iron roof. In the pioneer stations of the 

 Northern Territory it might be a large barulike building 



* Patekson, Outback Marriage, pp. 35-6. Campbell Pbaed, 

 My Australian Oirlhood, pp. 59-60, 154. 



