254 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



scrubs of the Dawson country. For seven years their 

 food has consisted of " fat hen," their only vegetable, 

 gait beef, and damper, or unleavened bread. Through 

 years of bad times the struggUng squatter often wishes 

 for death as a release, " when he views his haggard wife 

 and foredoomed children — doomed to a scant education, 

 social extinction, and early trouble." ^Vlien a crisis 

 arrives, like that of 1866 in Queensland, the pressure 

 becomes acute. Money grows scarce. The rates of 

 carriage are prohibitive. Flour can hardly be bought. 

 Under such conditions the harassed squatter cannot 

 make both ends meet. He sells out, and returns to 

 town, where he lives as he can. Others, it is true, face 

 the same hardships and hold on grimly.* 



Cultured habituf^s of pioneer stations in those early 

 daj'^s write, on the other hand, of the " chatelaine's soft 

 voice and ever-varying converse," and Henry Kingsley's 

 pictures, as of Mrs. Buckley, as also of Major Buckley, 

 are portraits of typical English gentlemen and gentle- 

 women transported to a strange environment. Just so 

 did Arthur Young, travelling in France before the great 

 revolution, fall into raptures over the charms and accom- 

 plishments of the old French nobiUty, \\dth whom he spent 

 the evening, after he had passed the day in inspecting 

 their estates. The charm that Boldrewood found then 

 in the stations of Western Victoria was no more lasting 

 than the refinements of the chateau ; it vanished with 

 the sale of the runs and the advent of the goldfields. 



In the monarchical countries of Europe the genesis 

 of social life was marked by the advent of ladies to the 

 king's court. Society, so called, began in France with 

 Francis the First, who professed that a court without the 

 ladies was like a year without a spring and a spring 

 without roses, and so he attracted by the splendour of 

 his fetes the chatelaines who, until then, had remained 

 forgotten in their feudal castles. In England it was 

 hardly older than the contemporary of Francis, Henry 

 VIII. It had its rise in the ascendancy of some female 

 * Babtley, Pioneering, etc., pp. 267, 256, 196. 



