SOCIAL LIFE, SPORTS, AND RECREATIONS 261 



warrior," who is fighting for his own hand, Hke Hal o' 

 the Wynd, because, being too quaiTelsome, he has been 

 driven, hke a rogue-elephant, from the society of his 

 kind. Evidently, " life in the bush " has its compensa- 

 tions. It has also its drawbacks, which are the close 

 counterparts of its compensations. By resuming the 

 pursuits of primitive or mediaeval man, the squatter 

 sinks back to the mediaeval or primitive stage. The 

 corresponding sentiments, the politics, the rehgion, and 

 too often the manners necessarily spring up as accom- 

 paniments of the activities of an earlier stage. Station 

 life is a reversion to patriarchal life. 



One thing to some extent saves the dwellers on a 

 station, or a portion of them. They are often within 

 practicable distance of a provincial metropolis, and then 

 the monotony and the miseries of the bush are tempora- 

 rily relieved by visits to Sydney or Melbourne, Brisbane 

 or Adelaide, Christchurch or Dunedin. 



A station picnic had all the characteristics and was 

 clothed with all the charms of the bush. Its objective 

 might be a black unfathomable lagoon, hid in the heart 

 of the scrub, and never before visited. It was on horse- 

 back, and the procession wound up the range. Over 

 plains and timbered ridges it passed, and through a dense 

 scrub, " where the bottle-trees rose weird and white, 

 and the stately bunyas drooped." With their toma- 

 hawks blackboys " blazed " a track for the return of 

 the party. Up stony ridges, down steep gullies, over 

 breakneck rocks they rode. They camped for the night 

 on a plateau amid great volcanic boulders. The ladies 

 slept in the tent on couches of grass-tree tops ; the men 

 camped by the fire, wrapped in their blankets. At 

 sunrise they bathed and dressed by a running stream 

 in the gorge. The horses were then saddled ; the black- 

 boys tied the tomahawks and pint-pots to the dees of 

 the saddles ; the men boiled the tea, or baked johnny- 

 cakes in the ashes. Then they rode upwards along the 

 gorge, over a ridge where the golden wattle shed on 



