264 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



English party's sober delight was trivial to the dehrious 

 pleasure of the Austrahans. 



Hospitahty is, perhaps, the most eminent virtue of 

 the pastoral state, and binds, as by a golden chain, all 

 the pastoral ages together. It is still such in contem- 

 porary Australia as much as it ever was in ancient 

 Chaldsea or modern Arabia, or South America. It is, 

 indeed, less a virtue than a necessity. Were it denied, 

 on stations separated from the next by a distance of 

 many — sometimes, as in the Northern Territory, a 

 hundred — miles, death would be speedy and sure. Thus, 

 at every Australian station, the wayfarer, of whatever 

 class or colour, receives a regular dole, which has come 

 to consist of a pound of meat and a pannikin of flour. 

 Such swagsmen are known as "sundowners," because 

 they usually arrive at a station about sundown, when 

 the labour of the day is ended, and they are less likely 

 to be required to do any work as a condition of receiving 

 food. Some professional vagrants are known as 

 " coasters," because they coasted up one bank of a 

 river and down the other (in the early days most stations 

 were placed on the banks of rivers or creeks), visiting 

 each station as they passed. These were malingerers, 

 who lived on the doles it was sometimes dangerous to 

 refuse. They are capable, in such a case, of doing 

 serious mischief. The description of a new, costly, and 

 thoroughly well-appointed wool-shed being set on fire 

 and burnt to the ground by some such miscreants, 

 whom the superintendent had angrily ordered off the 

 station, is evidently sketched from life.* A primary 

 virtue flouted, a clamorous need denied, thus avenges 

 itself. 



How to treat such wayfarers was long a problem. 

 To supply them gratuitously with food ad libitum would 

 have imperilled the subsistence of the station-dwellers 

 and brought down on them a cloud of harpies. To meet 

 the difficulty the " traveller's hut " was invented. 

 There the swagsman would find an iron pot, a bucket, 

 * BOLDBSWOOD, The Squatter's Dream, ch. viii. 



