THE PASTORAL CULT 273 



angry river," we do not wonder that, in Eastern coun- 

 tries, where these phenomena are to be witnessed on a 

 still larger scale, the Pantheon should be peopled with 

 sun-gods and storm-gods, and their terrifying deeds 

 dramatized — divinized or diabolized. In many an 

 Australian mind the rudiments of just such a mythology 

 must have been planted. 



The natural religion of the squatter, apart from the 

 traditional beliefs and observances that he had brought 

 out from England, would be of the simplest character. 

 He would feel " the same dreaminess in the atmosphere, 

 the same crisp clearness, and the same vague conscious- 

 ness of haunting voices and of invisible benignant 

 presences which " Mrs. Campbell Praed had " never 

 found but in the Australian bush." Others have found 

 in the great Australian plains by night a scene the most 

 " able to enforce reverence from man." That conscious- 

 ness and the sense of infinite space the plains beget 

 are the base of all the higher religion. 



It is not all brightness on the station. Indeed, a 

 character in one of Mrs. Campbell Praed's melancholy 

 tales sadly says : " Nothing of any consequence has 

 ever happened to us on the Ubi [in Queensland] without 

 death coming into it." No clergyman being, oftener 

 than not, at hand, sometimes an old squatter, well 

 fitted to be a layman-priest, would read the funeral 

 service — one who could both fight and pray, and had laid 

 his own dead to rest out there in the lonely desert plains. 

 Mrs. Praed is surely not wrong in thinking that " there 

 is something infinitely beautiful and solemnizing in such 

 simple burying amid the vast Australian solitudes." * 



The pastoralist's religion long remained of this " allu- 

 minous simplicity," and his form of worship partook of 

 it. The head of a pastoral tribe was at first its priest 

 and sacrificer. So was the pioneer squatter his own 

 minister. Sir George Grey, the shepherd king of his 

 island in the Hauraki Gulf ; Sir Frederick Napier Broome 

 among the hills of the Southern Alps ; and other squatters 

 * Dwellers by the Eiver, pp. 298 , 305. 

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