The Australian Bush. 413 



Dull, is it ? when the fairest pages of the noblest book that ever 

 was written, and written, too, by a hand that never yet erred 

 the great Book of Nature, which a man may study for his life 

 and yet scarcely master a single chapter is continually lying open 

 before us ! 



Monotonous, is it ? when every season brings some fresh pur- 

 suit, every day some fresh charm, and every hour its own particular 

 occupation ! 



No ! let the man who is sated with the enjoyments of fashionable 

 life which, indeed, we may with some justice call monotonous 

 or him who has been crushed and broken by the rude conflicts 

 with the world try such a life for a few years ; and if he does 

 not return again to the haunts of civilization, at the end of his 

 probation, a wiser and a better man, all I can say is, there is no 

 help for him. 



And now let us see how the year is spent in the Australian bush ; 

 and any reader who follows me to the end of my chapter, if he 

 only be a naturalist or a sportsman, will agree w r ith me that a bush 

 life is neither dull nor monotonous. But he must bear in mind that 

 I am not about to describe the life of a squatter, who rules like a 

 baron of old over a run miles in extent, coining money every year 

 where he has no opportunity of spending, save when, with his 

 cattle or his wool, he makes periodical visits down to Sydney or 

 Melbourne from the up-country. Nor of the stock-rider, whose 

 life is spent on horseback, galloping over the bush, looking up his 

 master's cattle ; whose sole talk is of bullocks, and whose only 

 study is the different brands of the neighbouring station-masters, 

 and the cultivating a kind of knowledge, which to him seems 

 intuitive, that of singling out at a glance a stray bullock from the 

 largest mob. Nor of the shepherd, who lazily follows his flock 

 from sunrise to sunset in all weathers, and whose life is one calm 

 tame monotony, each day so precisely like its predecessor, that it 

 must be hard for him often to remember how the weeks steal 

 on. Nor of the hut-keeper, the easiest worked, and, generally 

 speaking, the most discontented man on the station. Nor of the 



