THE STOCKMAN 206 



ten years later Mr. Neil Black, of Basin Bank, used to 

 import annually, as stockmen, a " draft of stalwart 

 Highlanders." A section of Western Victoria is now 

 peopled by the clansmen and their descendants.* 



Squatters would ride fifty miles to hire male or female 

 servants on board of an immigrant ship. That was in 

 days when all the station hands save the overseer had 

 left for the gold-diggings. The squatter would then 

 hire two " fine upstanding Carlow men," who were 

 indentured to him for a year. But they remained with 

 him for years — indeed, till the station was sold. The 

 squatter himself would break them in to stock-riding, 

 and in a year they would ride, rope, brand, and draft. f 



Immigrant stock-riders changed with the changes of 

 the land. They became thriving farmers. Thus, the 

 squatters not only prepared the way of the farmers ; 

 they bred the farmers. 



The English farm-labourer, hired from an emigrant 

 ship, still wearing his smock-frock, speaking his Dorset- 

 shire or other dialect, and with his rustic gait, " deve- 

 loped through various stages of colonial experience," 

 into dairyman, rouseabout, bullock-driver, stock-rider, 

 and working overseer. Not a few of the overseers rose 

 to be runholders.J 



* BoLDREWOOD, Old Melbourne Memories, ch. ii. 

 f Ibid., ch. xxii. 

 X Ibid., ch. xvi. 



