STATION-PROCEDURES AND PROCESSES 217 



will be found in A. C. Grant and the descriptive writers, 

 or in Henry Kingsley and the novelists. These things 

 on such a scale are almost as threadbare as the descrip- 

 tions of them, and, if we look for novelty, the exhibition 

 of them on a large scale, we must betake ourselves to 

 the great cattle-runs of the Far North. There, on a 

 station 9,000 square miles in area, with 70,000 head of 

 cattle, bullock-mustering dwarfs all prior station-pro- 

 cedures of a like kind. When the six months' wet 

 season that stretches through the summer is at an end, 

 the first mustering-plant sets out for three weeks' work 

 on distant parts of the run. Six or eight stockmen, all 

 of them splendid riders, with as many blacks on un- 

 broken horses. A train of laden pack-horses, with a 

 supply of provisions and the mustering-plant, follows. 

 Behind these ride the cook and his blackboy, who seek 

 for a site for a dinner-camp. Then comes the fierce 

 work of the long, hot morning. " Over spinifex ridges, 

 down gorges and gullies, across spear-grass plains and 

 through ti-tree scrub " the cattle are mustered and 

 driven towards the camp. Then comes the cutting out 

 of the bullocks, and then are to be seen " wonderful 

 feats of horsemanship, wonderful handhng of the long, 

 heavy stockwhip, furious galloping and wheehng in 

 and around a great mob of ever-moving cattle, with 

 great tossing horns and pawing hooves." * 



* Sydney Morning Herald, April 30, 1910. 



