CHAPTER XXXI 



THE squatter's FOES 



No one who lands or alights at any of the cities of Aus- 

 tralia would readily imagine that the denizen of this 

 favoured continent could have any serious enemies at 

 all. The chances are, at almost any season of the year, 

 that the warm sun is shining in a sky of cloudless blue. 

 A cool and tonic breeze, highly charged with ozone, is 

 blowing in from the sea ; the bleak and bitter Avinds, 

 the prolonged tempestuous, or cold and rainy weather, 

 that bulk so largely in the biographies of our European 

 contemporaries — of Carlyle, Huxley, Spencer, George 

 Eliot — as in the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller 

 in a former generation, are soon discovered to be almost 

 unknown. Of what, then, can the pastoralist have to 

 complain ? Of what is he afraid ? Is not this the 

 Garden of Eden, the Lost Atlantis, the dreamland of 

 the poet, where eternal spring abides and never-failing 

 flowers, and where (in most parts of it) there " never 

 falls the least white star of snow ? " 



Alas ! the very beauty of the climate is its danger 

 and its snare. The sun, so genial in spring and autumn 

 (for winter is hardly knoA^n), is as a burning fire in 

 summer, which is often prolonged through many months. 

 Pitilessly it shines down on the burnt-out pastures, 

 piercing at length to the roots of all but the deepest- 

 rooted grasses. Rain has ceased to fall for weeks or 

 months, for eighteen months or two years in many parts 

 of Austraha and certain provinces of New Zealand. 

 The herbage is reduced to mere earth, and dark clouds 

 of fine dust blow over it. With the death of the grass 



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