252 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



the Darling Downs in the fifties as in Southern New 

 South Wales in the forties, and early in that decade 

 Patrick LesHe, pioneer squatter of Queensland, married. 

 Not long after Mr. Murray Prior, father of Mrs. Campbell 

 Praed, married also. And when the famous Orders in 

 Council of 1846 brought security to the precariously 

 situated fraternity, a new era dawned, says Mr. Brodribb, 

 who lived through that time. Squatters made per- 

 manent improvements, pushed farther into the interior, 

 and occupied new country. With the new sense of 

 permanence their circumstances gradually improved. 

 On stations hundreds of miles from Sydney or Melbourne 

 you would meet with highly respectable ladies, whose 

 famines were reared in comfortable homes, where they 

 were happy and contented. And of the following decade 

 in Queensland Henry Stuart Russell, himself married, 

 writes in similar terms.* 



Men who, gently bred and brought up in luxury, find 

 themselves in the Austrahan bush, hundreds of miles 

 away from a settlement, with everything still in the 

 rough— rough food and clothes, rough beds and housing, 

 rough companions and rough overseers— are often seized 

 with an inextinguishable regret that they rashly threw 

 away such priceless advantages as were theirs in order 

 to lead the life of a clod. They remember " the gray 

 city with its dreaming spires," and they lament the 

 abandonment of the congenial studies for which, they 

 now fancy, they were better fitted. Some of them were 

 doubtless right. One of the best books about Austrahan 

 life in the bush was written, seventy years ago, by one 

 such remorseful emigrant.f They grieve, more super- 

 ficially, that, through long disuse of it, they have become 

 unfit for society. Even a large squatter, who is a 

 member of the Legislature of his colony, will confess to 

 his conscious unsuitedness for even the social hfe of the 

 provincial metropohs. The younger and still amorous 

 stockman will ask how long it is since he has touched 



* Lang, Account, i. 356-7. Bkodeibb, Reminiscences, p. 67. 

 t HAvaAEiH, Bush Life. 



