CHAPTER XLII 



THE LITERATURE OF THE STATION 



The prospectors of new grazing-lands and the formers 

 of new stations in the wilderness must have been con- 

 scious that they were making history, and the conscious- 

 ness may have cheered them in times of trial or consoled 

 them under acknowledged failure. They must have 

 perceived that their work was of the same order, if on 

 a lesser scale, as that of the great explorers — the Sturts, 

 Humes, Ejares, and Leichhardts, and, like theirs, de- 

 served to find " a sacred bard." Some of them, we 

 know, kept journals. Patrick Leslie kept one, and, 

 many a year after his notable achievement, he confided 

 the vital portion of it to Henry Stuart Russell. John 

 Campbell, one of the two or three first pastoralists to 

 settle in Queensland, kept a diary, and, a still greater 

 number of years afterwards it was embodied, rather 

 than transcribed, in J. J. Knight's Early Days. In 

 general, the experiences of the early squatters, like these 

 journals, were slow to be converted into literature. 

 W. J. Brodribb, a squatter successively in New South 

 Wales and Victoria, published in a very interesting 

 and only too brief account of his personal experiences, 

 his efforts to form stations, his vicissitudes, the economics 

 of squatting, the effects of legislative changes (such as 

 the famous Orders in Council of 1847) on runholding, 

 some touching incidents in his domestic history, his 

 retirement from pastoral occupations, and his entry into 

 politics. Still later, another runholder, Henry Stuart 

 Russell, of Cecil Plains in the Darling Downs, pubhshed 



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