Life of a Shepherd in Australia, 1849
Having already introduced many settlers of different grades, I wish now to give an idea of the primitive life of shepherds, and other labouring men, beyond the boundaries; and also…
From: 1849 C.E. To: 1849 C.E.
Location: New South Wales, Australia
From Rambles and Observations in New South Wales by Joseph Townsend, 1849.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
Having already introduced many settlers of different grades, I wish now to give an idea of the primitive life of shepherds, and other labouring men, beyond the boundaries; and also to say a few words on convicts and their condition.
A shepherd's hut is a hovel, built of slabs, and covered with bark. Between the slabs a man could thrust his foot, and nothing could be more easy than to cover the walls, as well as the roof, with bark, thus making the tenement weather-tight; but the men will not take the trouble to do this, and, probably, airiness in summer compensates for the cold of winter.
The accommodations are the simplest. A sheet of bark, on trestles, forms the bedstead on which the mattress is spread; and another sheet, supported by sticks, does duty as a table. The cooking apparatus consists of an iron pot. If the traveller falls in with one of these solitary dwellings, he is immediately asked to take “a pot of tay;” and the tea is produced from a bag that hangs on a peg, and the sugar from another; whilst salt beef and damper make their appearance from some very original substitute for a shelf. The bark is generally secured to the roof by strips of green hide; and it is a common saying, that, if it were not for green hide and stringy bark the colony would go to a place more remote than even the antipodes.
In some huts which it has been my lot to visit, I have had rough fare, and rougher beds. The salt beef is sometimes hard and black, worthy only of a place in a museum, and certainly not of a depository in a human stomach. “The greatest hardship I endured was salt-beef.” says William Penn; and this I can echo from the bottom of my heart. In some huts, black pieces of beef are suspended from the roof by strings, and if it is marvelous that any man can be induced to swallow such a curious production, it would be still more marvellous if he could digest it.
My bed has sometimes been a sheet of bark with a sack spread upon it, and I have lain, near the fire, almost literally in sackcloth and ashes!
It is one comfort that, in the bush, it is always in one’s power to make a good fire, when the weather is cold, and enjoy this at all events. By such a fire, I have seen stockmen sprawling on the floor, discussing, during the greater part of the night, their adventures in England with "beaks and traps," and their own wonderful achievements in the colony.
A bushman run wild presents a singular picture. He lives far in the interior, and all his thoughts, and all his talk, are about cattle, horses, the bush, and wild blacks. He wears a cabbage-tree hat as black as a coal; while his garments are venerable for their antiquity, and remarkable for their patches. He smokes bad tobacco incessantly, and never, when travelling, enters an inn, but "camps out," with his opossum cloak, in all weathers.
He devours salt junk and clarty damper, and swills oceans of a dark liquid which he calls tea, and which he sweetens with vast quantities of coarse brown sugar. A few ants in his tea give it an additional flavour, and the summit of his bliss is a "brandy ball."
Sheets are an effeminate luxury that he has not known for years; but the blankets in which he rolls himself, are as delightful to him as a hearth rug to a pointer. If he were to offer a share of his hut to a stranger, most men would be inclined to exclaim, "Oh! 'tis too lovely for me!" and to leave the New South Wales rara avis in undisturbed possession of all his domestic comforts.
It is of such a bushman as this that the following story is told.
The scene is laid at Maitland. He had just come down the country—doubtless wild as a kangaroo—when, over his cups at an inn, he quarrelled with a lieutenant in the navy, and “satisfaction" at sunrise was to be the result But the bushman, having no acquaintance in the town, sallied out in quest of a second, and adopted the very original idea of giving the first man he chanced to encounter a pound, to put on his best clothes, and serve him in this capacity on the following morning.
Then the affair took place, and terminated without injury on either side, and the lieutenant went to bed to compensate himself for early rising; but, hardly was his head settled on the pillow, when he was aroused by the heavy step of a man stumbling up-stairs, and his late antagonist burst into his room, saying, "Get up, man, get up; I gave that fellow a pound to stand second, and I am not going to be put off with one shot.” Of course this offer was politely declined, with an intimation that, had the navy-man known how the affair had been arranged, he would have declined the meeting altogether.
At each of the huts of the shepherds are placed two folds, and consequently two men; whilst a third, called “the hut-keeper,” receives the sheep at night, and is answerable for their safe custody until the morning. This man sleeps in a kind of sentry-box near the fold, and has to guard against the attacks of native dogs, which sometimes leap into the folds, when the sheep, in their terror, break out and are dispersed in the woods; but a good dog is generally tied at each comer of the fold; and kangaroo dogs also keep watch. I asked a hut-keeper where he procured a famous dog that he had, and which would attack the native dog at night (a rare instance of courage), "Oh," said he " I seen the dog, and I said to Bill, Bill, says I, I’ll give a cow for that ere dog; and a month arter Bill brought him. I didn't steal the dog; I don't know where Bill had him, I don't—"
The sheep are counted frequently, either at sunrise when they are turned out of the fold, or at sunset when they are driven into it; and miserable is the ride home in the dark, after performing this office at the latter period. The horse is constantly stumbling over limbs of trees and logs of wood, and sometimes starts desperately. Many men guide themselves through the woods at night by the Pleiades, which the stockmen call "the five stars," or,
“By fair Orion when he mounts on high, Sparkling with midnight splendour in the sky."
The shepherd occupies the position usually assigned at home to knights of the thimble. "Do you think I'd be a crawling shepherd?" asks a stockman, with the utmost scorn, if it is proposed to him that he should assume the office. Since the shepherds and hut-keepers usually live on salt beef and damper only, and the climate seldom allows them to grow vegetables, the scurvy is by no means uncommon amongst them; and I have heard one of them express a devout wish that he were a pig in a cabbage garden!
Their wages, in quiet districts, where they are in no danger from the Blacks, are about twenty pounds a year each with rations. They can save nearly the whole of their wages, and this they sometimes do for two or three years, and then travel down the country to the nearest public-house, and “knock their money down;" and to quote Sir George Gipps, “the whole country for miles, almost for hundreds of miles round Melbourne, is strewed to this day with champagne bottles!"
“So sailors when escaped from stormy seas,
First crown their vessels, then indulge their ease."
Dryden’s Virgil.
But this once favourite method of being relieved from the burden of troublesome cash, is going fast out of fashion, to the mutual advantage of both the men and their masters; indeed, the latter have strongly opposed the licensing of public-houses beyond the boundaries, but without success.
The first object of the ambition of a labouring man in the bush is to possess a mare. He then buys a few cows; and many a "ticket-of-leave holder" has a nice little property in cattle and horses before he becomes free. Some shepherds have their wives and children with them in the bush; and, with the assistance of the hut-keeper, milk a cow, and, where the climate will allow it, cultivate a small garden; but this is the exception and not the rule; and the opossums often destroy their gardens, at least the produce of them, when there is any.
I have seen a squatter's garden, consisting only of a spot enclosed by four hurdles and producing a few leeks. I have asked shepherds why they do not patronise the savings' bank, and they say they consider cattle a more profitable investment. No doubt, the truth is, that they derive much pleasure from having their property in a tangible shape, and dote on “Bally," and "Spot," as a man may sometimes, perhaps, dote on his wife, and are ready to exclaim "here could I live, and love, and die with only you."
"So-and-so seems very fond of his cow," I remarked. "Of course he is," was the answer; " he has no wife or child to dote on, and a man must have something to dote on, so he dotes upon she”
Townsend, Joseph. Rambles and Observations in New South Wales. Chapman and Hall, 1849.
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