第38章 "A Rough Shed"(1)

A hot, breathless, blinding sunrise -- the sun having appeared suddenly above the ragged edge of the barren scrub like a great disc of molten steel.

No hint of a morning breeze before it, no sign on earth or sky to show that it is morning -- save the position of the sun.

A clearing in the scrub -- bare as though the surface of the earth were ploughed and harrowed, and dusty as the road. Two oblong huts -- one for the shearers and one for the rouseabouts -- in about the centre of the clearing (as if even the mongrel scrub had shrunk away from them) built end-to-end, of weatherboards, and roofed with galvanised iron. Little ventilation; no verandah; no attempt to create, artificially, a breath of air through the buildings.

Unpainted, sordid -- hideous. Outside, heaps of ashes still hot and smoking.

Close at hand, "butcher's shop" -- a bush and bag breakwind in the dust, under a couple of sheets of iron, with offal, grease and clotted blood blackening the surface of the ground about it. Greasy, stinking sheepskins hanging everywhere with blood-blotched sides out. Grease inches deep in great black patches about the fireplace ends of the huts, where wash-up and "boiling" water is thrown.

Inside, a rough table on supports driven into the black, greasy ground floor, and formed of flooring boards, running on uneven lines the length of the hut from within about 6ft. of the fire-place.

Lengths of single six-inch boards or slabs on each side, supported by the projecting ends of short pieces of timber nailed across the legs of the table to serve as seats.

On each side of the hut runs a rough framework, like the partitions in a stable; each compartment battened off to about the size of a manger, and containing four bunks, one above the other, on each side -- their ends, of course, to the table. Scarcely breathing space anywhere between. Fireplace, the full width of the hut in one end, where all the cooking and baking for forty or fifty men is done, and where flour, sugar, etc., are kept in open bags.

Fire, like a very furnace. Buckets of tea and coffee on roasting beds of coals and ashes on the hearth. Pile of "brownie" on the bare black boards at the end of the table. Unspeakable aroma of forty or fifty men who have little inclination and less opportunity to wash their skins, and who soak some of the grease out of their clothes -- in buckets of hot water -- on Saturday afternoons or Sundays.

And clinging to all, and over all, the smell of the dried, stale yolk of wool -- the stink of rams!

. . . . .

"I am a rouseabout of the rouseabouts. I have fallen so far that it is beneath me to try to climb to the proud position of `ringer' of the shed.

I had that ambition once, when I was the softest of green hands; but then I thought I could work out my salvation and go home.

I've got used to hell since then. I only get twenty-five shillings a week (less station store charges) and tucker here. I have been seven years west of the Darling and never shore a sheep. Why don't I learn to shear, and so make money? What should I do with more money?

Get out of this and go home? I would never go home unless I had enough money to keep me for the rest of my life, and I'll never make that Out Back. Otherwise, what should I do at home?

And how should I account for the seven years, if I were to go home?

Could I describe shed life to them and explain how I lived. They think shearing only takes a few days of the year -- at the beginning of summer.

They'd want to know how I lived the rest of the year. Could I explain that I `jabbed trotters' and was a `tea-and-sugar burglar' between sheds.

They'd think I'd been a tramp and a beggar all the time.

Could I explain ANYTHING so that they'd understand?

I'd have to be lying all the time and would soon be tripped up and found out.

For, whatever else I have been I was never much of a liar.

No, I'll never go home.

"I become momentarily conscious about daylight. The flies on the track got me into that habit, I think; they start at day-break -- when the mosquitoes give over.

"The cook rings a bullock bell.

"The cook is fire-proof. He is as a fiend from the nethermost sheol and needs to be. No man sees him sleep, for he makes bread -- or worse, brownie -- at night, and he rings a bullock bell loudly at half-past five in the morning to rouse us from our animal torpors.

Others, the sheep-ho's or the engine-drivers at the shed or wool-wash, call him, if he does sleep. They manage it in shifts, somehow, and sleep somewhere, sometime. We haven't time to know.

The cook rings the bullock bell and yells the time. It was the same time five minutes ago -- or a year ago. No time to decide which.

I dash water over my head and face and slap handfuls on my eyelids -- gummed over aching eyes -- still blighted by the yolk o' wool -- grey, greasy-feeling water from a cut-down kerosene tin which I sneaked from the cook and hid under my bunk and had the foresight to refill from the cask last night, under cover of warm, still, suffocating darkness. Or was it the night before last? Anyhow, it will be sneaked from me to-day, and from the crawler who will collar it to-morrow, and `touched' and `lifted' and `collared' and recovered by the cook, and sneaked back again, and cause foul language, and fights, maybe, till we `cut-out'.

"No; we didn't have sweet dreams of home and mother, gentle poet -- nor yet of babbling brooks and sweethearts, and love's young dream.

We are too dirty and dog-tired when we tumble down, and have too little time to sleep it off. We don't want to dream those dreams out here -- they'd only be nightmares for us, and we'd wake to remember.

We MUSTN'T remember here.

"At the edge of the timber a great galvanised-iron shed, nearly all roof, coming down to within 6ft. 6in. of the `board' over the `shoots'.

Cloud of red dust in the dead timber behind, going up -- noon-day dust.

Fence covered with skins; carcases being burned; blue smoke going straight up as in noonday. Great glossy (greasy-glossy) black crows `flopping' around.