The Ballad of Desmond Kale Read Online Free PDF

described as progress at all. Yet the tracks of every bullock waggon ever hauling out from Parramatta remained deep cut in the ground years afterwards. It caused Stanton to consider coming on afterwards in the matter he was concerned with; not to rush but to follow and watch, as he was doing on the question of tempting the boy Warren Inchcape over to his service — to try not frightening up answers too much. It was how he worked his livestock — why not with men, for a change? Men left tracks of intention, they indicted themselves with their hearts.
    Stanton dismounted and walked his mare around a stack, a hillock, of the most marvellous collection of valuable trade goods he had ever seen. His thoughts ran on:
    â€˜Here in our colony! — formerly starved — where a two-pound of iron, shaped to a rake, is taken from a shed in risk of a man’s neck; yet here, here in the open air, under a bare sky, is metal worth a thousand guineas, guarded by a mongrel dog to be bought with a bone, a pat on the head, or a tickle. Get behind me, you yeller mutt!’
    The trade goods were spread on the ground by category, size and weight, ready for loading onto Tornley’s six-wheeled waggon. Stanton saw in a glance, from as close as he could step without being savaged, sufficient items for the setting up of a stock camp or the foundations of a veritable sheep station as big as his own or bigger. Quite possibly Tornley and Joe had better information than Stanton could have dreamed: that not just was somebody out therewaiting for their supplies, but also their prime location was given. Allow Stanton a minute, and he would be able to calculate pretty exactly the number of head of sheep to be grazed by an ambitious settler from such a quantity of cast-iron pots, farming tools, boots, canvas buckets, sheep shears, tar tubs, tarpaulins, axes and big-toothed saws. It would be a fairly large clutch — around five thousand head! There was a quantity of corrosive sublimate, sulphur, bluestone, twine thread, gin, and also a trunk holding ‘household linnen’, securely padlocked. Of sugar and flour there were several one-hundred-pound sacks. There might not be five thousand sheep or anything like that number spreading through the landscape awaiting these stores as yet, but that was the number being perfected, he estimated. By the time the goods were run out, and further supplies were needed, it would be … say two or three years’ time and a good few lusty matings and well-rated lambings and so forth bringing the numbers up … and by the thousands, yet … because whoever the goods were going out to would not be in a hurry getting themselves back.

ON THE FAR SIDE OF the waggon, under a canvas fly, Stanton found Joe Josephs sitting on a square of carpet, wearing a battered top hat and a weskit of gold threads and blue buttons, his legs crossed and reciting prayers with his eyes rolled back in his head. Stanton waited respectfully until he was noticed, while supposing he was noticed from the moment he rode into Joe’s camp, and even now in all probability from behind those intelligently elevated eyeballs … ‘It is Friday night,’ he thought, ‘their Sabbath begins, the shadows are chilly blue, the sun is gone, and over in their home tent (now Stanton could see it, from where he stood) all’s as it should be. The women have lit their candles …’
    â€˜Amein,’ said Joe, blinking up at his visitor.
    â€˜Here we are again, my very good friend.’
    Joe Josephs was aged around forty, narrow-faced, straggly red-bearded, with deeply set tired eyes and a Londoner’s sooty pallor enduringly staining his weathered skin. Joe had a bird’s nest of wiry hair, touched with drab grey fringes, that dangled to the front of his ears in two jouncing ringlets. His chest was concave, his back slightly humped. A character of energetic contemplationburned in his eyes. When he