Arrawatta

A sky of wind! And while these fitful gusts   
Are beating round the windows in the cold,   
With sullen sobs of rain, behold I shape   
A settler’s story of the wild old times:   
One told by camp-fires when the station-drays           
Were housed and hidden, forty years ago;   
While swarthy drivers smoked their pipes, and drew,   
And crowded round the friendly-gleaming flame   
That lured the dingo howling from his caves   
And brought sharp sudden feet about the brakes.           
 
A tale of love and death. And shall I say   
A tale of love in death; for all the patient eyes   
That gathered darkness, watching for a son   
And brother, never dreaming of the fate—   
The fearful fate he met alone, unknown,           
Within the ruthless Australasian wastes?   
 
For, in a far-off sultry summer rimmed   
With thunder-cloud and red with forest-fires,   
All day, by ways uncouth and ledges rude,   
The wild men held upon a stranger’s trail           
Which ran against the rivers and athwart   
The gorges of the deep blue western hills.   
 
And when a cloudy sunset, like the flame   
In windy evenings on the Plains of Thirst   
Beyond the dead banks of the far Barcoo,           
Lay heavy down the topmost peaks, they came   
With pent-in breath and stealthy steps, and crouched,   
Like snakes, amongst the grasses, till the night   
Had covered face from face and thrown the gloom   
Of many shadows on the front of things.           
 
There, in the shelter of a nameless glen   
Fenced round by cedars and the tangled growths   
Of blackwood stained with brown and shot with gray,   
The jaded white man built his fire, and turned   
His horse adrift amongst the water-pools           
That trickled underneath the yellow leaves   
And made a pleasant murmur, like the brooks   
Of England through the sweet autumnal noons.   
 
Then after he had slaked his thirst, and used   
The forest-fare, for which a healthful day           
Of mountain-life had brought a zest, he took   
His axe, and shaped with boughs and wattle-forks   
A wurley, fashioned like a bushman’s roof:   
The door brought out athwart the strenuous flame:   
The back thatched in against a rising wind.           
 
And, while the sturdy hatchet filled the clifts   
With sounds unknown, the immemorial haunts   
Of echoes sent their lonely dwellers forth   
Who lived a life of wonder: flying round   
And round the glen,—what time the kangaroo           
Leapt from his lair and huddled with the bats,—   
Far-scattering down the wildly startled fells.   
Then came the doleful owl; and evermore   
The bleak morass gave out the bittern’s call,   
The plover’s cry, and many a fitful wail           
Of chilly omen, falling on the ear   
Like those cold flaws of wind that come and go   
An hour before the break of day.

                            Anon   
The stranger held from toil, and, settling down,   
He drew rough solace from his well-filled pipe           
And smoked into the night: revolving ther
The primal questions of a squatter’s life;   
For in the flats, a short day’s journey past   
His present camp, his station yards were kept   
With many a lodge and paddock jutting forth           
Across the heart of unnamed prairie-lands,   
Now loud with bleating and the cattle bells   
And misty with the hut-fire’s daily smoke.   
 
Wide spreading flats, and western spurs of hills   
That dipped to plains of dim perpetual blue;           
Bold summits set against the thunder-heaps;   
And slopes be-hacked and crushed by battling kine!   
Where now the furious tumult of their feet   
Gives back the dust, and up from glen and brake   
Evokes fierce clamor, and becomes indeed           
A token of the squatter’s daring life,   
Which growing inland—growing year by year,   
Doth set us thinking in these latter days,   
And makes one ponder of the lonely lands   
Beyond the lonely tracks of Burke and Wills,           
Where, when the wandering Stuart fixed his camps   
In central wastes afar from any home   
Or haunt of man, and in the changeless midst   
Of sullen deserts and the footless miles   
Of sultry silence, all the ways about           
Grew strangely vocal and a marvellous noise   
Became the wonder of the waxing glooms.

*        *        *        *        *
   
Thus passed the time until the moon serene   
Stood over high dominion like a dream   
Of peace: within the white-transfigured woods,           
And o’er the vast dew-dripping wilderness   
Of slopes illumined with her silent fires.   
Then far beyond the home of pale red leaves   
And silver sluices, and the shining stems   
Of runnel-blooms, the dreamy wanderer saw,           
The wilder for the vision of the moon,   
Stark desolations and a waste of plain   
All smit by flame and broken with the storms:   
Black ghosts of trees, and sapless trunks that stood   
Harsh hollow channels of the fiery noise           
Which ran from bole to bole a year before,   
And grew with ruin, and was like, indeed,   
The roar of mighty winds with wintering streams   
That foam about the limits of the land,   
And mix their swiftness with the flying seas.           
 
Now, when the man had turned his face about   
To take his rest, behold the gem-like eyes   
Of ambushed wild things stared from bole and brake   
With dumb amaze and faint-recurring glance,   
And fear anon that drove them down the brash;           
While from his den the dingo, like a scout   
In sheltered ways, crept out and cowered near   
To sniff the tokens of the stranger’s feast   
And marvel at the shadows of the flame.   
 
Thereafter grew the wind; and chafing depths           
In distant waters sent a troubled cry   
Across the slumberous forest; and the chill   
Of coming rain was on the sleeper’s brow,   
When, flat as reptiles hutted in the scrub,   
A deadly crescent crawled to where he lay,—           
A band of fierce fantastic savages   
That, starting naked round the faded fire,   
With sudden spears and swift terrific yells,   
Came bounding wildly at the white man’s head,   
And faced him, staring like a dream of hell!           
 
Here let me pass! I would not stay to tell   
Of hopeless struggles under crushing blows;   
Of how the surging fiends with thickening strokes   
Howled round the stranger till they drained his strength;   
How Love and Life stood face to face with Hate           
And Death; and then how Death was left alone   
With Night and Silence in the sobbing rains.   
 
So, after many moons, the searchers found   
The body mouldering in the mouldering dell   
Amidst the fungi and the bleaching leaves,           
And buried it; and raised a stony mound   
Which took the mosses: then the place became   
The haunt of fearful legends, and the lair   
Of bats and adders.