The family have only been a few hours together, yet there is an undercurrent of growling, that, to the stranger, mysterious yet evident undercurrent of nastiness and resentment which goes on in all families and drags many a promising young life down. But Aunt Emma and the old mate make things brighter, and so the dinner--of hot roast and red-hot plum pudding--pa.s.ses off fairly well.
The men sleep the afternoon away and wake up bathed in perspiration and helpless; some of the women have headaches. After tea they gather on the veranda in the cool of the evening, and that"s the time when the best sides of their natures and the best parts of the past have a chance of coming uppermost, and perhaps they begin to feel a bit sorry that they are going to part again.
The local races or "sports" on Boxing Day. There is nothing to keep the boys home over New Year. Ted and his wife go back to their lonely life on their selection; Tom returns to his fencing or tank-sinking contract; Jim, who has borrowed "a couple of quid" from Tom, goes out back with strong resolutions for the New Year, and shears "stragglers," breaks in horses, cooks and clerks for survey parties, and gambles and drinks, and gets into trouble again. Maybe Joe "knocks about" the farm a bit before going into the Great North-West with another mob of cattle.
The last time I saw the Old Year out at Eurunderee the bushfires were burning all over the ranges, and looked like great cities lighted up. No need for bonfires then. Christmas in Bourke, the metropolis of the great pastoral scrubs and plains, five hundred miles west, with the thermometer one-hundred-and-something-scarey in the shade. The rough, careless shearers come in from stations many dusty miles out in the scrubs to have their Christmas sprees, to drink and "shout" and fight--and have the horrors some of them--and be run in and locked up with difficulty, within sound of a church-going bell.
The Bourke Christmas is a very beery and exciting one. The hotels shut up in front on Christmas Day to satisfy the law (or out of consideration for the feelings of the sergeant in charge of the police station), and open behind to satisfy the public, who are supposed to have made the law.
Sensible cold dinners are the fashion in Bourke, I think, with the hose going, and free-and-easy costumes.
The free males take their blankets and sleep in the "park;" the women sleep with doors and windows open, and the married men on mattresses on the verandas across the open doors--in case of accidents.
Christmas in Sydney, though Christmas holidays are not so popular as Easter, or even Anniversary Day, in the Queen city of the South. Buses, electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water"s edge with harbour picnic-parties. "A trip round the harbour and to the head of Middle Harbour one shilling return!" Strings of tourist trains running over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful Illawarra, until after New Year. Hundreds of young fellows going out with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like bushmen--not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and servants. For you can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush within a stone"s throw of the city, so to speak.
Jolly camps and holiday parties all round the beautiful bays of the harbour, and up and down the coast, and all close to home. Camps in the moonlight on sandy beaches under great dark bluffs and headlands, where yellow, shelving, sandstone cliffs run, broken only by sandy-beached bays, and where the silver-white breakers leap and roar.
And Manly Beach on a holiday! Thousands of people in fresh summer dress, hundreds of bare-legged, happy children running where the "blue sea over the white sand rolls," racing in and out with the rollers, playing with the glorious Pacific. Manly--"Our Village"--Manly Beach, where we used to take our girls, with the most beautiful harbour in the world on one side, and the width of the grandest ocean on the other. Ferny gullies and "fairy dells" to north and south, and every shady nook its merry party or happy couple.
Manly Beach--I remember five years ago (oh, how the time goes by!)--and two names that were written together in the sand when the tide was coming in. And the boat home in the moonlight, past the Heads, where we felt the roll of the ocean, and the moonlit harbour--and the harbour lights of Sydney--the grandest of them all.