All afternoon brass-band selections, comic songs, and
variety items, blared out with ceaseless reiteration ; and
as the men-follt smoked and talked cattle, and the wee
baby — a bonnie fair child — toddled about, smiling and
contented, the women-folk spoke of their hfe " out-back,"
and hstening, I knew that neither I nor the telegraph
lady had even guessed what roughness means.
For fifteen years things had been improving, and now
everyone was to have a weU-eamed hoUday. The children
were to be christened and then shown the dehghts of a
large town 1 Darwin of necessity (Palmerston, by the
way, on the map, but Darwin to Territorians). Darwin
with its one train, its telegraph offices, two or three stores,
banks and pubUc buildings, its Residency, its China-
town, its lovers' walk, its two or three empty, wide, grass-
grown streets bordered with deep-verandahed, iron-built
bungalow-houses, with their gardens planted in painted
tins — a development of the white-ant pest — and lastly,
its great sea, where ships wander without tracks or made
ways 1 Hardly a typical town, but the best in the Territory.
The women, naturally, were looking forward to doing
a bit of shopping, and as we sUpped into fashions the
traveller guests became interested. " Haven't seen so
many women together for years," one of them said.
" Reminds me of when I was a nipper," and the other
traveller " reckoned " he had struck it lucky for once.
" Three on 'em at once," he chuckled with indescribable
relish. " They reckon it never rains but it pours." And
so it would seem with three women guests within three
weeks at a homestead where women had been almost
unknown for years.
