would have been different. But he could not. The stench of the stifling
shearing-sheds and of the crowded sleeping huts where men are packed in
rows like trucked sheep came to him with the sickening smell of the
slums. On the faces of men in the bush he had seen again and again that
hopeless look as of goaded oxen straining through a mud-hole, that utter
degradation, that humble plea for charity. He had known them in Western
Queensland often in spite of all that was said of the free, brave bush.
It was not new to him, this dark side of life; that was the worst of it.
It had been all along and he had known that it had been, but never before
had he understood the significance of it, never before had he realised
how utterly civilisation has failed. And this was what crushed him--the
hopelessness of it all, the black despair that seemed to fill the
universe, the brutal weariness of living, the ceaseless round of sorrow
and sin and shame and unspeakable misery.

Often in the bush it had come to him, lying sleepless at night under the
star-lit sky, all alone excepting for the tinkling of his horse-bell:
"What is to be the end for me? What is there to look forward to?" And his
heart had sunk within him at the prospect. For what was in front? What
could be? Shearing and waiting for shearing--that was his life. Working
over the sweating sheep under the hot iron shed in the sweltering summer
time; growing sick and losing weight and bickering with the squatter till
the few working months wore over; then an occasional job, but mostly
enforced idling till the season came round again; looking for work from
shed to shed; struggling against conditions; agitating; organising; and
in the future years, aged too soon, wifeless and childless, racked with
rheumatism, shaken with fevers, to lie down to die on the open plain
perchance or crawl, feebled and humbled, to the State-charity of Dunwich.
He used to shut his eyes to force such thoughts from him, fearing lest he
go mad, as were those travelling swagmen he met sometimes, who muttered