Buckalong was a big freehold of some 80,000 acres, belonging to
an absentee syndicate, and therefore run in most niggardly style.
There was a manager on 200 pounds a year, Sandy M'Gregor to wit --
a hard-headed old Scotchman known as "four-eyed M'Gregor",
because he wore spectacles. For assistants, he had half-a-dozen of us --
jackaroos and colonial-experiencers -- who got nothing a year,
and earned it.

We had, in most instances, paid premiums to learn the noble art
of squatting -- which now appears to me hardly worth studying,
for so much depends on luck that a man with a head as long as a horse's
has little better chance than the fool just imported.
Besides the manager and the jackaroos, there were a few boundary riders
to prowl round the fences of the vast paddocks. This constituted
the whole station staff.

Buckalong was on one of the main routes by which stock were taken
to market, or from the plains to the tablelands, and vice versa.
Great mobs of travelling sheep constantly passed through the run,
eating up the grass and vexing the soul of the manager. By law,
sheep must travel six miles per day, and they must be kept to within
half-a-mile of the road. Of course we kept all the grass near the road
eaten bare, to discourage travellers from coming that way.

Such hapless wretches as did venture through Buckalong used to try hard
to stray from the road and pick up a feed, but old Sandy was always
ready for them, and would have them dogged right through the run.
This bred feuds, and bad language, and personal combats between us