Prisoners of the outback
Few occupations have been as celebrated in Australian history as the squatter (a settler or former convict). The reality, however, was very different from the mythology. As Edward Curr wrote in Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (1883), “One journey with sheep across a country is so like another.” Curr, who sailed to Australia in 1842 to take over the management of his father’s estate near Melbourne, felt unfulfilled by the “little household jobs” that took up most of his days. Every morning he rose with the sun and “the monotonous routine of the previous day recommenced”.
Aside from reading, Curr’s only means of passing the time was to pace back and forth in front of the hut like a caged animal, an evocative indication of how bored he must have been. He wrote about the many “intervals of solitude”, one of which lasted three weeks, during which time he did not see a single person. He felt like “a prisoner with nothing to occupy me”.
For John Henderson, who emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 at the age of 19, every day in the bush was “a repetition of the one that went before it”. The same was true for gold diggers, who even at the height of the Gold Rush in the 1850s complained about their “monotonous work”.
Edward Curr’s only means of passing the time was to pace back and forth in front of the hut like a caged animal