The shearers have one chronic grievance, and that is the food and the cook. They have another constantly recurring grievance, and that is wet sheep, over which they are in a perpetual state of insurrection; and little wonder, considering that the labour and the menace to health incurred in shearing wet sheep is hardly to be overestimated. No squatter can make his men shear wet sheep since the formation of the “Shearers’ Union,” and rightly enough too, though he is bound to pay them all the time that they are in the sheds waiting for the sheep to dry. A really wet sheep can be picked out in a moment by the lank, dark look of the wool; but when the wetness is not so distinctly shown, the question between the shearers and the squatter—who naturally wants to get his sheep finished—becomes a vexed one. Often, too, the back is quite dry, while the neck and belly of the sheep is wringing wet; while the argument so often used in courts of law that no rain has fallen for weeks is absolutely futile. Anyone who is used to shearing in Australia is not likely to doubt the Scriptural story of the wet fleece, whether it was on the sheep’s back or off it, for the yoke of the wool will absorb moisture to any extent from fog, dew, or even from an atmosphere that is not palpably the least damp. Harry Lawson has drawn us some grim pictures of life in the back blocks. It is often bad enough for the large landowner and his womenkind. But they have books, and papers, and motors—which have revolutionized country life in Australia more than anything else. They can take occasional runs up to town, and have friends to stay with them, so that existence becomes endurable in a way that it never could become to the small settlers, and it seems to me that before such people are uprooted it would be well to face clearly the question as to whether those who replace them will ever be able, or willing, to endure the life which they must face—conditions which will appear far more appalling to strangers than to people who have been bred and born in the country, and who possess, as all Australians seem to do, the most amazing powers of rebound. “John Barleycorn got up again and sore surprised them all” might be said of many a man and many a district in Australia. One of the most extraordinary things about the people being that they will live in absolute loneliness, facing drought, heat, and loss, toiling incredibly to get their stock fed and watered, watching them die day after day during a bad season; and then, when good times come, start again at the very beginning, with as gay a spirit as ever, absolutely unembittered by all the hardships through which they have passed.