The Record of Nicholas Freydon: An AutobiographyDawson, A. J. (Alec John)
General
The Record of Nicholas Freydon: An Autobiography
Dawson, A. J. (Alec John)
Fiction
The saloon skylight had been removed bodily, perhaps to serve some
cockatoo bush farmer for a cucumber frame! And the result of this,
more than any other circumstance, had been to give the saloon its
desolate look; for, beneath the yawning aperture where once the
skylight had stood, there was now an unsavoury mound of bird's
droppings, near three feet high at its apex. This was now dust-dry;
but the autumnal rains of bygone seasons had streamed upon it no
doubt, with the result that all the rest of the saloon was several
inches deep in the same sort of covering. There were naturally no
stores in the pitch-black lazareet which one reached through a trap-door
in the saloon deck; but among the lumber there we found an old
bucket, a number of empty tins, packing-cases, and the like, a coal
shovel with a broken handle, and two tanks in which ship's biscuits
had been kept. How these latter commodities came to have been spared
by marauding visitors it would be hard to say; for, in the bush, every
one, without exception, requires tanks for the storage of rain-water.
From the saloon we made our way right forward to the forecastle, in
which practically no damage had been done; for the reason, I suppose,
that little was there which easily could be damaged or removed. No
anchors or cables were to be seen, but the seamen's bunks remained
much as I imagine they had left them; and, on the side of one, some
sundowner had contrived to scrawl, apparently with a heated wire, this
somewhat fatuous legend:
'Occewpide by me Captin Ned Kelli Bushranger. Chrismas day 1868. Not
too bad.'
In many other parts of the ship we found, when we came to do our
cleaning, initials, dates, and occasional names, rudely carved. But
the only attempt at a written tribute to the derelict's quality as a
camping-place was the pretended bushranger's 'Not too bad'; a
thoroughly Australian commentary, and probably endorsed in speech at
the time of writing by the exclamation: 'My word!'
Internally, the _Livorno_ had been very thoroughly gutted, even to the
removal of many of her deck joists and 'tween-decks' stanchions. But
in her galley, which, having remained closed, was in quite good order,
we found the cooking range, though rusty, intact. It had been built
into the deck-house, and, being partly of tiles, would hardly have
lent itself to easy transport or use in another place. Ted had a fire
burning in it that very day, and water boiling on it in tins. Hidden
under much mouldering rubbish in the boatswain's locker were found two
deck scrapers, which proved most useful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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