fire. In the matter of improvements, too, stations vary greatly. Some
are in a wilderness, with fittings to match; others have telephones
between homestead and out-stations, the jackeroos dress for dinner, and
the station hands are cowed into touching their hats and saying "Sir."
Also stations are of all sizes, and the man who is considered quite a
big squatter in the settled districts is thought small potatoes by the
magnate "out back," who shears a hundred and fifty thousand sheep, and
has an overdraft like the National Debt.

Kuryong was a hill-country station of about sixty thousand acres all
told; but they were good acres, as no one knew better than old Bully
Grant, the owner, of whose history and disposition we heard something
from Pinnock at the club. It was a highly improved place, with a fine
homestead--thanks to Bully Grant's money, for in the old days it had
been a very different sort of place--and its history is typical of the
history of hundreds of others.

When Andrew Gordon first bought it, it was held under lease from
the Crown, and there were no improvements to speak of. The station
homestead, so lovingly descanted upon in the advertisement, consisted
of a two-roomed slab hut; the woolshed, where the sheep were shorn, was
made of gumtree trunks roofed with bark. The wool went down to Sydney,
and station supplies came back, in huge waggons drawn by eighteen or
twenty bullocks, that travelled nine miles a day on a journey of three
hundred miles. There were no neighbours except at the township of
Kiley's Crossing, which consisted of two public-houses and a store.
It was a rough life for the young squatter, and evidently he found it
lonely; for on a visit to Sydney he fell in love with and married
a dainty girl of French descent. Refined, well-educated, and
fragile-looking, she seemed about the last person in the world to take
out to a slab-hut homestead as a squatter's wife. But there is an old
saying that blood will tell; and with all the courage of her Huguenot
ancestry she faced the roughness and discomforts of bush life. On
her arrival at the station the old two-roomed hut was plastered and
whitewashed, additional rooms were built, and quite a neat little home
was the result. Seasons were good, and the young squatter might have
gone on shearing sheep and selling fat stock till the end of his life
but for the advent of free selection in 1861.

In that year the Legislature threw open all leasehold land