t suddenly, without a moment's warning, she sprang to her feet and
scrambled to the top of the rock overhanging the camp. She stood for a
moment in the bright moonlight, gazing intently down the vacant road.

"Here they come!" she cried, pointing down the road. "Here they
come--the troopers! I can see their cap-peaks glistening in
the moonlight!... I'm going away! Mother's gone. I'm going
now!--Good-bye!--Good-bye! I'm going away from the bush!"

Then she ran through the trees towards the foot of Long Gully. Bob and
his mate followed; but, being unacquainted with the locality, they lost
her.

She ran to the edge of a granite cliff on the higher side of the deepest
of the rocky waterholes. There was a heavy splash, and three startled
kangaroos, who had been drinking, leapt back and sped away, like three
grey ghosts, up the ridge towards the moonlit peak.

Mitchell on the "Sex" and Other "Problems"

"I agree with 'T' in last week's 'Bulletin'," said Mitchell, after
cogitating some time over the last drop of tea in his pannikin, held
at various angles, "about what they call the 'Sex Problem'. There's no
problem, really, except Creation, and that's not our affair; we can't
solve it, and we've no right to make a problem out of it for ourselves
to puzzle over, and waste the little time that is given us about. It's
we that make the problems, not Creation. We make 'em, and they only
smother us; they'll smother the world in the end if we don't look
out. Anything that can be argued, for and against, from half a dozen
different points of view--and most things that men argue over can
be--and anything that has been argued about for thousands of years (as
most things have) is worse than profitless; it wastes the world's time
and ours, and often wrecks old mateships. Seems to me the deeper you
read, think, talk, or write about things that end in ism, the less
satisfactory the result; the more likely you are to get bushed and
dissatisfied with the world. And the more you keep on the surface of
plain things, the plainer the sailing--the more comfortable for you and
everybody else. We've always got to come to the surface to breathe, in
the end, in any case; we're meant to live on the surface, and we might
as well stay there and look after it and ourselves for all the good we
do diving down after fish that aren't there, except in our imagination.
And some of 'em are very dead fish, too--the 'Sex Problem', for
instance. When