Ten Creeks Run

These people never were, and the incidents here recorded could not
therefore have happened to them. They remain more vivid than reality
because of imagination. I ramp impatiently, desirous of progressing to
other scenes and souls, but, demonstrating the full scale of human
emotions, they crowd about me suffocatingly, craving--nay,
demanding--perpetuation. I am faced by a patternless, trackless region
out of which I must urgently beat my way like the early explorers,
uncertain if I am merely going round and round, or right through, or
slipping out the side by a false route.

"You poor old nonentities," I exclaim in the irritation of fatigue and
close confinement to their affairs. "What profit in agitating the
printing-presses on your behalf! You are not among those who have
contributed ideas to human knowledge, nor have you taken the human race
one flicker above the mud on that road to super-humanhood for which some
of us gape."

"Bah!" they retort. "That stuff's all tommy rot! No matter what airs of
spiritual or mental superiority people give themselves, it's all a bottle
of smoke in the end, and the end is before you can bally well get your
pipe to draw decently. They will all lie down and die and rot like the
cows and horses, and, in spite of all the faith and belief, no one knows
for a dead cert if they have any more soul, or as much as old 'Flea
Creek', who carried the salt-bags out on the Run because the other horses
were too flash for the job."

"That's all very well," I contend, "but it does not solve the problem of
your inconsequence as material from which to concoct a story. Whatever
happened to you but that you were born in your turn, grew up in your
turn, were smitten with the procreative urge or scourge--sometimes out of
your turn--and tried to marry women who seldom wanted you; whereupon you
turned to those more obliging, and who served equally well; whereupon you
reproduced your species without male restraint or mercy to the limit of
female capacity and endurance; and the reproductions like yourselves
mostly, were not worth the women's birth-pangs, nor the women worth any
other sort of pangs. Then in due time you were buried, and ordinary
funerals are as monotonously alike as infants. One generation of you was
but a repetition of a former, with a marriage or a funeral as a
highlight--not a single epic adventure to create a hero, nor a hero to
engineer an epic adventure in the whole boiling!"

"Hold hard!" says one old philosopher, who has thought much in the
solitudes. I see him on the outer edge of the crowd. "Is it real life
here in this part of the world you're driven to make this blanky book
about, or is it about some strange, unusual, far-away land, with kings
and savages, or professors and millionaires, and other kinds of fantastic
people?"

"It has to be set bang here in Australia, with none but you kicking up
your heels and using bad language in the middle of the natural scenery."

"Well, then, it seems to me that all you have to do is yarn along and
make us come alive just as we blooming well were. Let us drivel and
meander like life itself. You have nothing to do with the way of our
lives or the character of our performances, whether big or little, or
dull, or exciting. If a funeral, or a marriage, or a drought, or a flood,
or a snake-bite, or a spree, or a broken leg was our greatest experience,
that is not your responsibility. Blow it all, you're not the Lord
Himself! You have only to show how things were without any squirming
about the why or how. You don't need to swell your head with shaping
destiny or interpreting life according to those new-fangled blokes who
never baked a damper, or felled a tree, or rode a buck-jumper, or killed
a snake or a beast, or tanned a hide, or broke in a team of bullocks, or
knocked up a coffin for a mate out of stringybark, or drank water out of
their hats. You just set us down on paper as we were, without any of your
own shenannakin!"