HOW I BEGAN TO WRITE
For publication I mean. Having the pen of a ready writer by inheritance, I had dashed off occasional onslaughts in the journals of the day, chiefly in defence of the divine rights of kings (pastoral ones). I had assailed incoherent democrats, who perversely denied that Australia was created chiefly for the sustenance of sheep and cattle and the aggrandisement of those heroic individuals who first explored and then exploited the 'Waste Lands of the Crown.' The school of political belief to which I then belonged derided agriculture, and was subsequently committed to a scheme for the formation of the Riverina into a separate pastoral kingdom or colony. A petition embodying a statement to this effect, wholly unfitted as it was for the sustenance of a population dependent upon agriculture, was forwarded to the Secretary for the Colonies, who very properly disregarded it. The petitioners could not then foresee the stacking of 20,000 bags of wheat, holding four bushels each, awaiting railway transport at one of the farming centres of this barren region in the year 1897. Allied facts caused me to reconsider my very pronounced opinions, and, perhaps, led others to question the accuracy of theirs. My deliverances in the journals of the period occurred in the forties and fifties of the century, and gradually subsided.
I was battling with the season of 1865 on a station on the Murrumbidgee River, at no great distance from the flourishing town of Narandera, then consisting of two hotels, a small store, and a large graveyard, when an uncertain-tempered young horse kicked me just above the ankle with such force and accuracy that I thought the bone was broken. I was to have ridden at daylight to count a flock of sheep, and could
