John McPhee Family - Blue Vapours

Portland to Coleraine
It was a long journey, through forest and wild
country, but the teamsters were young and hearty,
and made light of any mishaps that came their way.
They were full of fun and devilment, and of course,
they never missed an opportunity of taking a rise
out of us new chums.
A stranger to supper
Oh! But they had a great joke with me the night
I saw the first kangaroo. It was after supper, and
the men were sitting around a fine, blazing camp
fire. They had fixed up a nice tent for us and the
children, so that we need not be climbing up into
the wagon. The children were playing about, but
after a while they got sleepy, so I took them off to
bed.
At the same time young Patchen went off to have
a look at the bullocks, and the dogs put up a fine
lump of a bush kangaroo. Patchen managed to
kill it, and then he thought he would have a lark
with me, so he brought it back to camp with him,
and propped it up with sticks between my tent
and the fire. Then he strolled up to the fire, where
Tom and Billy Lear were still smoking and talking,
and poked it together and put on some more light
wood, that made a fine blaze, and showed up the
kangaroo nicely.
I had lain down with the baby, and must have
dozed off, but the blaze of the fire soon woke me
up, and I looked out through the flap of the tent,
and the Lord save us! – Yes! Sure enough, it must
be him; there he was, tail and all; and I could
almost swear that I could see his horns! I let one
unearthly yell out of me, and dived into the bed
and covered my head. Tom and Billy Lear thought
there must be a snake in the tent and they came
running over, but, of course, what they saw was the
kangaroo propped up, and they guessed Patchen
had been playing a joke on me.
It took a lot of persuasion on their part to make me
come out and see for myself, and many’s the laugh
they had at me afterwards about “how the devil
nearly had me” that night.
John McPhee Family
Arrival at Brennan’s
We got to Brennan’s that night, and glad we were
to get to the end of our journey, I can tell you.
Bullock wagons aren’t quite as soft and comfortable
as a feather bed, even if it is upholstered with all
the acts of thoughtfulness and kindness that our
good friends Lear and Patchen, could think of. I’ll
never forget how good they were to us, and they
were only two young fellows at the time; one
would not expect them to think of all the little
things they did for us. We stayed at Brennan’s for a
spell for a few weeks; then Tom started out to find
work, so that we could settle down on our own.
Towards Coleraine
It was a nice fresh morning when Tom started off,
in good spirits, with his “bluey up”. He stepped
it out nice and lively till he got to the crossroads
outside Coleraine. There he stopped, and said
to himself: “Well now, which way will I go?” He
couldn’t make up his mind. Seeing a bit of straw
on the road, he picked it up, and, says he: “Straw
shows which way the wind blows; I’ll follow the
straw!” With that he let it go, and he turned into
the road it landed on; and a good wind it was
indeed, that guided that straw, for the road led to
Wootong Vale, at the time owned by Mrs Hassall, as
good and kind a Christian lady as ever lived.
At Hassall’s
Tom called at the homestead and got a job as
handyman about the place. He was a very green
new chum indeed, at the time, about horses and
implements, or anything like that. You see, he had
always lived in the city at home, and worked in a
printing office, but, of course, he never let on. He
gave them to understand he was a good all-round
farm hand; but to tell the truth, I don’t think he
could tell one end of a set of harness from the
other. He used to be in a quandary at times how to
do something or another, but he would always get
out all about it, without them hardly knowing that
he was trying to find out things.
Tom soon made friends of all the men, but Jim Ryan
(or “Yankee Jim” as they called him, because
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