Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

This rather obscure apostrophe is written expressly for the benefit of such imaginative litterateurs and conversational liars as it may concern.

For it should be known that the perfect rider “nascitur, non fit,” to begin with; that his training must begin in early boyhood, and be followed up sans intermission; that his system of horse-breaking must be the Young-Australian, which is, beyond doubt, the most trying in the world; that his skill is won by grassers innumerable; that, in short, there is no royal road to the riding of a proper outlaw⁠—a horse that, not with any view of showing-off before girls, but with the confirmed intention of flattening out his antagonist, plays such fantastic jigs before high heaven as make the angels peep.

And yet, to be an ideal rider, man wants but little here below, nor is it at all likely he will want that little long. He wants⁠—or rather, needs⁠—a skull of best spring steel; a spinal column of standard Lowmoor; limbs of gutta-percha; a hide of vulcanised india-rubber; and the less brains he has, the better. Figuratively speaking, he should have no brains at all; his thinking faculties should be so placed as to be in direct touch with the only thing that concerns him, namely, the saddle. Yet his heart must not be there; he must by no means be what the schoolboys call a “frightened beggar.”

Perfect horsemanship is usually the special accomplishment of the man who is not otherwise worth his salt, by reason of being too lazy for manual labour, and too slenderly upholstered on the mental side for anything else. Sir Francis Head, one of the five exceptions to this rule⁠—Gordon being the second, “Banjo” the third, “Glenrowan” the fourth, and the demurring reader the fifth⁠—says the greatest art in riding is knowing how to fall. And here we touch the very root of the matter. It is the moral effect of that generally-fulfilled apprehension which makes one salient difference between the cultivated, or spurious, rider, and the ignorant, or true rider. In this case, ignorance is not only bliss, but usurps the place of knowledge, as power.

Edward M. Curr knew as much of the Australian horse and his rider as any writer ever did; and this is what he says of the back-country natives:⁠—

“They are taciturn, shy, ignorant, and incurious; undemonstrative, but orderly; hospitable, courageous, cool, and sensible. These men ride like centaurs,” etc., etc.

Yes, yes⁠—but why? Looking back along that string of well-selected adjectives, doesn’t your own inductive faculty at once place its finger on ignorance as the key to the enigma? Notice, too, how Curr, being a bit of a sticker himself, is thereby disqualified from knowing that the centaurs were better constructed for firing other people over their heads than for straddling their own backs.

Your true-rider must audibly and sanguineously challenge every unfamiliar scientific fact stated in conversation, and be prepared to stake his rudimentary soul on the truth of anything read aloud from a book. He must believe, with the ecclesiastics of yesterday, that the earth is flat and square, like them, he must be a violent supporter of the geocentric theory; unlike them, his aeschatological hypothesis must be that the fire we wot of is only a man’s own conscience⁠—the wish, in his case, being father to the thought. Above all, he must have no idea how fearfully and wonderfully he is made. He must think upon himself as a good strong framework of bones, cushioned and buffered with meat, and partly tubular for the reception and retention of food; he must further regard it as a rather grave oversight in his own architectural design that the calf of his leg is not in front. Just consider what advantages such a man enjoys in cultivating the art of knowing how to fall. Why, a spill that perils neck or limb, a simple buster is to him, and it is nothing more.

But it is a great deal more to one who has been nourishing a youth sublime with the curious facts of science and the thousand-and-one items of general information necessary to any person who, like the fantastical duke of dark corners, above all other strifes contends especially to know himself; and that physically, as well as morally. To him it is a nasty scrunch of the two hundred and twenty-six bones forming his own admirably designed osseous structure; a dull, sickening wallop of his exquisitely composed cellular, muscular, and nervous tissues; a general squash of his beautifully mapped vascular system; a pitiless stoush of membranes, ligaments, cartilages, and whatnot; a beastly squelch of gastric and pancreatic juices and secretions of all imaginable descriptions⁠—biliary, glandular, and so forth. And all for what? Why, for the sake of emulating the Jack Frosts of real life in their own line!

My contention simply is, that the Hamlet-man is only too well seized of the important fact that his bones cost too much in the breeding to play at heels-over-tip with them. And I further maintain that, for reasons above specified, the man of large discourse, looking before and after (ah! that is where the mischief lies!) never, in spite of his severest self-scrutiny, knows what a frightened beggar he is till he finds himself placing his foot in the stirrup, preparatory to mounting a recognised performer.

Just take yourself as an example. You remember the time you were passing the old cattle-yards in the flat, and saw four fellows of your acquaintance putting the bridle on a black colt in the crush? You remember how the chaps inspected your saddle, and, the concurrence of opinion being that it was the best on the ground, how they asked the loan of it for an hour? You lent it with pleasure, you will remember, and assisted them to girth it on. You liked to be at the second backing of a colt⁠—not as the central figure, of course, but in the capacity of critic and adviser. There was the probability of