With well-nursed bullocks, and a full complement of them--the "Macs" had
twenty-two per waggon for their dry stages--a "thirty-five-mile dry" can
be "rushed," the waggoners getting under way by three o'clock one
afternoon, travelling all night with a spell or two for the bullocks by
the way, and "punching" them into water within twenty-four hours.
"Getting over a fifty-mile dry" is, however, a more complicated business,
and suggests a treadmill. The waggons are "pulled out" ten miles in the
late afternoon, the bullocks unyoked and brought back to the water,
spelled most of the next day, given a last drink and travelled back to
the waiting waggons by sundown; yoked up and travelled on all that night
and part of the next day; once more unyoked at the end of the forty miles
of the stage; taken forward to the next water, and spelled and nursed up
again at this water for a day or two; travelled back again to the
waggons, and again yoked up, and finally brought forward in the night
with the loads to the water.
Fifty miles dry with loaded waggons being the limit for mortal bullocks,
the Government breaks the "seventy-five" with a "drink" sent out in tanks
on one of the telegraph station waggons.
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