An autobiography / by Millais Culpin.

  • Millais Culpin
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An autobiography / by Millais Culpin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mology and I used the scholarship money to join in a trip, the first of many, to Wicken Fen, the bug-hunter’s Mecca. Three years of field work and reading in this subject, directed entirely by ourselves, gave a contact with biological principles and scientific terminology the value of which I appreciated only in later-years. Meanwhile school went well and I matriculated in January, 1891, my only school companion being R. W. Chambers. Years later we found ourselves occupying academic chairs in the same street, he having become Quain Professor of English at University College. Now came a great change. My father was over-worked, and London fogs, the yellow sort that made me weep, made him more chesty each winter, so he sold his practice and took us all to Queensland. He set up practice in Brisbane and I tried various ways to earn a living, spending three months at a gold rush where an illiterate but skilled miner from Gympie took charge of my fortunes, taught me how to use a shovel and cook a damper, and was always ready to back his practical experience against my matriculation mechanics. We raised several tons of stone that showed gold when “dollied’ but it would not have paid for cartage and crushing. Then I got up North and took on the job of schoolmaster at the Laura, a township on Cape York Peninsula about 15 degrees south of the equator. The population was not stable and, to meet educa- tional needs in such a circumstance, if the people put up a structure that would keep out the weather, and fourtd someone who could read and write and do a bit of figuring, the Government would pay his salary. There were aborigines all round, but it did not cccur to me or anyone else that their young should attend school. Here for four years | was happy. My kids gave no trouble and discipline was unnecessary; | taught them during the week and at week- ends they taught me. I could keep a horse or two, find plenty of game — turkeys, duck, pigeons — catch small fish all the year round and in the season make some incredible hauls of barramundi, the giant perch of India. Up-country, far apart, were cattle stations and gold mines. Our police constable, with his half-dozen black troopers, had many errands to do and w oul often arrange for a trip to fit in with my holidays so that I could go with him. Thus I saw a good part of the Peninsula with no risk and little discomfort. I came to admire the self-reliance of the man — prospector, mailman, or what-not — who would start off with a saddle- horse and one or two pack-horses for a two-hundred-mile journey, on the whole of which he might not see a fence. | remember sitting by two men as, on the pub verandah, they discussed such a journey one of them was about to make. The other had already travelled the route and described it to his mate with as much care as if he were a scientific man describing
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