deaths and destructions innumerable; the dreadful multiplication of station hands, who assisted with cheerful but perfunctory effort, patently disbelieving in "any species of cure," and looking on the whole affair—disease, dressing, and dipping—as a manifest dispensation of Providence for the sustentation of the "poor man."
When all had been done that could be done by the proprietor in his desperate need, a single sheep straying among the straggling flocks, or reintroduced by a careless or malignant station hand (and the latter crime is alleged to have been more than once committed), was sufficient to undo a year's labour. Then the distracting, expensive task had to be commenced de novo.
In those days, too, when fencing was not; when the shepherds comprised, perhaps, the very worst class of labour in the colonies, it may be guessed how hard and anxious a life was that of the western Victorian sheepowner.
His neighbour, too, was but too often his natural enemy. A careless flockholder might supply a nucleus of contagion from which a whole district would suffer. This state of matters continued until the gold discoveries, when the shepherds having mostly withdrawn themselves, and a compulsory admixture of flocks taking place, scab spread throughout the length and breadth of Victoria. What its cost to the Government and to private persons was before it was finally stamped out would be difficult, very difficult, to find out—so large a sum that it would have paid all concerned ten times, a hundred times over, to have purchased all infected
