nation. He turned the Gorge into a nursery for thoroughbred horses, and seldom visited the Luya, leaving the management of affairs there to his working partner, Dominic Trant. Except, however, for these selectors' homesteads, a great part of the Upper Luya belonged to the Hallett Brothers, and made portion of their station Tunimba—a troublesome bit of country in mustering time, when the broken gorges and undergrowth formed an almost impregnable refuge for "scrubbers."
Tunimba was one of the principal stations on the Luya, and extended beyond this mountainous region to the open country where was good grazing land, and where the river was no longer a shallow, uncertain stream brawling over miniature precipices, trickling through quicksands, or dropping into a chain of still, deadly-looking pools—except in flood-time, when it had a way of coming down from its source with amazing volume and rapidity. As the mountains widened out, the Luya widened and deepened, and flowed quite sedately through wooded pastures and the paddocks of well-kept head stations. Lower down it washed peaceful German plantations and the settlements of cedar-cutters, who floated their logs on its surface to the township, below which it finally emptied itself into the ocean.
Of the squatters on the Upper Luya, the Hallett Brothers were perhaps the most important, and with the prospect of greater wealth in the future than any others of the settlers in the district. They were young and enterprising, and besides Tunimba, owned stations out west, which they worked in conjunction with their southern property. Tunimbah was always quoted as the most comfortable and best managed of the Luya stations. Young Mrs. Jem Hallett, the eldest brother's wife, was considered a model housekeeper, and the most dressy woman in the district. She went to Leichardt's Town for the Government House balls, and was a lady not slow to assert her pretensions, social and otherwise. Frank Hallett, the unmarried brother, was popular in the neighbourhood as a capital fellow and a clear-headed man of business. He was particularly popular
