”Shall We Gather at the River?”

TOLD BY JOE WILSON

God’s preacher, of churches unheeded,
God’s vineyard, though barren the sod,
Plain spokesman where spokesman is needed,
Rough link ‘twixt the Bushman and God.
The Christ of the Never.

I never told you about Peter M’Laughlan. He was a sort of bush missionary up-country and out back in Australia, and before he died he was known from Riverina down south in New South Wales to away up through the Never-Never country in western Queensland.

His past was a mystery, so, of course, there were all sorts of yarns about him. He was supposed to be a Scotchman from London, and some said that he had got into trouble in his young days and had had to clear out of the old country; or, at least, that he had been a ne’e-er-do-well and had been sent out to Australia on the remittance system. Some said he’d studied for the law, some said he’d studied for a doctor, while others believed that he was, or had been, an ordained minister. I remember one man who swore (when he was drinking) that he had known Peter M’Laughlan as a medical student in a big London hospital, and that he had started in practice for himself somewhere near Gray’s Inn Road in London. Anyway, as I got to know him he struck me as being a man who had looked into the eyes of so much misery in his life that some of it had got into his own.

He was a tall man, straight and well built, and about forty or forty-five, when I first saw him. He had wavy dark hair, and a close, curly beard. I once heard a woman say that he had a beard like you see in some Bible pictures of Christ. Peter M’Laughlan seldom smiled; there was something in his big dark brown eyes that was scarcely misery, nor yet sadness—a sort of haunted sympathy.

He must have had money, or else he got remittances from home, for he paid his way and helped many a poor devil. They said that he gave away most of his money. Sometimes he worked for a while himself as bookkeeper at a shearing-shed, wool-sorter, shearer, even rouseabout; he’d work at anything a bushman could get to do. Then he’d go out back to God-forgotten districts and preach to bushmen in one place, and get a few children together in another and teach them to read. He could take his drink, and swear a little when he thought it necessary. On one occasion, at a rough shearing-shed, he called his beloved brethren “damned fools” for drinking their cheques.

Towards the end of his life if he went into a “rough” shed or shanty west of the Darling River—and some of them were rough—there would be a rest in the language and drinking, even a fight would be interrupted, and there would be more than one who would lift their hats to Peter M’Laughlan. A bushman very rarely lifts his hat to a man, yet the worst characters of the West have listened bareheaded to Peter when he preached.

It was said in our district that Peter only needed to hint to the squatter that he wanted fifty or a hundred pounds to help someone or something, and the squatter would give it to him without question or hesitation.

He’d nurse sick boundary-riders, shearers, and station-hands, often sitting in the desolate hut by the bedside of a sick man night after night. And, if he had time, he’d look up the local blacks and see how they were getting on. Once, on a far outback sheep station, he sat for three nights running, by the bedside of a young Englishman, a B.A. they said he was, who’d been employed as tutor at the homestead and who died a wreck, the result of five years of life in London and Paris. The poor fellow was only thirty. And the last few hours of his life he talked to Peter in French, nothing but French. Peter understood French and one or two other languages, besides English and Australian; but whether the young wreck was raving or telling the story of a love, or his life, none of us ever knew, for Peter never spoke of it. But they said that at the funeral Peter’s eyes seemed haunted more than usual.

There’s the yarn about Peter and the dying cattle at Piora Station one terrible drought, when the surface was as bare as your hand for hundreds of miles, and the heat like the breath of a furnace, and the sheep and cattle were perishing by thousands. Peter M’Laughlan was out on the run helping the station-hands to pull out cattle that had got bogged in the muddy waterholes and were too weak to drag themselves out, when, about dusk, a gentlemanly “piano-fingered” parson, who had come to the station from the next town, drove out in his buggy to see the men. He spoke to Peter M’Laughlan.

“Brother,” he said, “do you not think we should offer up a prayer?”

“What for?” asked Peter, standing in his shirt sleeves, a rope in his hands and mud from head to foot.

“For? Why, for rain, brother,” replied the parson, a bit surprised.

Peter held up his finger and said “Listen!”

Now, with a big mob of travelling stock camped on the plain at night, there is always a lowing, soughing or moaning sound, a sound like that of the sea on the shore at a little distance; and, altogether, it might be called the sigh or yawn of a big mob in camp. But the long, low moaning of cattle dying of hunger and thirst on the hot barren plain in a drought is altogether different, and, at night there is something awful about it—you couldn’t describe it. This is what Peter M’Laughlan heard.

“Do you hear that?” he asked the other preacher.

The little parson said he did. Perhaps he only heard the weak lowing of cattle.

“Do you think that God will hear us when He does not hear that?” asked Peter.

The parson stared at him for a moment and then got into his buggy and drove away, greatly shocked and deeply offended. But, later on, over tea at the homestead, he said that he felt sure that that “unfortunate man,” Peter M’Laughlan, was not in his right mind; that his wandering, irregular life, or the heat, must have affected him.

I well remember the day when I first heard Peter M’Laughlan preach. I was about seventeen then. We used sometimes to attend service held on Sunday afternoon, about once a month, in a little slab-and-bark school-house in the scrub off the main road, three miles or so from our selection, in a barren hole amongst the western ridges of the Great Dividing Range. School was held in this hut for a few weeks or a few months now and again, when a teacher could be got to stay there and teach, and cook for himself, for a pound a week, more or less contributed by the parents. A parson from the farming town to the east, or the pastoral town over the ridges to the west, used to come in his buggy when it didn’t rain and wasn’t too hot to hold the service.