While the Billy Boils · Chapter
Another of Mitchell’s Plans for the Future explained
Mitchell outlines a detailed fantasy of returning to the farming districts along the Lachlan River, where he plans to charm a farmer's daughter, secure a job, shear the farmer's sheep, and eventually be pressured into marriage with the prom
What happens
Mitchell outlines a detailed fantasy of returning to the farming districts along the Lachlan River, where he plans to charm a farmer's daughter, secure a job, shear the farmer's sheep, and eventually be pressured into marriage with the promise of a farm and a cash settlement.
Themes in this chapter
Mateship and Loyalty
Mitchell promises to help a mate in need if he ever comes around hard up, but warns him not to visit when he's not home, reflecting conditional loyalty.
Humor and Irony
The entire plan is a humorous, ironic fantasy where Mitchell imagines manipulating a farmer into giving him a farm and a wife through a series of exaggerated and unlikely scenarios.
Class and Social Inequality
Mitchell's plan exploits the social dynamics between itinerant workers and landowning selectors, using marriage as a means to climb from laborer to farmer.
Characters to notice
- Mitchell
Narrates his elaborate plan to settle down with a cocky's daughter, shear sheep, and secure a farm through marriage.
Key passages
“I’ll get down among the cockies along the Lachlan, or some of these rivers. A man stands a better show down there.”
Mitchell believes he will have better opportunities working for small farmers along the Lachlan River than in the outback.
Sets up the setting for his plan.
“One of them was clean gone on me. There are some grand girls down that way.”
Mitchell claims one of the farmer's daughters was infatuated with him, and he praises the women in that region.
Highlights Mitchell's self-assured charm.
“I’ll marry her and settle down and be a cocky myself and if you ever happen to be knocking round there hard up, you needn’t go short of tucker a week or two; but don’t come knocking round the house when I’m not at home.”
Mitchell concludes that he will marry the girl, become a farmer himself, and offer limited hospitality to a friend in need, but only when he is present.
Reveals the conditional nature of his promised mateship.