LITMIR.BIZ

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few weeks later Dad did some work for a cocky who still kept a few sheep and he took part of his wages in the form of a dressed hogget. He arrived home with the carcass in a clean hessian bag and laid it on the kitchen table under the excited and watchful eyes of his children. The poor creature, minus head and feet, naked of its skin and wool and recently disembowelled, lie pink and lifeless on the table. We poked and prodded it until Mum again started cuffing ears. In a calico bag were the succulent bits that I liked best, the brain, heart and liver. I knew that the next morning’s breakfast would be a feast.

      Mum rolled the liver or ‘lamb’s fry’ as she called it, in flour and fried it a golden brown, covering it in rich gravy. The other kids did not like liver much so Dad and I had it mostly to ourselves. ‘Lamb’s fry’ was a bit of a misnomer in this case. The sheep was more likely to be a worn out weather (desexed male) or an old ewe that had failed, just one season too often, to produce a lamb.

      Mum hung the sheep out on the open verandah over night to ‘set’, which meant she had to be up before the flies the next morning to cut it up for storage. The axe and one of Dad’s handsaws played an important part in this ritual. The body of the sheep had hung near my bed all night, sometimes giving me a start as I dozed nearby and opened my eyes to see this gruesome corpse hanging at my bedside. Next morning I lay sleepily in my bed on the verandah and watched Mum at work cutting up the carcass. I had not slept a great deal during the night as I anticipated breakfast, and the dead sheep was not the most comforting bedmate. We had no refrigeration so the meat had to be consumed fairly quickly before it spoiled. But with seven mouths to feed that was an easy enough achievement and we ate well for a few days.

      His children learned to dispatch chooks with ease, but despite his strong nature Dad was more faint hearted when it came to blood. The pet lamb that one of us had brought home after a walk in a neighbour’s paddock during the lambing season was becoming troublesome. We had reared it on powdered milk; it was one of the times when we had no house cow in milk production and at home at the same time. The cows were usually dry, strayed off or in the council pound waiting, often in vain, for my father to pay the relevant fine and bail them out. If the fine was not paid the animals were sold and the proceeds forfeited to the council. We lost a few head of stock in this way. Now the lamb was fully-grown and we were in the middle of another bad patch. There had been a drought, which meant no bag sewing and very little other work, and we were short of food.

      Mum decreed that the lamb must become part of the larder. It was, she said, now a full grown, useless and spoiled sheep. The animal had not helped its case by breaking out the night before and devouring a crop of marketable lettuce. Mum would brook no appeals for it to be spared after that. Dad had to butcher the animal himself and I was surprised at how difficult he found the task. He argued long and hard with Mum over the issue, lost, and was now at a point of no denial.

      He spent about three hours sharpening a knife before finally binding the sheep with some twine and taking it out of sight behind the fowl house where he decided the murder should take place. He sat there for hours while the sheep that was trussed up helplessly on the ground appeared resigned to its fate. Any kid foolish enough to peer around the corner of the coop to assess his progress received a violent tongue- lashing. Mum made regular visits to encourage him and we eagerly called for reports as she returned. Finally in frustration she declared loudly that if he lacked the courage to dispatch one lousy sheep whose time had clearly come, then she would do it for him.

      Her next report confirmed that the deed had been done at last. It was now dark and too late to contemplate any part of the sheep for our supper. We had camp pie for tea again. After the lamb had been slaughtered we were allowed to attend the apparently less barbaric, ‘dressing process’. This was the part that looked more like undressing to me, where the animal was skinned and cleaned, which Mum and Dad did together, albeit somewhat awkwardly and with frequent conflict.

      What I saw, but the others did not, were the tear streaks down Dad’s face and his running nose. I knew then what a tough job this had been. Not because it was a mere sheep, but because it had been our sheep and a pet. He must have felt such a failure that we were reduced to this act in order to eat. Now that I had secretly seen this sensitive and warm side of my father, I loved him more and in a special way. I felt I knew him better than the others did after that, but I suspect we all felt we each had some special and individual bond with Dad.

      My father was not a big man, though he seemed so to me in the beginning. He was about five foot ten, but very muscular and stocky due to the physical nature of the work he did. He had long black hair that he always combed straight back from his forehead. His skin, naturally very dark, was always a deep tan. He had a long and aristocratic nose I thought, and his green intelligent eyes had a way of resting on you as if he could see into your heart and mind. It was very hard to keep a secret from Dad. He was a warm and sensitive person, always very reserved and well mannered around people.

      While he had a fierce temper it always blew over quickly and he seemed to lack the energy to hold any sort of grudge for too long. I hardly ever saw him without an old battered felt hat on his head, and he had another, his ‘good’ hat that he wore on his rare visits to town. I do not know what he had been like as a younger man, but I remember he was a person of simple tastes. He rarely drank, though I suppose we had no money to buy grog anyway, but he smoked almost non-stop. Strong, ‘roll-your-own’ Log Cabin tobacco, which made him cough constantly with great hacking chokes that seemed to reach up from his boots. Mum was different in colouring and disposition. Tall, slim and pale with liquid blue eyes I am sure she had been very pretty once, and I still thought her so when she dressed up to go to town. But constant child bearing and harsh living conditions had taken their toll. Unlike Dad, she could get into a foul temper and maintain the black mood for days.

      My sister Patricia had arrived in the world just under two years after me and I had lost my position as the baby forever. Patricia had assumed the baby role, though she was also rapidly taking on her share of the domestic duties as Mum’s swollen tummy heralded the approach of yet another child. I felt grown up and attended my various tasks with a swagger. I was regarded as an important working member of the household and my parents kept me very busy on the farm.

      My brother Trevor was tall and thin, but although still in his early teens he was already filling out in the arms and shoulders. Like Mum, he was pale and blue eyed and had not inherited Dad’s dark colouring like the rest of us. He also had a bad temper and a moody disposition. He could change from being a loving brother to belting me around the ears in seconds.

      When in a good mood he often put me to bed at night. He sprawled on the lawn with me on his chest looking at the deep night sky that was always sprinkled with stars and singing, ‘tonight I’m a tired weary cowboy’, over and over. Eventually I always fell asleep, either from the sweetness of the melody or as a form of escape. Trevor soon began to work on a neighbour’s farm some distance away and we saw less and less of him as he grew up and fled the nest, or at least that was how my mother saw it.

      I missed him terribly as I had been his favourite sibling and he spoiled me often. Now that Trevor had more or less left the farm, my brother Darryl and I were the only boys left, at least for the time being. Unlike Trevor, Darryl was dark and stocky like Dad, but destined to be much taller. He was placid to the point of being almost unnoticed, but we soon became very close and spent countless hours wandering around the bush when we could break free of our chores.

      My sister Gay always seemed quite a lot older than the rest of us. She spent most of her time in the house with Mum, so I never became really close to her. An adolescent girl with all of the appropriate hormonal disturbances, she must have found life on the farm, isolated as it was from society, something of a frustration. I supposed that was why she also began to work away somewhere; leaving us younger children pretty much the run of the place. Room was tight in the old house so we welcomed the extra space, but I lamented the steady loss of my older siblings.

      The boys usually slept on the verandah, an open area running about two thirds of the way along the eastern side of the house. Sleeping on the verandah with its half-height wall was fun most of the time because it gave us a sense of adventure being

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