A Town like Alice

to do it reasonably well. But it could never satisfy you after the Gulf country, and cinemas won't fill the gap, or streets of shops, or dance halls. And sometimes when we squabble-we shall squabble, Joe-you'll think about your old life in the Gulf country, and how you had to give it up, because of me. And I shall know you're thinking that and blaming it on me, and that will be between us all the time. That's what I'm afraid of, Joe. I think we ought to stay up in the Gulf country, where your work is."
    "You just said you couldn't stand Willstown," he objected. "Burketown and Croydon-well, they're just the same."
    "I know," she said thoughtfully. "I'm not being very reasonable, am I? First I say I couldn't stand living in a place like that, and then I say that you oughtn't to think of living anywhere else."
    "That's right." He was puzzled and distressed. "We've got to try and work it out some way to find what suits us both."
    "There's only one way to do that, Joe."
    "What's that?"
    She smiled at him. "We'll have to do something about Willstown."

Chapter 8
    They spent that day in a curious mixture of love-making and economic discussion. "You can't tell me that a country with three times the rainfall of the Territory can't support a town as good as Alice," she said once. "I know Alice has a railway. Willstown's got rain, and I know which I'd rather have for raising cattle. If you go on doing that, Joe, I'll go off and sit by myself. We aren't married yet." She removed his hand and kissed it.
    "Rain's not the only thing you want for raising cattle," he said. "The better the feed, of course, the more calves live through the dry and the more you've got to sell. But there's a lot more to it than that, oh my word."
    "Tell me, Joe." She had his hand in a firm grip.
    "One thing," he said, "you've got to keep that water when you've got it. It's true that Midhurst gets a lot of rainfall, but it's all gone in a flash. We get rain from the middle of December till the end of February, and you'll see the creeks all running full in flood. But three weeks later, by the end of March, they'll be all dry again, and the country as dry as ever."
    "Is that what you want to build the dams for, at Kangaroo Creek and Dry Gum Creek?"
    "That's right," he said. "I want to make a start with building little kind of barrages to hold back the water. Do a bit each year, starting at the head of each creek and working down. Get a little pool held back every two or three miles all down the creeks till they run out into the Gilbert. They wouldn't hold the water right through the dry, of course; the sun's too strong. But you could add a lot of feed to Midhurst if you had a lot of little dams like that. Oh my word, you could."
    She released his hand. "How big is Midhurst, Joe?"
    "Eleven hundred square miles."
    "How many cattle does it carry?"
    "About nine thousand. Ought to carry more than that, but it's dry up at the top end. Very dry."
    "Suppose you could get all the little dams that you're imagining. How many would it carry then?"
    He thought for a minute. "I don't see why it shouldn't carry double what's on it now. That'd be about sixteen to the mile. With a rainfall like we've got you should be able to do that."
    "You sold fourteen hundred head this year, didn't you?"
    "That's right."
    "How much a head?"
    "Four pound sixteen."
    She grabbed his hand again, and held it imprisoned. "I'm trying to think, Joe. If you doubled the stock on the station you'd have another fourteen hundred to sell each year. That's -that's between six and seven thousand pounds a year more to sell. You'd be selling twelve or thirteen thousand pounds worth every year then, Joe. It’ll be worth spending a bit of capital on dams to get that rise in turnover, wouldn't it?"
    He looked at her with a new respect. "Well, that's the way I worked it out. I told Mrs Spears. I said, I want to keep a permanent gang of three men and a few Abos on this. Do a bit each year, working down from the top. Spend about fifteen hundred a year, you might say. There'd be less profit the first year, but after that it should rise steadily to nearly double. That's what I told her."
    "She agreed, did she?"
    "She's agreed to spend the money. But that's only the start of it, the easy part. It may be years before I get the men."
    She looked at him incredulously. "Years?"
    "Too right," he said heavily. "It's all very well to think of things like that, but it's another thing to do them. Might be five years