A Town like Alice

eight glass-topped tables, thirty-two chairs, two sink units, and a mass of minor shop fittings, glasses, plates, cutlery, and furnishings as well as a good deal of electrical fittings and cable. She made arrangements with the firms for all this stuff to be crated and consigned to Forsayth; in Cairns she made arrangements for the truck transport of these goods from Forsayth to Willstown. I had arranged the necessary credits for her and she was able to pay cash for everything.
    She came back to Willstown a week later having made tentative arrangements for supplies of stock for her ice-cream parlour, and found the framework of the workshop already erected; a wooden building goes up very quickly. The matter was a nine days' wonder in Willstown and old men used to stand around wondering at this midsummer madness of an English girl, a stranger to the Gulf country, who proposed to make shoes there and send them all the way to England to be sold. They were too kindly to be rude to her or to laugh at such an eccentricity, but an aura of disbelief surrounded the whole venture and made her feel very much alone in those first weeks.
    She visited Midhurst at a very early stage, one Sunday when no work was going on upon her building. Joe Harman drove in to fetch her in his big utility at dawn one day, and took her back to Midhurst in time for breakfast. As soon as they were out of sight of the town they stopped for five minutes to kiss and talk.
    Presently they disentangled and went on. Jean was accustomed by this time to the idea that no road in this country had a metalled surface. She had not been beyond the town hitherto; very soon she discovered that a road was where the car drove across country. The land was parched and dry with the heat of summer, covered with thin tufts of scorched grass. It was a wooded land, covered thinly with spindly, distorted eucalyptus trees averaging twenty to thirty feet in height; these trees were fairly widely spaced so that it was possible for a car or truck driven across country to find a way between them. This was the road, and when the surface of the earth became too deeply pitted and potholed with traffic the cars and trucks would deviate and choose another course. These tracks followed the same general direction, coming together at the fords where creeks, now dry and stony, had to be crossed, and fanning out again upon the other side.
    Once in the twenty miles she saw half a dozen cattle, that stampeded wildly at the noise of the utility as it bounced and rocketed over the uneven ground. She asked Joe what on earth the cattle found to eat; the ground seemed to her to be completely barren. "They get along," he said. "There's plenty here for them to eat, my word. This dry stuff in the tussocks, why, it's just the same as hay." He told her that there was a water-hole a little way from their track. "They never go more than three or four miles from water," he said. "Horses, now-you'll find them grazing up to twenty miles from a drink."
    Once she exclaimed at three brown, furry forms bounding away among the trees. "Oh, Joe-kangaroos!"
    He corrected her. "Wallabies. We don't get any 'roos up in these parts."
    She stared after the flying forms, entranced. "What's the difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo, Joe?"
    "A wallaby's smaller," he said. "A big, buck kangaroo, he'll stand up to six feet high, but a wallaby's not more than four. A kangaroo, he's got a face like a deer. A wallaby, he's got a face like a rabbit, or a rat. I got a little wallaby to show you at the homestead."
    "A wild one?"
    "He's a tame one now. He'll get wild as he grows older; then he'll go off to his own folks." He told her that when they had shot the wallabies to send the sample skins to Cairns for her they had shot a doe with a joey, and rather than leave the small defenceless creature to die they had taken it home to rear. "I like a wallaby about the place," he said.
    They came to Midhurst presently. A fence of two wire strands tacked to the trees, with an occasional post in the wider gaps, crossed their path, with an iron gate; beyond the gate the track became the semblance of a road. She got out of the utility and opened the gate and he drove through. "This is the home paddock," he said. "For horses, mostly." She could see horses standing underneath the trees, lean riding horses, swishing long black tails. "I've got about three square miles fenced off like this around the house."
    The road swung round, and she saw