A Town like Alice

said. "If I should go to sleep, Joe, it'll be just one of those things." So they pulled two of the long cane chairs to the corner of the veranda where there might be a little breeze, and sat together close, so that they could touch hands. "It's not always as hot as this," he said, still anxious for her approval of the place. "Just these two months are the bad ones. By January it'll be beginning to cool off, when the rain gets properly under way."
    "It's not too bad," she said. "I remember times when it was quite as hot as this in Malaya."
    She led him on to tell her about his work on the station; having seen a little of the terrain that morning she felt she could appreciate what he told her better now. "There's not a lot to do this time of year," he said. "I like to get up to the top end of the station once a fortnight, if I can, in case of duffers. Make a cache or two of tucker up there, top, this time of year, and shoot the worst of the scrub bulls you see around."
    "What's a duffer, Joe?"
    "Why, cattle duffers-cattle thieves. We've not had much of it this year. Sometimes the drovers coming down to Julia Creek from the Cape stations-they pick up a few as they go through the property and put them with the herd. It means faking the brands, of course, and there's the police at Julia to keep an eye open for fresh-branded beasts as they go on the train. They caught a joker at it two years ago and he got six months. We've not had much since then. Poddy-dodging, now -well, that's another matter."
    "What's poddy-dodging, Joe?" She was beginning to grow sleepy, but she wanted to know all she could.
    "Why, a poddy's a cleanskin, a calf born since the last muster that hasn't been branded. Some of these jokers, even your best friends, they'll come on to your station and round up the poddys and drive them off on to their own land, and then there's nothing to say they're yours. That's poddy-dodging, that is. It's a fair cow. Of course, there's always cattle crossing the boundaries because there aren't any fences, so it's a bit of a mix-up generally when you come to muster. But I've been on stations where there weren't hardly any poddys there at all when we come to muster. All the jokers on the other stations had got them."
    She said, "But do the poddys just stay on the new land? Don't they want to go back to mother?"
    He glanced at her, appreciating the question. "That's right -they would if you let them. They'd go straight back to their own herd on their own land, even if it was fifty miles. But what these jokers do is this. They build a little corral on their land in some place where no one wouldn't ever think to look, and they drive your poddys into it. Then they leave them there for four or five days without food or water-don't give them nothing at all. Well, if you do that to a poddy he goes sort of silly and forgets about the herd, and mother. All he wants is a drink of water, same as you or I. Then you let him out and let him drink his fill at a waterhole. He's had such a thirst he won't leave that waterhole for months. He forgets all about his own place, and just stays in his new home."
    Her eyes closed, and she slept. When she woke up the sun was lower in the sky, and Joe had left her. She got up and sponged her face in the bathroom, and saw him outside working on the engine of the truck. She tidied herself up, looked at her watch, and went to investigate the kitchen.
    Primitive was the word, she thought. There was a wood-burning hearth which mercifully was out, and a wick-burning oil stove; this was the cooking equipment. There was a small kerosene refrigerator. Masses of cooked meat were stored in a wire gauze meat safe with nearly as many flies inside it as there were outside. The utensils were old-fashioned and dirty and few in number; it was a nightmare of a kitchen. Jean felt that the right course would be to burn it down and start again, and she wondered if this could be done without burning down the house as well. There was little in the store cupboard but staple foods such as flour and salt, and soap.
    She put on a kettle to boil for tea and looked around for something to cook, other than meat. Eggs were plentiful at Midhurst and she found some stale cheese; she went and consulted Joe, and then came back and made him a cheese omelette with eight eggs. He cleaned his hands and came and watched her while she did it. "Oh my word," he said. "Where did you learn cooking?"
    "In Ealing," she said, and it all seemed