A Town like Alice

very far away: the grey skies, the big red buses, and the clamour of the Underground. "I had a sort of little kitchenette with an electric cooker. I always used to cook myself a two-course evening meal."
    He grinned awkwardly. "Afraid you won't find many electric cookers in the outback."
    She touched his hand. "I know that, Joe. But there are lots of things that could be done here to make it a bit easier." As they ate their tea they talked about the kitchen and the house. "It's just the kitchen that needs altering," she said. "The rest of it is lovely."
    "I'll get a toilet fixed up in the house before you come," he promised her. "It's all right for me going out there, but it's not nice for you."
    She laughed. "I don't mind that, so long as you keep up the supplies of the Saturday Evening Post ." He grinned, but she found him set upon this alteration. "Some places have a septic tank and everything," he said. "They put one in at Augustus when the Duke and Duchess stayed there. I reckon that we'll have to wait a while for that."
    They ate their tea out on the veranda as the sun went down, and sat looking out over the creek and the bush, smoking and talking quietly. "What are you doing next week?" she asked. "Will you be in town, Joe?"
    He nodded. "I'll be in on Thursday, or Friday at the latest. "I'm going up to the top end tomorrow for a couple of days, just to see what's going on."
    She smiled. "Looking after the poddys?"
    He grinned. "That's right. It's a bit difficult this time of year, in the dry, because the tracks don't show so good. I got a boy called Nugget on the station now, and he's a bonza tracker, oh my word. I'm taking him up with me. I've got a kind of feeling that Don Curtis, up on Windermere station, he's been at my poddys."
    "What would you do if you found tracks, then, Joe? Tracks leading off your land and on to his?"
    He grinned. "Go after 'em and find 'em and drive 'em back," he said. "Hope Don doesn't come along while we're doing it."
    He drove her into Willstown at about nine o'clock that night; they halted for a while outside the town to say goodnight in proper style. She lay against his shoulder with his arm around her, listening to the noises of the bush, the croaking of the frogs, the sound of crickets, and the crying of a night bird. "It's a lovely place you live in, Joe," she said. "It just wants a new kitchen, that's all. Don't ever worry about me not liking it."
    He kissed her. "It'll be all ready for you when you come."
    "April," she said. "Early in April, Joe."
    She started up the shoe workshop in the first week of December, three or four days after Aggie Topp arrived. To start with she had five girls, Judy Small and her friend Lois Strang, and Annie, whose figure was beginning to deteriorate and who had been sacked from the hotel, and two fifteen-year-olds who had recently left school. For cleanliness and to mark the fact that they were working in a regular job she put everyone into a green overall coat in the workshop, and gave them a mirror on the wall so that they could see what they looked like.
    From the first days she found that the fifteen-year-olds were the best employees. Girls straight from school were used to the discipline of regular hours of work; she seldom got the girls from outback homes to settle down to it so well as the younger ones. The monotony was irksome to the older girls who had left school for some years, or who had never been to school at all. She tried to help them by ordering an automatic changing gramophone from Cairns, with a supply of records; the music certainly intrigued and amused the whole of Willstown and may have helped the older girls a little, but not much. The big attraction of the workshop was the air-conditioner.
    The air-conditioner was the best recruiting agent of the lot. In that torrid summer heat which ranged from between a hundred and a hundred and ten degrees at midday, she managed to keep the temperature of the workshop down to about seventy degrees, at which the girls could work without their hands sweating. For the girls it meant that they got respite from the heat of the day, and music to listen to, and the novelty of a clean green overall to wear, and money in their pockets at the end of the week. The workshop was popular from the first, and Jean never had any difficulty in getting as many recruits for it as she could handle. For the early months, however, she was content with five.
    She spent a hectic fortnight after the workshop