A Town like Alice

Rose was telling us about you yesterday. It's nice to meet somebody from home."
    She went back to the hotel to pack her suitcase, and on the way she stopped at the Post Office. She spent a quarter of an hour sucking the end of a pencil, trying to word a telegram to Joe Harman to tell him that she was coming to see him. Finally she said,
    Heard of your recovery from Kuantan atrocity quite recently perfectly delighted stop I am in Australia now and coming up to Willstown to see you next week.
    jean paget
    She took her suitcase round to the Sawyers' house in a taxi, and settled in with them. She stayed with these kind people for four days. On the third day she could not bear to go on lying to them; she told Rose and her mother what had happened in Malaya, and why she was looking for Joe Harman. She begged them not to spread the story; she was terribly afraid that it would get into the papers. They agreed to this, but asked her to tell her story again to Mr Sawyer when he came back from the office.
    Mr Sawyer had a lot to say that interested her that evening. "Joe Harman may be on to a good thing up there," he said. "The Gulf country's not much just at present, but he's a young man, and things can happen very quickly in Australia. This town was nothing twenty years ago, and look at it now! The Gulf's got one thing in its favour, and that's rain. We get about six or seven inches a year up here-about a quarter of what London gets. Up where Joe Harman is they probably get thirty inches-more than England does. That's bound to tell in the long run, you know."
    He sucked at his pipe. "Mind you," he said, "it's not much good to them, that rainfall, because it all comes in two months and runs off into the sea. It's not spread out all the year round, like yours is in England. But I met a chap from home last year, and he said most of your water would run off into the sea, in England, if you hadn't got a weir every three miles or so on every river. That's what Australia hasn't got around to yet- water conservation on the stations. They're doing a little at it, but not much."
    In the days she spent with the Sawyers, Jean inevitably heard about Rose Sawyer's love life, which was not so far very serious. It chiefly centred round a Mr Billy Wakeling, who built roads when he could get a road to build. "He did awfully well in the war," she told Jean. "He was a captain when he was twenty-three. But he's nothing to compare with your Joe Harman. He hasn't been crucified for me yet…"
    "I'm not in love with Joe Harman," Jean said with some dignity. "I just want to know that he's all right."
    Rose was still looking round for work that would suit her.
    "I like a shop," she said. "I couldn't ever learn shorthand, like you do. I like a shop all right, but I don't know that the dress shop is much catch. I can never tell what suits a person till I see it on, so I don't think I'll ever be a dress designer. I'd like to run a milk bar, that's what I'd like to do. I think it must be ever such fun, running a milk bar…"
    Jean visited Mr Sawyer at the bank in his professional capacity, and arranged for him to transfer to Willstown any credits that might come for her account after she had gone. She left Alice Springs on Monday morning with regret, and the Sawyers and Macleans were sorry to see her go.
    She flew all that day in a Dragonfly, and it was a very instructive day for her. The machine did not go directly to Cloncurry, but zigzagged to and fro across the wastes of Central Australia, depositing small bags of mail at cattle stations and picking up stockmen and travellers to drop them off after a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles. They landed eight or ten times in the course of the day, at Ammaroo and Hatches Creek and Kurundi and Rockhampton Downs and many other stations; at each place they would get out of the plane and drink a cup of tea and gossip with the station manager or owner, and get back into the plane and go on their way. By the end of the day Jean Paget knew exactly what the homestead of a cattle station looked like, and she was beginning to have a very good idea of what went on there.
    They got to Cloncurry at dusk, a fairly extensive town on a railway that ran eastward to the sea at Townsville. Here she was in Queensland, and she heard for the first time the slow, deliberate speech of the Queenslander that reminded her of Joe Harman at once. She was driven into town in a very old open car and deposited at the Post Office Hotel;