A Town like Alice

very deeply.
    That evening as she was sitting in her deckchair on the veranda, Sam Small came to her. "Miss Paget," he said. "Mind if we have a talk?"
    "Of course, Sam," she said.
    "I been thinking about that pair of shoes you made," he said. "I been wondering if you could teach our Judy."
    "How old is Judy, Sam?"
    "Fifteen," he said. "Sixteen next November."
    "Do you want her to learn shoe-making?"
    He said, "I been thinking that anyone who could make a dinkum pair of ladies shoes like that, they could sell them in Cairns in the shops. You see, Judy's getting to an age when she's got to do some work, and there ain't nothing here a girl can do to make a living. She'll have to go into the cities, like the other girls. Well, that's a crook deal for her mother, Miss Paget. We've only got the one girl-three boys and one girl, that's our litter. It'll be a crook deal for her mother if Judy goes to Brisbane, like the other girls. And I thought this shoe-making, well, maybe it would be a thing that she could do at home. After all," he said, "it looks like we've got everything you need to do it with, right here in Willstown."
    "Not buckles," Jean said thoughtfully. "We'd have to do something about buckles." She was speaking half to herself. She thought for a minute. "It wouldn't work like that, Sam," she said. "You think that pair of shoes are wonderful, but they aren't. They're a rotten pair of shoes. You couldn't sell a pair like that in England, not to the sort of people who buy shoes like that. I don't think you could sell them in any first-class shop, even in Cairns."
    "They look all right to me," he said stubbornly.
    She shook her head. "They aren't. I've been in this business, Sam-I know what a shoe ought to look like. I'm not saying that we can't turn out a decent shoe in Willstown; I'd rather like to try. But to get the job right I'll need machinery, and proper benches and hand tools, and proper materials. I see your point about Judy, and I'd like to see her with a job here in Willstown. But it's too big a thing for her to tackle on her own."
    He looked at her keenly. "Was you thinking of a factory or something?"
    "I don't know. Suppose somebody started something of the sort here. How many girls would you get to work regular hours, morning and afternoon-say for five pounds a week?"
    "Here in Willstown?"
    "That's right."
    "How young would you let them start?"
    She thought for a minute. "When they leave school, I suppose. That's fourteen, isn't it?"
    "You wouldn't pay a girl of fourteen five pounds a week?"
    "No. Work them up to that when they got skilled."
    He considered the matter. "I think you'd get six or seven round about sixteen or seventeen, Miss Paget. Then there'd be more coming on from school."
    She turned to another aspect of the matter. "Sam, what would it cost to put up a hut for a workshop?"
    "How big?"
    She looked around. "About as long as from here to the end of the veranda, and about half as wide."
    "That's thirty foot by fifteen wide. You mean a wooden hut, like it might be an army hut, with an iron roof, and windows all along?"
    "That's the sort of thing."
    He calculated slowly in his head. "About two hundred pounds."
    "I think I'd want it to have a double roof and a veranda, like that house that Sergeant Haines lives in. It's got to be cool…"
    "Ah, that puts up the cost. A house like that'll cost you close upon four hundred, with a veranda all around."
    "How long would that take to build?"
    "Oh, I dunno. Have to get the timber up from Normanton. Tim Whelan and his boys'll put that up in a couple of months, I'd say."
    There would be extra buildings needed for the tanning and the dyeing of the hides. "Tell me, Sam," she said. "Would people here like something of that sort started? Or would they think it just a bit of nonsense?"
    "You mean, if it kept the girls here in the town, earning money?"
    "That's right."
    "Oh my word," he said. "Would they like it. They'd like anything that kept the girls at home, so long as they was happy and got work to do." He paused thoughtfully. "It isn't natural the way the girls go off a thousand miles from home in this country," he said slowly. "That's what Ma and I was saying the other night. It isn't natural."
    They sat in silence for a time. "Takes a bit of thinking about, Sam," she said at last.
    When the Dakota came the next Wednesday she left Willstown for Cairns. She took two days to get there because that was the unhurried way of the Dakota; they left