Free The View From Connor's Hill by Barry Heard

abundance of cream. It was great on my Weeties. All up, this would take about 45 minutes.
    Then Mum got a butter churn, and I had to make the damn butter. It was only once a week, admittedly, but — what with feeding chooks and then giving the milker a biscuit of hay, to mention just a few of my chores — the demands on my time before and after school were increasing. By now, I was rising at 5.00 a.m. every day.
    The first really positive change came about when Mum arrived home with a poddy lamb. She’d got it from a farmer somewhere. It was a female, and we called her Mary-Anne. Bottle-feeding this bundle of fluff with its vibrating tail was a sheer joy. Robbie, little brother John, and I would fight over whose turn it was. The confidence I gained from handling this tiny sheep encouraged me to befriend the milker’s calf. We called him ‘Sooky’. In no time, this gorgeous little fellow became a pet. We smothered him in pats and hugs, then soon found ourselves perched up on his back and taken for rides. Over the next few weeks, we adopted another poddy lamb, and then another. We were farmers.
    But I have left the darkest part of our move to last. It was our new house at Tongio. Well, it wasn’t new. It was a fallen-down, creaky, leaky, cobwebby bloody hovel that Robbie and I reckoned was haunted. It was a rented house that had no power, hot water, heating, or any other familiar city conveniences.
    The lavatory was horrific. It had a new name — the dunny. It was way out the back, and built over a hole that disappeared into the bowels of the earth — the sort of place where a monster or hobgoblin would live. Down in this deep cavern, where one day I finally had the courage to glance, I saw a pinnacle of poop at least six feet high. It tapered like an upside-down ice cream cone, with tufts of pages from an old telephone directory poking out all over it. Blowflies, at great risk to the person about to lower themselves over the hole, buzzed in and out when you opened the creaky lid. However, that was nothing. The kids at school told us to check under the dunny lid for red-back spiders. They said that, after a bite from one of them, ‘Y’are dead in no time.’ God, had I died and gone to hell?
    It was torture going to that dunny. The lavatory paper was an old Melbourne telephone directory. Admittedly, I became fascinated with the strange names and accompanying phone number before I smeared them and dropped the page into oblivion. What’s more, the smell around the dunny was putrid. Have you ever tried doing a number two while holding your breath? Both Robbie and I reckoned this was the best method.
    Everyone kept on complaining until an enterprising local told Mum the secret of killing the smell, the blowflies, and the spiders. It was a thick liquid called ‘Phenyle’ that came in a dark-brown triangular bottle. A disinfectant of some kind, its smell reminded me of warm tar. More importantly, it worked.
    Inside the house was also a worry. For starters, Mum didn’t have her radio, so there were no serials to listen to. There was also no electricity for lights or anything else, and we had to be in bed by dark as there were only two lamps. They were tall, glass lamps filled with kerosene, and lit with a match. If they smoked, the wick had to be trimmed. Mum continually reminded us, ‘If you knock it over, you’ll burn the jolly house down.’
    It fascinated me that a small flame could produce such a strong, soft light. As for the rooms, there were no curtains, so someone gave Mum some hessian. At least that meant we had a bit of privacy, even though we had no neighbours. The only water tap in the entire house was over the sink, and new rules now applied to water use — we were to bathe once a week in a large, galvanised tub. The water wasn’t changed as we each had a turn. Daily, we got constant reminders about turning off the tap and saving water, as