Free You Never Met My Father by Graeme Sparkes

intermittently pulled up at the homestead dam. While they refilled, the sense of crisis was palpable even to us children, who watched the sweating blackened men accept cordial and fruit cake from Pat, too preoccupied to indulge their usual rural courtesy. Jean told me and Carol these men were heroes, just like soldiers who went to war. And while Carol wanted to know what a ‘hero’ was, I marched stiffly around the yard, saluting, imitating the Anzacs of Gallipoli.
    The drama ended overnight and we went off to school the following day. As we rode in the front of the ute with Pat, I saw an eagle standing next to the roadside fence on ground charred and denuded by fire, its head reaching the height of the top strand of barbed wire as it watched us pass. I cried out in awe but neither Pat nor Jean saw it. When I looked back it had gone. I thought it must have taken flight but the sky was empty. Jean suggested I had a vivid imagination. Had I imagined it? If so, it had the same substance as any other bird. I looked for it, slyly, privately, every day I went to school while I lived at Kirkwall , but never saw it again.
    Flight. Again flight.
    â€œTo be real,” Jean instructed, employing her superior learning, “you need at least one witness.”
    I devoted myself to my education, eager to learn about my country and the world I lived in. Each Monday morning we assembled outside our classroom, saluted the flag while it unravelled, sang God Save the Queen , and repeated with sincerity the oath of loyalty— I love God and my country, I honour the flag, I serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law —a ceremony that established the appropriate degree of subservience for the rest of the school week, even if it begged the question about how to obey an absentee father.
    I coveted my pencils, ruler, set square, compass and especially my plastic template of Australia with which I made copious maps, soon filling an entire exercise book. I enjoyed drilling the multiplication tables, chanting them with the other students like a tribal ritual, quickly memorising up to the twelve-times table. I liked to take my turn to read aloud in class. For Show-And-Tell I tried my best to impress. One morning I presented the skull our gardener had given Jean, not yet appreciating the grief such an act might cause the indigenous people of the district, if there were any left.
    Jean was in Grade 4 while I was in Grade 2. My arithmetic was good enough to figure that by the time I made it to Grade 4 she would have reached Grade 6. I accepted stoically that she was always going to be brainier than me. Already she was three letters of the alphabet through a junior encyclopaedia. So I didn’t dare challenge her assertions. Nor in matters of dispute between us could I match her negotiating skills. We argued over who would have the crust at the end of a loaf of bread to eat. We fought about it until she came up with a solution: she would have all of them for the next four years; after that, I could have them for as long as I liked, for the rest of my life if I wanted. She persuaded me I was getting the better deal and so I agreed, much to my regret next time we started a loaf of bread. I skulked around the yard and climbed a tree to brood. I resolved to be extra alert whenever I made a deal with her.
    When the shearing started at Kirkwall Pat had to prepare morning teas and lunches and deliver these to the shearing shed, which was a mile from the homestead. She was busy keeping up with her routine, getting us up in the morning and ready for school, on top of which Angus Campbell, a majestic, snowy-haired, ruddy-faced creature in a yeoman’s cap, moleskins and tweeds, arrived to oversee the shearing, expecting her to cook for him as well. He ordered French omelettes and declared he had tasted none better than hers, not even in Paris, in a land so far away it was breathtaking to think he had been there. We