Free You Never Met My Father by Graeme Sparkes Page A

children were sent to raid the chookhouse to satisfy his appetite. And we had to keep our quarters tidy, get ready for school without our mother’s assistance, prepare our own school lunches, and check to see that Carol had dressed herself properly, doing chores normally done by Pat.
    On top of that I was assigned an onerous duty: fetching golf balls that Campbell slogged from one end of the home paddock to the other, a little while after his breakfast. I was sent to the far end with a bucket, while he stood at the edge of the homestead garden in strange pants, gloves and cap, relaxing the muscles in his bum with a wiggle, as he glanced in my direction. Then he swung the stick he was holding in a great arc and a little white ball soon whistled overhead. The war had started. In-coming fire! I had to remain vigilant. As I picked up one ball to put in the bucket, another landed nearby. I realised my duty was not only to collect his golf balls but to be his pin as well.
    Towards the end of the shearing season Pat took me to the shearing shed, a shimmering corrugated iron building with adjacent pens packed with sheep. Inside was a cacophony of bleats, shouts, curses and machines, a melee of men in navy-blue singlets, flailing clippers attached to long levers, dragging terrified sheep, scooping up fleeces, casting wool across tables; the stench of lanolin, men’s sweat and diesel in my smarting nostrils. My heart raced. No schoolyard activity compared to this frenetic scene. Pat took the occasion to reveal that one of her father’s occupations, beside dairy farmer, carter and nightsoil-man, had been shearer. My grandfather, whom I called Da, but was yet to meet, gained some substance, grew in stature.
    Once the shearing was over, Pat, and so the rest of us, returned to our normal routines. I had made a few tentative friends amongst my classmates but outside school hours I rarely set eyes on them. I played on my own or with my sisters around the homestead. I observed Carol as she dressed the motionless old greyhound in doll’s clothes and improvised a fence around him with garden stakes. I encouraged a game she initiated of head-butting the orphaned lamb, Woollyofus, which was sprouting horns, until Pat discovered in horror what was happening and warned us with a sobering tale about how one of her brothers had once witnessed a bull confront a ram. While the bigger beast was stamping and snorting and tossing its head around, the ram had taken the initiative and charged. With a sickening crack it laid the bull out cold. I had seen a bull on a farm near Portland and had been totally intimidated by its massive stature. I stared at Woollyofus with a surge of respect. Pat gave me the authority to be in charge of Carol whenever she was near him.
    Carol was a cute kid. Next to my absent father she had the brightest blue eyes I’d ever seen and little ringlets in her hair, which Pat made with a wet comb and her fingers every morning. She seemed a bit dopey but that was probably because she was younger. I loved her smile, the way it gave her dimples, the way her eyes lit up. I started to feel very protective of her.
    Pat was aware of our isolation and whenever she had time to spare she did her best to amuse us. Now and then she put us in the back of the ute, armed us with a straw broom and drove out to one of the back paddocks where a large male emu roamed. Whenever a vehicle entered its territory it charged over and attacked. It would run at twenty miles an hour right alongside the ute and try to peck at us, which brought the straw broom into play.
    On some weekends, usually a Sunday afternoon, we were invited to the manager’s house for a lunch of roast lamb, slaughtered on the farm a couple of days earlier.
    I liked these afternoons because the manager and his wife always made an effort to entertain us with games and tricks. The one that impressed me the most was a sixpence spun on a needle. Before starting, the