Free The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

nothing happens. Each year as the season for rain approaches, people begin to look hopefully up at the sky. It mocks them with a few showers, barely enough to lay the dust. That is all.
    It takes a long time for a carefully managed grazing property to decline, but three years without rain will do it. Once the disaster begins it unfolds swiftly. So it was with us.
    My parents, buoyed up by the good year of 1939, the results of that good year returned in the 1940 wool sales, the new water supply, and the new woolshed, remained hopeful for a long time.By 1942, it was apparent that the drought could be serious and their levels of anxiety began to climb. I was conscious of those anxieties in a variety of ways. That year, 1942, my eighth, was my first one of correspondence school. There was no governess, nor was there any pretense that I would keep a daily school schedule. On Friday afternoons, from 2:00 p.m. until I finished (usually around 4:30 p.m.), I did my week’s school. My mother made it a pleasant occasion for me by saying, “Today, you don’t have to work out of doors. You can sit in the shade [or if it was winter, in the sun] on the veranda, have your own pot of tea, and do your schoolwork.” Thus I was introduced to study as a leisure activity, a gift beyond price. When I was close to finishing, my mother would arrive to glance quickly over the work. Then she questioned me closely about the state of each paddock, what my father had said about it when we were there last, and then, ever so discreetly, she would lead me to talk about how he had seemed as we worked together that week. I needed no instruction not to mention these conversations. I knew why she was anxious.
    My father and I would set out to work on horseback as usual, but instead of our customary cheerful and wide-ranging conversations he would be silent. As we looked at sheep, or tried to assess the pasture left in a particular paddock, he would swear softly, looking over the fence to a neighbor’s property, already eaten out and beginning to blow sand. Each time he said, “If it doesn’t rain, it will bury this feed in a few weeks.” It was true and I could think of nothing consoling to say.
    His usual high spirits declined with the state of the land, until the terrible day when many of our own sheep were lost because of a sudden cold rain and wind when they had too little food in their stomachs. Although my mother produced her usual ample meals, he began to lose weight his bony frame could ill afford. He lost his wonderful calm, and deliberation in planning, and would be excited by the slightest sign of trouble. A few years ago, a bore losing water flow would have meant there was a problem with the pump, requiring some days’ labor to repair it. Now he wouldinstantly worry about whether the water supply was running dry. We would fall to work on raising the pump and assessing the problem as though disaster were at hand.
    My mother was impatient with this excitability and in my father’s presence, would try to deflate it. But I knew from her questions that she too was worried. When the work to be done on the run didn’t need two people, my father would say, “Stay home and help your mother, she needs help in the house.” My mother would let him set out for the stables or the garage and then say to me, “I don’t need help. Run quickly and go with your father. See if you can make him laugh.” So I would set out, and begin to play the child I no longer was. I would think up nonsense rhymes, ask crazy questions, demand to be told stories, invent some of my own to recount. Sometimes it would have the desired effect, but it was hard to distract a man from the daily deterioration of our land and flocks. Every time we stopped to look at the carcass of a dead sheep and dismounted to find out why it had died, it became more difficult to play my role.
    My brothers would return home from boarding school to a household consumed with anxiety. Coming, as