Free The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway Page B

February (when only the withers of the sheep were shorn to limit fly infestation in hot weather) and shearing in early June. Crutching time in 1943 was particularly worrisome. It was a fearfully hot summer. The sheep were poorly nourished and the last season’s lambs weak. They needed to be moved slowly, held in paddocks close to the sheepyards, crutched quickly, and returned to their sparse pastures before heat exhaustion took its toll. In addition, to speed the whole process, someone needed to be at the woolshed, counting each shearer’s tally of sheep, and pushing the supply of animals into the shed, so that not a moment was lost. It was always an exhausting business, because speed required constant running about in the 100 degree weather. This year, it was clear that my father found it hard to bear the pace.
    At home in the evening, I found my mother feeling his pulse, administering brandy, and urging him to lie down. The heat and anxiety had combined to revive the irregular heartbeat that had been one of the factors occasioning his discharge from the army in 1917. My mother was at her best caring for the sick. She radiated calm. The errant pulse was checked regularly and diagnosed as palpitations, but not a serious arrhythmia.
    The next day, we went a little more slowly at the work in the yards, advised by my mother that we could still afford to keep the team an extra day or two, or lose a few sheep, provided that my father was in sound health. I now found myself volunteering for jobs I was not quite sure I could do, in order to be sure that he had more time to rest. The next afternoon, after the close of work at the shed, there was a lot of riding still to be done. “These sheep need to go to Rigby’s, that mob to Denny’s,” my father began, about to give me an assignment to return sheep to their paddocks. “I can do both,” I said rashly, having never moved so many sheep on my own. “Mind you, move them slowly, and don’t let them mix with the rams. Take the dogs, and don’t open the gate until you have the dogs holding them at the fence.” He had forgotten that I couldn’t remount easily, and that the dogs didn’t work very well for me. I was half pleased at completing the two assignments, half astonished that anyone had left me to handle them alone. Too much is being asked of me, I thought privately, forgetting that it was I who had volunteered. There was no getting around that the work was there and had to be done, and so I fell early into a role it took me many years to escape, the person in the family who would rise to the occasion, no matter the size of the task.
    Shortly afterwards, the first terrible dust storm arrived boiling out of the central Australian desert. One sweltering late afternoon in March, I walked out to collect wood for the stove. Glancing toward the west, I saw a terrifying sight. A vast boiling cloud was mounting in the sky, black and sulfurous yellow at the heart, varying shades of ocher red at the edges. Where I stood, the air was utterly still, but the writhing cloud was approaching silently and with great speed. Suddenly I noticed that there were no birds to be seen or heard. All had taken shelter. I called my mother. We watched helplessly. Always one for action, she turned swiftly, went indoors, and began to close windows. Outside, I collected the buckets, rakes, shovels, and other implements that could blow away or smash a window if hurled against one by theboiling wind. Within the hour, my father arrived home. He and my mother sat on the back step, not in their usual restful contemplation, but silenced instead by dread.
    A dust storm usually lasts days, blotting out the sun, launching banshee winds day and night. It is dangerous to stray far from shelter, because the sand and grit lodge in one’s eyes, and a visibility often reduced to a few feet can make one completely disoriented. Animals which become exhausted and lie down are often sanded over and smothered. There is