Free Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville

you a small plot of sandy land covered with gum trees and small prickly shrubs, down where the explorers had enthused over the land they had subdued to trigonometry. What was neat on their maps, and wondrously promising, was to the naked eye somewhat less enticing. Tall pale stands of straight gums grew like gigantic weeds, spearing up and then branching into untidy bunches of leaves, and bushes of all kinds made it impossible to stroll as they had somehow implied they had. But morning sunlight between those trees was soft: birds trilled and whistled in a secretive excited way, and those odd flat leaves caressed each other against sky as clean as a china plate.
    I grew to love those gums in the mornings: I loved the sinuous massive way their trunks rose up into the blue, and the way the bark hung off them in long feathery strips, exposing the solid white skin beneath. On those mornings when the smoke fromthe breakfast fire hung blue in the air, I walked among them and touched each trunk to feel its cool flesh.
    But later in the day I loathed them, when I had to chop at the hard dense wood that was as dry and unyielding as stone, and as heavy. Horizontal, those slender trunks were hateful, bleeding brown sap and resisting every effort with crowbars, wedges and saws. At night I could feel muscles twitching in legs and arms, and lay dreaming of endless heaving effort, levering a log along the ground to be laid across another, and even in my dreams I clenched my mouth with effort, braced my shoulders and back, and felt pain streak up my legs from thrusting too hard against that unforgiving wood.
    The old hands here had devised a few ways of cheating the bush and those gums of a few gallons of the sweat they wanted to extract from us. Save a third of your chopping, one whiskery old fellow directed as he passed along the track to his own bit of ground. You chop a little ways through the trees in a row, see, then when you fell the one on the end, down they all come tumbling like ninepins, you mark my words. Well, it sounded good as he said it, sitting behind his horse. It sounded grand, and simple, and elegantly labor-saving, but those foul gums foiled such ingenuity by growing just too far apart, and branching out wildly so there was no ninepin-like trunk to come cracking down, and they twisted and leaped as they fell so that they missed each other, laughing, it seemed, and each one still had to be hacked right through.
    That left the stumps. Those stumps! They were so close together it would never be possible for a plough to make any kind of furrow around them. They lingered and haunted, tiresome powerful roots gripping yards of soil and rock in a death vice it was impossible to loosen. There were endless hot afternoons of sweatand blisters and flies coming to suck at sweat dripping off my face into the earth, as I battled with the blind strength of those roots. Like a furious mole, becoming more clumsy in fatigue and exasperation, I chopped and gouged at the earth around the dead roots, chipped and grubbed, scratching out earth and stones in a ring around the stump, always feeling the pick strike yet another branch of root whenever there seemed a straight go at a bit of earth. All this tedious scrabbling went on until at last the stump perched in a hole with its roots branching out from it into the ground.
    The fires I lit later around those stumps were a cruel satisfaction: I stood watching the flames of the twigs lick out and blacken that pale dead flesh, dry now: but even in death, and even when dry, the wood resisted and quenched almost any amount of fire. I was willing to think I had not waited long enough for the wood to dry, or that I had not the knack of lighting the right kind of fire, or even that these particular trees were of a hitherto unknown variety, completely impervious to flame. Fury mounted in me as I heaped and heaped dry sticks until, reluctantly, without any satisfying flare and blaze, but smokily, sullenly,