Free Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville Page A

the stone-like timber began to char and fall away, and the loathed stumps began to smoulder, sending out urgent plumes of white smoke from their tops like a death cry.
    With so much timber, after the scarcity back Home an extravagant embarrassment of timber, you might have thought there would be joy in sawing and planing and chiselling, constructing a snug dwelling and a sufficiency of rustic furniture. But no, that wretched timber would not split straight: it twisted and warped in perverse ways, tearing ragged along the grain. Then it was so hard it blunted the saw, and sharpened immensely the tempersof those doing the sawing, so that hours passed filled with hatred for that clotted, obdurate wood.
    However, at last there was a hut of sorts, a hut like those we had housed a pig or two in, back Home: a hut all skewed and lean-to, with not a square corner anywhere, just great crude slabs of that loathsome timber stuck upright in the ground and roofed after a fashion with flattened-out slabs of bark. Our hut was like a tiny Stonehenge, built of such huge-hewn lumps, for nothing could be made small with such wood, nothing made fine, no two surfaces ever made to fit snugly together. The great fissures between the planks were filled with such clay as could be found, and I spent hours trying to smooth and beat the mud floor that was slimy when wet but became powdery dust when dry. In the first rains, the clay washed from the cracks and the bark roof let in water along every crack, so that a painstakingly flattened floor became a quagmire of thick mud full of the heel prints of exasperated feet.
    Then I laboured over the patch of earth that was starting to appear, like a bright spot on tarnished brass, from the wilderness. Each day I heaved at the soil with my pick, thrust at it with a crowbar, and at last with a shovel when the soil was loosened. Such quantities of stones emerged from the soil that I heaped them in long rows, picturing a wall of stones as we had had at Home between the fields. How tame and easy all that seemed now, what mad luxury it seemed to have a plain bit of earth to dig, and four walls and a roof, and a door that was more than a flap of wood hanging from some bits of leather! We will have a wall here, I pictured, and wasted a morning with those stones, but there was some trick to it that I had never learned, having had all my walls built for me long before I was born, before evenmy mother and father and their mothers and fathers had been born. Some trick there was to keeping the stones clinging to each other, some trick of wedging and geometry against gravity: some trick I did not know, and could not learn now, and all my walls came to nothing more than the long heaps of obstinate rocks that had been their beginnings.
    As I dug I teased myself with imagining the cornucopia that would pour out of this sandy grey soil. I sweated and panted, and the moisture gushed into my mouth, thinking of the sweet mealiness of tiny pale potatoes, brought up fresh-faced and surprised out of the earth and popped into the pot, of the succulence of young cabbage heaped steaming on a plate, of the tang of an onion eaten in the hand with a great slab of good crusty bread. Oh, the feasts I had in my imagination! And meanwhile it was peas and weevilly flour, the odd bit of salt pork, and now and again a bit of possum that was foolish enough to fall into the snare.
    Seed was the most precious commodity. There were many notions shared with us by the old hands, of preserving it in borax from the ants, of waxing the necks of jars, of tying up the bag with Condy’s crystals: of keeping many small stores of it, rather than one large one: even of sleeping with one’s arm around it, so precious was that seed. Bought so dearly and hoarded with such care, checked every day against damp and the predations of insects and mice and who knew what other alien seed-snatchers this violent land might harbour: that seed was hope. Its successful