The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

through the household chores to work for three or four hours after lunch in her garden. The soil was fertile, there was ample fertilizer from the horses, cattle, and sheep, and the blessed water proved to contain only a little limestone which most plants flourished on. My father built a high windbreak, made of cane grass which grew on the property, to shield her seedlings from the hot winds. Inside it she produced a vision of paradise fit for a sultan’s courtyard. In front of the house were perennial beds, lining the verandas. Two perfectly balanced rectangles of green lawn were laid out, framed by long, thin rectangular beds for annuals. To the south of the house was the vegetable garden, and to the north the citrus orchard. The northern side of the cane windbreak became a trellis for grapes, and a little to the northwest was the potato bed.
    She had a fine sense of color, and a passion for scented flowers. Soon I would drift off to sleep in the evening bathed in the perfume of stocks, wallflowers, and heliotrope in summer, the crisp aroma of chrysanthemums in autumn. A whole bed was given over to Parma violets, and great fistfuls of them would sit in the middle of the round table on which we dined in summer on the southern screened veranda.
    The fruits and vegetables were as marvelous to a child raised on canned vegetables and dried apples. The scent of orange and lemon trees, the taste of fat green grapes, and the discovery of salads were marking points of that first year of water.
    Because it was clear that I was educating myself through reading everything within reach—a topsy-turvy mixture of children’s books, my mother’s books on current affairs, war correspondents’ accounts of the war, my father’s books on stock breeding—my parents decided not to bother with elementary school by correspondence for me the year my brothers left for boarding school. Instead, I became my father’s station hand. He needed help with mustering sheep, something which needed two people on horseback to accomplish easily. I rode out with him to check the state of fences, always in need of careful attention if bloodlines were to be kept clear. We went together to clean watering troughs, carry out the maintenance of windmills, trim and dress the fly-infested spots which developed around the crutch of sheep where flies would lay eggs in the hot summer months. Dressing fly-blown sheep was hard, hot work because one had to round up the particular flock, get the sheepdogs to hold them, and then dive suddenly into the herd to tackle the one animal whose fleece needed attention. An agile child was better at doing the diving than an adult, and in time I learned to do a kind of flying tackle which would hold the animal, usually heavier than I was myself, until my father arrived with the hand shears and the disinfectant.
    Much of the work with sheep involved riding slowly behind them while moving them from one paddock to another, travelingat a pace which was a comfortable walk for the animals. Often we dismounted and strolled along, horse’s reins looped over an arm. Occasionally something might startle the sheep, requiring my father to shout commands to the dogs, but otherwise it was not demanding work, and it was a perfect setting for extended conversation. Why did God allow the crows to pick out the eyes of newborn lambs, I asked, as we passed a bloody carcass. My father never treated such questions as idle chatter, but tried seriously to answer. He didn’t know, he replied. It was a puzzle. The world seemed set up so that the strong preyed on the weak and innocent. I would ask endless questions about the weather, the vegetation, the transmission of characteristics through several generations of sheep. How to breed to eliminate that defect, or promote this desirable characteristic. When the lambs were a year old, we would bring the sheep into the nearest sheepyards, or make a temporary one, so that we could cull the flocks, selecting the