discards which would be sent for immediate sale or used for our own food.
I did reasonably well as a station hand while in sight of my father. He could shout directions, or notice that I was having trouble getting the dogs to work for me and arrive quickly to solve the problem. I didn’t always do so well when we worked in the large paddocks, twelve or fifteen thousand acres in size, where we would separate, one going clockwise, one counterclockwise, turning the sheep into the middle, to be gathered into one flock and moved as a whole to a new spot. I was a long-legged seven-year-old, but not quite tall enough to remount my horse if I got off to kick some lazy sheep into motion, or to investigate a sick or lame one. Then there would be no getting back on till the next fence, or the rare occasional stump. At first I was not quite secure enough in ego to cope with the space, the silence, and the brooding sky. Occasionally I would find myself crying, half in vexation at my small size and the pigheadedness of sheep, half for the reassurance of a sound. By the family’s code it was shameful to weep, and I was supposed to be too grown-upfor such babyish behavior. Once the wind carried the sound to my father on the other side of the paddock. By the time we were reunited, I had reached a fence, climbed on my horse, and become secure again by seeing him in the distance. “I thought I heard someone crying,” he observed to me as we met. I looked him in the eye. “I didn’t,” I said. There he let the matter rest.
The sheepdogs were always a trial to me. They were trained to respond to a series of calls. Their trainers were station hands and drovers whose calls were usually poetic, blasphemous, and picturesquely profane. I would try to make my voice deep, and sound as though I really meant to flay them alive when I got home if they didn’t go behind or get around or whatever other command was needed, but I didn’t believe it and neither did they. My father would laugh at me shouting to the black kelpie whose pink tongue and nose I loved, “You black bastard, I’ll flay the hide off you if you don’t go around.” “You don’t sound as if you mean it,” he said. “Why not just try whistling, that’s easier for you to do.” He tried to teach me the series of whistles used to command sheepdogs. I did better at that, but they would never obey me perfectly, as they did my father.
As we did our day’s work, theological questions kept cropping up. “Isn’t it wrong to kill?” I would ask, as we drove home with a fat young sheep, feet tied together, who would be slaughtered when we arrived at the wooden block near the dog kennels used for such purposes. I always felt a sneaking fellow feeling for the creature as its neck was slit and its blood ebbed away to be drunk voraciously by the dogs. Skinning a sheep was a lengthy process, so there was plenty of time to explore the question. God made the creatures of the earth for man’s use, my father responded. It was wrong to kill needlessly for sport, the way some people hunted kangaroos, but it was moral to kill what we needed to eat. Besides, he said, what would happen to the sheep if we never culled them. Their wool would deteriorate, their body types grow weaker, and they would all starve because we couldn’t feed them all and all their natural increase. “Did you kill peopleduring the war?” I would ask, meaning the 1914–1918 War. “Yes,” he would respond. Killing in self-defense was moral also, and the war had been a generalized version of that situation. But no war was ever really just because of the pain and suffering inflicted not only on soldiers, but on civilians. We should work for a world where there were other ways of settling conflicts. It was wrong for so many generations of young men to be killed, as had happened in 1914–1918, and was happening now. He prayed the war would be over before Bob was old enough to go.
After the water supply was provided
I did reasonably well as a station hand while in sight of my father. He could shout directions, or notice that I was having trouble getting the dogs to work for me and arrive quickly to solve the problem. I didn’t always do so well when we worked in the large paddocks, twelve or fifteen thousand acres in size, where we would separate, one going clockwise, one counterclockwise, turning the sheep into the middle, to be gathered into one flock and moved as a whole to a new spot. I was a long-legged seven-year-old, but not quite tall enough to remount my horse if I got off to kick some lazy sheep into motion, or to investigate a sick or lame one. Then there would be no getting back on till the next fence, or the rare occasional stump. At first I was not quite secure enough in ego to cope with the space, the silence, and the brooding sky. Occasionally I would find myself crying, half in vexation at my small size and the pigheadedness of sheep, half for the reassurance of a sound. By the family’s code it was shameful to weep, and I was supposed to be too grown-upfor such babyish behavior. Once the wind carried the sound to my father on the other side of the paddock. By the time we were reunited, I had reached a fence, climbed on my horse, and become secure again by seeing him in the distance. “I thought I heard someone crying,” he observed to me as we met. I looked him in the eye. “I didn’t,” I said. There he let the matter rest.
The sheepdogs were always a trial to me. They were trained to respond to a series of calls. Their trainers were station hands and drovers whose calls were usually poetic, blasphemous, and picturesquely profane. I would try to make my voice deep, and sound as though I really meant to flay them alive when I got home if they didn’t go behind or get around or whatever other command was needed, but I didn’t believe it and neither did they. My father would laugh at me shouting to the black kelpie whose pink tongue and nose I loved, “You black bastard, I’ll flay the hide off you if you don’t go around.” “You don’t sound as if you mean it,” he said. “Why not just try whistling, that’s easier for you to do.” He tried to teach me the series of whistles used to command sheepdogs. I did better at that, but they would never obey me perfectly, as they did my father.
As we did our day’s work, theological questions kept cropping up. “Isn’t it wrong to kill?” I would ask, as we drove home with a fat young sheep, feet tied together, who would be slaughtered when we arrived at the wooden block near the dog kennels used for such purposes. I always felt a sneaking fellow feeling for the creature as its neck was slit and its blood ebbed away to be drunk voraciously by the dogs. Skinning a sheep was a lengthy process, so there was plenty of time to explore the question. God made the creatures of the earth for man’s use, my father responded. It was wrong to kill needlessly for sport, the way some people hunted kangaroos, but it was moral to kill what we needed to eat. Besides, he said, what would happen to the sheep if we never culled them. Their wool would deteriorate, their body types grow weaker, and they would all starve because we couldn’t feed them all and all their natural increase. “Did you kill peopleduring the war?” I would ask, meaning the 1914–1918 War. “Yes,” he would respond. Killing in self-defense was moral also, and the war had been a generalized version of that situation. But no war was ever really just because of the pain and suffering inflicted not only on soldiers, but on civilians. We should work for a world where there were other ways of settling conflicts. It was wrong for so many generations of young men to be killed, as had happened in 1914–1918, and was happening now. He prayed the war would be over before Bob was old enough to go.
After the water supply was provided
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