1

At the beginning of the summer Sim and Jane left Melbourne for Boongah. The station house was occupied by the manager, with whom it was arranged that Sim and Jane should board.

Pennefather, the manager, a square, brown, bearded man of forty, was an ex-schoolmaster who had come to Victoria during the gold-rush. He had more regard for hard work than for humour. He did not hesitate to rebuke any of his five children, nor his wife, if necessary, at meal-times, and he was indifferent to any discomfort which he might create in so doing. It was not long before he included Sim in implied, if not definite, rebuke. This was intolerable to Jane. She was experiencing, for her, a new phase of Australian life. Woodridge had been run with all the amenities of an English house. It was bad enough to have to eat the coarse meals of mutton and vegetables which were served to the manager’s family without having to endure his manners.

While Sim was out riding she shut herself in her hot sitting-room at the end of the long verandah and sewed for the baby which she was expecting in the winter. It was almost impossible to keep this room cool. The sun beat mercilessly on the iron roof and thin wooden walls. She kept the blinds drawn in a vain attempt to exclude the heat and the flies. All day she sat there in the half-light, suffocating and in aching loneliness. She had made her rooms prettier than the rest of the house, and Mrs. Pennefather, envious and harassed with the discomfort of her life and the care of her children, had repelled Jane’s friendly advances.

At midday she went along the verandah to the dining-room for her dinner. On every side the brown plains stretched to the horizon. From the blazing expanse of blue the hot white sun flooded the world, and etched sharp purple shadows beneath the scanty gums, and every shed, fence, and piece of wood which caught its rays. The dining-room was hot, large, light, and full of flies. The children did their lessons there in the mornings and their books would be swept off the table on to chairs or the floor while the table was laid. The cloth, clean at Sunday dinner, steadily progressed to a Saturday night state of stain. The table appointments were only useful, and there was no attempt at adornment.

When she first arrived Jane had filled a vase with gum-blossom and put it on the dinner table. Mrs. Pennefather had looked at it as if pleased, but later, stirred to resentment by Jane’s elegance and ineffectuality, had said gruffly that she had ‘no time for that sort of thing.’

Before dinner the windows were opened, and the whole family, armed with table napkins which they waved above their heads, walked in formation up the room and drove out the mass of flies. By the time they sat down to dinner there were generally not more than two or three dozen left to settle on the unpolished glasses and the food.

There was a drought that summer and a gloom was cast over the station by the death, for want of water, of some of the cattle. Here and there heaps of their carcases lay rotting in the sun. Pennefather became more dour. Sim’s relations with him did not improve.

Pennefather believed that the best way to gain experience was by working up from the bottom. He had done so himself and tried to make Sim do the same. He set him unpleasant tasks, one of which was plucking the wool off dead and decaying sheep. Sim ignored the instruction. Pennefather found him practising jumps over a slip-rail.

‘I thought I told you to join those men with the dead sheep,’ he said.

‘You did,’ said Sim.

‘Well?’

The two men sat on their glistening sweating horses, which whisked at the flies with their tails. Sim looked at Pennefather, who was making a last determined effort to retain mastery of the situation. Pennefather had great faith in the power of a steady commanding gaze. He had been accustomed to use it effectively on his scholars. His eyes were wide with a not altogether easy effrontery. Sim’s were blue, intent, derisive. Sim was regarding Pennefather objectively as a human specimen. To do so was a habit he had acquired at Cambridge, a method of self-defence. Pennefather, consciously striving to command, suddenly found himself shrivelled in this duel of glances.

Sim grinned maliciously, and once more put his horse at the slip-rail. He came home, still grinning, and told Jane of the incident, but she was not amused. She thought it monstrous of Pennefather even to suggest that Sim should pluck the sheep.

‘I wish we could leave this horrid place,’ she said, and began to cry. Her distress was caused not only by the discomfort of the life but by a sourness developing in Sim. He had not sufficient to occupy his mind, and amused himself by a kind of vivisection of every one on the station. He even had names for each of the children, and predicted separate revolting fates for them.

Now, however, he softened.

‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said. ‘Once there was a man shut up in a room for forty years; then he opened the door and walked out.’

‘It’s a silly story,’ said Jane.

‘It isn’t. We’re going to walk out.’

That was the end of Sim’s and Jane’s definitely colonial experience.