Great Aunt Beulah had an S.T. Gill lithograph on her wall: ‘Labourers washing sheep, Isonville head station, 1847’. The Isons, their habits of thought and action, were founded on wool. An entry in Anna’s baby book: Funny Sayings. As I was watching Grandpa butcher a hogget for the coolstore I said ‘You can’t cut my legs off and throw them away, I want to wear them.’ One afternoon in late May, Grandfather Ison rattled back from the end paddock with a pair of three-day-old lambs in the tray of the Land Rover, the offspring of a first-time mother confounded by triplets. The children helped him to untie the twine that bound their spindly forefeet and carry them into the laundry. Where Grandfather Ison saw years of profit saved from foxes and icy winds, Anna saw painfully concave bellies, tiny bowed spines, ears like flaps of pink-tinged white velvet, mucousy nostrils, a viscous brown plug stopping each sorry anus. She named the lambs Cynthia and Bert. The children fed them heated milk from a bottle twice a day, panting, laughing, calling out involuntarily at the sensation of powerful small mouths tugging on the teats. The ropy little tails wiggled ecstatically; a milky froth gathered at each set of tiny jaws. Anna gave her middle finger to Cynthia. The tug was there, certainly enough, and it was powerful. Each lamb wore a ribbed nap of greasy white wool. Anna always washed her hands each time she fed the lambs. Cynthia and Bert were released into the yard a few days later and back with the ewes at the beginning of August. For about a year after that, the children were able to identify them in the mob, and Cynthia and Bert half approached or acknowledged them out of habit, but time, a new season and a coat grown and shorn and grown again soon made them forget. When Anna was twelve she woke up screaming from a dream of slathering, bloodied lips. Earlier in the week a knotted old bushman had come to help her father tail the first mob of lambs he’d produced on the six-forty acres, and Anna had seen the man draw the testicles from the lopped scrotum of the male lambs with his teeth. She’d watched, fascinated, as he neatly dipped his head, snapped his teeth on each pale nude bulb, jerked back, spat. Hugo and her father were in the pen, catching the lambs one by one, proffering the crotches on a stained wooden rail. Hugo was small, but he wanted to feel useful. He closed his eyes and turned his head as the blades trimmed and sliced the flesh, uttering a high, nervous hum and whistle that calmed no creature there in that gory corner of the sheepyards. The blood: gouts of it on the old bushman’s shirtfront, flecked in his whiskers. It sprayed finely from every tail stump, masking Hugo’s face. Anna stood far behind the old man’s shoulder and when her father noticed her watching he gave a quick jerk-frown of his head as if to say: Lovey, you shouldn’t be seeing this. Later he said: The last of the oldtime ways. For three years Anna and Lockie made love on a woollen blanket. It was tartan. They had nowhere else to go, only a sagging bench seat behind a worn steering wheel and a cluttered glove box that refused to stay shut. The blanket protected them from dust and erupting seat springs. Anna identified another odour in Lockie’s composition of odours: he smelt of wool, of the lanoline in wool. He worked the sheds of the district and the wool kept his hands soft, even as bale hooks, blades, rough-weld holding pens and jute bales abraded the skin. One Sunday afternoon, returning flushed from their lovemaking on a back road behind the Razorback, Anna and Lockie ploughed into a poddy lamb that his brothers and sisters were rearing. Lockie wailed. He braked. The tyres skated in the red dirt. Anna saw him scramble for the door handle, and when she found him a moment later he was on his knees, sobbing wretchedly: I didn’t mean it. Don’t die, I didn’t mean it. She knelt with him. The lamb bleated, struggling under their probing fingers. I’ve broken its back. No you haven’t—only its leg. They severed the leg where the splintered bone had torn through the flesh beneath the centre joint, then sewed a flap over the wound with stiff black cotton. Lockie splashed antiseptic over the stump and lifted the lamb to its feet. They watched it totter away, clearly puzzled, shaking the shortened limb as though it were whole and somehow offensive, maybe mired in wire or mud. Behind them Lockie’s dog bellied closer, snapped the amputated leg in its jaws, crept away. I wanted to bury that, Lockie said. Anna had noticed, but kept to herself, that the lamb carried the earmark of Showalter Park. So Lockie was a bandit in the night, not only a lover creeping to her window. She smiled to herself. The Kellys were entitled. They had shot and burnt and buried two hundred sheep during the drought and needed to build up their flock again. And here’s another contradiction, Anna would say, in her arguments with her father. You’re anti-communist yet you don’t mind selling your wool to Russia or China. Your lot would sell it to North Vietnam if there was a buck in it. There were starved sheep grazing on the tussocky banks of the sunken road the day that Anna returned from seeing Chester Flood. She could feel him leaking out of her. Her breasts tingled with the memory of his hands; his sheepskin hearth rug still cushioned her undulating hips and spine. One by one the old family properties are being broken up or sold to agricultural companies. The decline and fall of the Showalters has been the most spectacular in the district. Wesley Showalter borrowed sixteen million dollars from the banks to develop his sperm-bank program, and now the only sheep on the property are the embryos and straws of semen sitting frozen in tanks of liquid nitrogen. Many of the locals had subscribed, all had lost their money, and if they were to meet the Showalters face to face now, some would spit on the ground. Notwithstanding that, the 150th Jubilee Committee has obtained a handspan of Pandowie Showalter Lustre 8’s fleece for the time capsule. Anna jokes: Maybe they should include a foreclosure notice as well. There is not much money for Christmas presents this year, but Anna has scraped together the cash to buy Rebecca and Meg a wool underlay for their bed. The significance of this gift, and others like it in the years to come, will lie in Rebecca’s realisation that her mother has let her lead her life without remark or interference—acceptance, indeed, and support. When she is old, a permanent chill in her bones, Anna will wear wool next to her skin, wool on top. But she’ll shop for youthful styles, and the girls in the North Adelaide house will exclaim admiringly over her. Mutton dressed as lamb, according to Anna.