1929
The milking sheds were lit by a hurricane lamp swung from a rafter. They were constructed of slab uprights, with a roof of shingle. Strips of bark had been nailed down the joints of the slabs, but these had long since split to the shrinking of the timber, so that the walls were now a mosaic of draughty chinks. The floor was of slabs, also. These, settling into the earth, had become uneven and insecure. The slightest pressure fetched a spew of vile slime from the joins. The stench of it mingled with the reek of hot dung, and the stickily-sweet aroma of the spilling milk.
The bails gave on to a yard that was a morass of frozen filth, through which the cattle stamped almost to the hocks. Their udders were slimed with the stuff when they came into the stalls. It had to be washed off, and the udder dried, before milking could be attempted. A number had cracked teats. Blood from these stained the first milk . . .
The cows were a lean, mongrelly breed, with the rough hides that flaunt a starvation diet. Even in the flush of their calving they gave but little milk; and this of poor account. Their yield was reduced now to a mere winter’s pittance. The whole herd of fifteen barely filled the twelve and a half gallon can that went each morning to the cheese factory at Guruwa.
Jasper milked with his head burrowed into a shaggy flank and his knees trembling to the weight of a filling bucket. His feet were blocks of ice . . . beyond reach of their former agony of irritation; or, indeed, of sensation of any kind. The hot milk soothed his hands. For the time his chilblains were forgotten. He would remember them only when anointing a sore teat with petroleum jelly, taken from a tin at the head of the bail. He would anoint his fingers at the same time. The milk and the grease and the blood formed a scum on his hands, and dribbled down the side of the bucket . . .
In the adjoining bail his uncle was rising to empty his own bucket into the strainer set in the neck of the can. In addition to the ordinary fine-wire mesh, there were three or four thicknesses of cheese-cloth folded into the strainer. In spite of this precaution a good deal of dirt found its way into the can, along with the milk. Mr. Carbury, the factory manager, frequently complained of this. He had, indeed, not long since threatened to take no more milk from Musk Ridge, unless it was better strained. The threat had roused Hector Martin to a blasphemous fury. He had, notwithstanding, added an extra fold to the cheese-cloth. He let it be known that Carbury had – in the vernacular – “got him well set”. Jasper, for all his years, was unimpressed. He knew that Carbury was the last man to make unfair discrimination. The milk from Musk Ridge was more than ordinarily dirty. It was the fault of the milking yards. But, in that, most small off-road farms were alike.
Hector Martin’s milking stool had only a single leg. As is the fashion in some parts of Gippsland, the stool was strapped to his hindparts; so that as he walked to and fro one had the absurd impression that he wore a tail. The stool leg stuck out straightly. He had need only to assume a sitting posture, and the act was actually accomplished. In most so contrived, perhaps the quaintness of it would alone have attracted an unsophisticated observer; in the case of Hector Martin, the borrowed appendage became somehow part and parcel of his curiously simian proportions. His thinness was extraordinary; and he was tall and stooping, with overlong limbs. He wore no hat – seeming to be impervious to the cold, and his high head proclaimed itself bald and shining, except for a ragged circle of mouse-coloured hair. From full temples his face narrowed to a pointed, pepper-and-salt beard. His eyes were black, and deeply sunken; his nose fleshy and congested; his mouth a straight slit. His was the face of an intellectual marred by self-treason; a swift, sharp, clever face having in it a quality as of clean water newly dirtied. For the present, in the stress of hidden thought, this pollution was abominably plain to see.
‘The Morning’s Milking’ in Patrick Morgan (ed.), Shadow and Shine: an Anthology
of Gippsland Literature, Centre for Gippsland Studies, Churchill, Victoria, 1988