Pathfinder, 'Kriegie' and Gumboot Governor by Sir James Rowland

Author:Sir James Rowland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922387400
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

20.

Back to Paul’s

Idug out my old textbooks and notes for the subjects I’d failed in 1941, second-year Pure Mathematics and Physics II. They might as well have been music or Sanskrit for all I could recognise of them.

My sister Eliza kindly let me stay in her house at Pymble, and I found a much-needed coach, a Hungarian-Jewish teacher who had fled to Australia at the war’s beginning, to whom I went two evenings a week. It was a grind, and I fear I must have tried the patience of the poor man considerably. Yet it was wonderful to be home again, in the clear, clean air, and to smell the bush scents and hear the peaceful summer drumming of the cicadas and go out in the surf again and swoop down the crest of a wave.

At times I felt completely lost, and quite unsure if I could cut the mustard at university. ‘Morunda’ was still there, still run by Alf Chaffey, with my parents spending a good deal of their time there, but my father, no longer young, was not at all sure that he wanted to go back to the hard physical work of being a full-time grazier again. My parents still kept the flat at Bar Beach in Newcastle, where they had spent the last six years, and where they were thoroughly dug in and happy, with many friends and a respected place in the local society. Indeed, Newcastle had provided the first good break from the grindstone that either of them had had since they first took up ‘Morunda’, though now with rising wool prices at least it could provide a reasonable living. I could have gone back to the bush, as John was established in his diplomatic career and was not going to want ‘Morunda’. But did I want to?

I had not really been of much use on the land. I did not take naturally to horses, which were still the main means of transport and provided the power by which mustering and fencing and ploughing and harrowing and dam-cleaning and all the other chores of the land were done. While I loved the moving vista of cloud-shadowed mountains and granite boulders and the summer gold of the rolling paddocks and silver-grey of the grass in winter and the familiar hills and ravines of my childhood, I was not attracted to working with sheep, which, along with turkeys, must be the most stupid of God’s creatures. I did not enjoy the primeval aspects of a grazier’s life in the bush, the killing for meat and the subsequent butchering, the shooting of kangaroos to keep their numbers within reasonable bounds, the manhandling of cattle and sheep, the castration of unwanted or unsuitable young males, the treating of flyblown sheep with tar and a pair of hand shears, dealing with animals at both ends of their bodies and both ends of their lives. Unlike my Wright cousins, great bushmen all, I had no real yen for galloping through

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