Educating Alice by Alice Greenup

Author:Alice Greenup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

I needed to regain my independence, my sense of self; to have something more in my world than Rick. Getting busy was the best way to silence the genie and pack her menacing doubts away. The ‘to do’ list was straightforward: I needed to get a job.

My choice to work baffled Gaffer – or more accurately, it offended him – and having already crossed that barrier of telling me what he thought of me, he was not about to retreat.

‘What are you doing, getting a job? You already have one! At home, looking after Rick and entertaining bull clients. If you did that properly, you wouldn’t need to get a job.’

I was dumbfounded – I’d been told not to get a job. This went against every fibre of my being – against every universal law that I held and still hold dear, not to mention against my razor-sharp need to be independent and self-reliant. I was hardly going to rely on Rick’s pay packet or the company cheque book to provide me with soft furnishings or a new dress. I’d heard the family mantra too many times: ‘Buy the bull first and the carpet comes later.’ Rick’s Nana, Gaffer’s wife, had said it in the fifties and it was as legendary as she was.

Anyway, I wanted to work. I wanted to learn. I wanted to find my purpose, my place in this new land I intended to make my home. Correction: I needed to. Surely Rick can make his own lunch, I guiltily contemplated. Would I really be such a bad wife if he didn’t have freshly baked lamingtons, still moist from their dunking in hot chocolate and lightly tossed in desiccated coconut, waiting to greet him at smoko? I tried to grasp the lifelong implications of making Rick endure such neglect and the possibility that I might occasionally resort to the heinous crime of buying ready-made baked goods.

Grahame and Peggy actually seemed relieved that I’d chosen to get a job; it meant one fewer mouth for the business to feed. They knew times had changed. The persevering drought, increased costs and reduced prices for cattle were at the root of this change. By the mid-nineties, extra off-farm income was needed to underpin many farms across Queensland and put food on the table, while the farms that produced the food that is trucked into the cities day after day often ran at a loss, devouring precious equity, eroding livelihoods and straining relationships.

My options for work were not abundant. Resolved to put the long-distance aspect of our relationship behind us, I hoped to get something close to Cardowan in Kingaroy, fifty kilometres to the north-east. Kingaroy is a large town by country standards, with 10,000 people in the encompassing shire. I was prepared to do anything, but my scorching desire was to use my degree in agriculture, ideally in the beef industry. However, I knew beef jobs in this district were as rare as a bull with tits, so I would gratefully do anything agriculture-related.

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