Hello from the Gillespies Read Online Free PDF Page A

now it’s happening again. Robbie’s back full-time. Ig is ten years old. Shouldn’t he have grown out of that kind of behaviour by now? Joan tells me not to worry, that lots of kids have imaginary friends, especially youngest kids who live on a station miles from anywhere. But I’ve googled imaginary friends. It isn’t normal at his age, is it? It’s not just funny chitchat, either, asking us to set an extra place or leave a seat for Robbie in the car. He has entire conversations with someone (at least Ig assures me Robbie is a ‘someone’, not a ‘something’) that only he can see or hear.
    But am I overreacting? Should I be glad that he seems so happy in his own company? Even if he isn’t exactly on his own?
    She hesitated then. It had been almost easy to share her worries about her children. But where could she possibly begin with Nick?
    She called Joan’s advice to mind again.
Tell the truth.
She took a deep breath and began.
    Nick:
I am so worried about Nick. Worried and sad and confused, about him and about us.
    He’s leased out half the station to a mining company. It came as a complete shock to me. To the children too. He said he had no choice, that things were still so bad after all the years of drought, after the wool industry collapsed, that he had to accept the offer they made. I knew he’d been having meetings, and had been out on the property with different groups of people in the past year, but either he’d implied or I assumed they were stock agents, that he was planning on building our sheep numbers again, after we’d gradually had to sell them all off in recent years. I was wrong. It turns out they were geologists and representatives from the mining company, running test after test until they’d confirmed they’d found something. The something is diamonds. It’s not that simple, of course. They don’t just dig a few feet and there are diamonds everywhere. It’s a huge operation, a matter of finding something called kimberlite pipes first. And it’s luck as much as geology if they do, apparently. But they have found enough small diamonds to be optimistic enough to strike this deal. I don’t know the exact figures involved. All I know is that after the initial lump sum for the lease, the money will be paid in instalments, each one dependent on the results of the next geological test. Something like that, anyway.
    I knew things had been tough, of course, even though Nick has always insisted on taking care of the financial side of station life. His late father was the same. His mother, may she rest in peace too, always told me to be glad about it, that it was just the Gillespie way, that I had enough on my plate with the children. But I never felt like that about station life. I thought of Nick and me as equals, both doing what we could to keep the station running through the good and bad years.
    There was no discussion with me about the lease, though. By the time he told me, it was a done deal. All he would say is he’s signed a five-year exploration lease, with him employed in a caretaker role to maintain the fences, windmills, floodgates etc. on their half of the property. The most we can hope for is that nothing will happen for months, or possibly even years, at the exploration stage, and that more time will be taken up after that with environmental studies before they start digging. But what will my station-stay visitors think? What will this do to our beautiful landscape? To tourism in the area? We’re more than a hundred kilometres from the Flinders Ranges National Park, and our station is so far off the highway that we’re not on the main tourist trail, and the mining company apparently assured Nick that there would be minimal environmental damage, but there will still be some impact, surely?
    Only our nearest neighbours know so far. After the deal was signed, Nick visited everyone to tell them. He wouldn’t tell me much about their reaction, but I could guess. Shock. Anger.