Love In a Sunburnt Country Read Online Free PDF

part in enabling them to give of their best.
    The opening sequence shows the Warwicks arriving at Holowiliena in 1852. Frances plays her own great-great-grandmother, and Luke is William Warwick. With them they brought their ten children and they were to have two more.
    Those children grew up in and cooperatively ran Holowiliena when, after sixteen years of life there, William and his wife left to live closer to Adelaide. The youngest child was left behind for the oldest sister to care for. In the end, only three of William Warwick’s children married, and only one of the married men had children of his own.
    The things these people made and used are all around me, and Frances had talked about her departed family members as if they were just over the next hill repairing a fence; as a result, time here feels less as if it flows and more as if it is draped in layers over the land. In a closed section of shed, behind wire, are wagons with wooden-spoked wheels with metal rims. The skills that were used to make these wheels—to curve the wood, place the spokes, shrink the metal around the wheel, ensure all wheels match and balance—were once commonplace. Every station and small settlement would have had a blacksmith’s shop with a forge where this work was done. At the time of colonisation blacksmiths had a place equivalent to today’s software and hardware developers, as toolmakers in a high-status profession taken up by those of good intellect, design skills, physical prowess and business sense.
    Behind a tractor is hooked an arched contraption with a seat and a long blade beneath. ‘This is still in use!’ my father exclaims. He is astonished because this arched contraption is a hand-operated grader which on most properties would have been retired decades ago.
    Behind the main shed we find a well-rusted Model-T Ford. Over it grows a vine with a woolly, herbaceous, pastel leaf and white clusters of flowers. I’ve never seen this plant before.
    â€˜It’s horehound,’ Luke says, appearing around the shed corner, explaining that it was brought into Australia for flavouring in brewing and has become a weed in South Australia. He shows us the way to the storeroom where Frances and her father Richard are waiting. Richard’s hair is dark and the worry lines that financial struggle usually carves aren’t apparent on his face. I have difficulty believing he is over seventy years old. Richard bought Holowiliena from his uncle in the 1980s. Janne and Richard, just married, had to go massively into debt to purchase the homestead. The wool boom was over, and that came at the end of a run of dry years. It would have been enormously difficult to repay a debt that big and under those conditions, but Holowiliena had been in the family for four generations, and Richard and Janne wished to hand it over to the next generation.
    The storeroom roof was once thatched and now it is tin, but under the pole rafters and lathed purlins, running perpendicular to the rafters, little else has changed. The floor is river-bed stone. The bookkeeper would have stood behind the substantial angled desk and recorded wages drawn, allowances taken in stores and advanced allowances debited. The shelving of local wood held everything needed in the way of stores and more besides: flour, sugar, salt, cigarettes, coffee, boots.
    Now the long, high shelves overflow with things that have lost their place in time elsewhere. One of Janne and Richard’s first management decisions was to return this building to its original role—it was in use as a shed—and put in it all the someone-might-find-interesting or might-be-useful-again items from houses and sheds. The light and the colours in here are soft, sepia-tinted, and the fine apricot dust of Holowiliena coats everything.
    There is a hip bath, roasting covers and many bottles. Some bottles are iridescent, some pearlised, brown or blue or green, dusty from the ground