Love In a Sunburnt Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

in which they were found, standing like old friends together despite huge discrepancies in age and origin. A hand-held seed and fertiliser distributer, tiny, but with a huge gear ratio to blast out the seed: all done with the minimum of working parts. Cow bells, sheep bells, some still striking a clear early-morning note. A bee smoker, horse castrator, butter paddles, an icing syringe of metal and wood and a perplexing item which turns out to be a homemade fly zapper. The biggest gravy bowl I’ve ever seen, and the very biggest bread box, testament to just how many had to be fed at every meal—full-time gardeners, transient workers, a tutor, cowboys, shepherds, bookkeepers, people passing through, and family. A bunch of white tin mugs is strung like a bunch of grapes in the foreground. The smell of age rises from the saddlery, held above on the raft mezzanine, and from the hessian bags, which contain leather strapping for cart horses, complete with blinkers.
    In the corner waits an ancient vacuum cleaner, still working. We trundle it across the floor and it whirrs and the old fabric bag obligingly inflates, no electricity required. Near it is propped a shepherd’s crook in a pale wood of some bush timber, reinforced to support the hook and lovingly polished. This is a family that loves their wood and their metal. Tools have been forged here, wooden handles shaped and polished. There are scales everywhere, but they are not measuring time or, if they are, it is only very gently.
    â€˜There’s a family story for everything that is here—why it was made or how it arrived,’ says Luke.
    A commercial knife, the handle of which must have broken, has been re-handled in local wood, beautiful to hold and detailed with a wheat-head pattern: quite possibly some of Frank Warwick’s work. Frank was a great-great-uncle to Frances. In 1908 he was rounding up horses on foot when a rabbit warren collapsed under him and he fell into the dusty hole, breaking both legs. He had the ill luck to see a drunken doctor, who set both broken legs poorly. A shepherd re-broke and reset them, to better effect, but afterwards Frank was never without pain—or, it seems, without his woodwork. His well-used woodworking tools are touchingly kept next to his crutches. Hanging from a rafter is a double-sided pistol holster.
    â€˜This fitted over the neck of the horse—here is where you put your shells. I suspect my father sewed this together himself,’ says Richard, going on to explain that his father used gunfire in much the way the sound of a motorbike or helicopter is used now: ‘He used to use a firearm as a means of mustering. If he found scrub he couldn’t ride through, he’d shoot to start them out.’
    As there are just two of us visiting, the family decide to show us the office, which was built in 1856. ‘To me this is the heart of Holowiliena here,’ Frances says. ‘We generally don’t show it to people because I can’t resist handing them the diaries, the catalogues—and it is all too fragile to stand much of that.’ These treasures of ink on paper, Frances says, need climate control and they need to be digitised. She is a passionate curator and researcher as well as an archaeologist. In this special room two of Frances’s strongest instincts are set at odds: her sense of hospitality versus her passion for preservation.
    The opportunity to be hospitable has come to be seen by Frances and Luke as a priceless one.
    â€˜You see a lot of people who say, “Oh, we are too busy to have visitors,” but Richard will drop everything, sometimes to the detriment of the work that needs to be done. He’ll drop everything to spend time with people. At first when we came here it would drive us crazy,’ says Frances.
    â€˜We’d just moved here ready to make a difference and get in and do some work, but it would be time to pull up and talk to people,’