The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

nothing anyone can do but stay inside, waiting for the calm after the storm. Inside, it is stifling. Every window must be closed against the dust, which seeps relentlessly through the slightest crack. Meals are gritty and sleep elusive. Rising in the morning, one sees a perfect outline of one’s body, an afterimage of white where the dust has not collected on the sheets.
    As the winds seared our land, they took away the dry herbage, piled it against the fences, and then slowly began to silt over the debris. It was three days before we could venture out, days of almost unendurable tension. The crashing of the boughs of trees against our roof and the sharp roar as a nearly empty rainwater tank blew off its stand and rolled away triggered my father’s recurring nightmares of France, so that when he could fall into a fitful slumber it would be to awake screaming.
    It was usually I who woke him from his nightmares. My mother was hard to awaken. She had, in her stoic way, endured over the years two bad cases of ear infection, treated only with our available remedies, hot packs and aspirin. One ear was totally deaf as a result of a ruptured eardrum, and her hearing in the other ear was much reduced. Now her deafness led to a striking reversal of roles, as I, the child in the family, would waken and attempt to soothe a frantic adult.
    When we emerged, there were several feet of sand piled up against the windbreak to my mother’s garden, the contours of new sandhills were beginning to form in places where the dust eddied and collected. There was no question that there were alsomany more bare patches where the remains of dry grass and herbage had lifted and blown away.
    It was always a miracle to me that animals could endure so much. As we checked the property, there were dead sheep in every paddock to be sure, but fewer than I’d feared. My spirits began to rise and I kept telling my father the damage was not too bad. “That was only the first storm,” he said bleakly. He had seen it all before and knew what was to come.
    In June, at shearing time, we hired one of the district’s great eccentrics to help in the yards. I could not manage mustering and yard work at the same time, and my father could not manage both either without too frenetic a pace. Our helper, known as Pommy Goodman, was a middle-aged Englishman with a perfect Mayfair accent, one of the foulest mouths I ever heard, and the bearing of one to the manner born. He was an example of the wonderful variety of types thrown up like human driftwood on the farther shores of settlement in Australia. One moment he would be swearing menacingly at a sheep that had kicked him, the next minute addressing me as though he were my nanny and about to order nursery tea. I resented being called “child,” and noticed that Pommy did more leaning on the fence and offering advice than hard work. But it was good to have a third person on hand, and especially someone who could drive a car, something I could not do, my legs not yet being long enough to disengage a clutch. Pommy could drive ahead and open a gate, making the return of sheep to a paddock a simple task. He could shuttle between the house and woolshed on the endless errands that materialized during the day, and he could count out the sheep from the shearers’ pens, something I was not good at because my mathematical labors by correspondence were always done slowly and deliberately. The sheep raced for freedom at a furious pace, leaping through the gate in twos and threes, so that my counts were often jumbled. The shearers, by now old friends, knowing that my father was not well, tolerated my efforts and secretly kept their own tally, so the records were straight at the end of the day.
    After helping at crutching time, Pommy, by now a friend to me, took the job of postmaster at our little post office and manual telephone exchange in Mossgiel. There he was as bossy as he had been to me in the sheepyards, listening to