The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway Page A

everyone’s conversations, offering his own comments at crucial points in people’s communication, and opening and closing the service at arbitrary hours. It soon became clear that he was drinking heavily, alone every night in the postmaster’s cramped quarters. His slight frame grew emaciated and when I came with my father to the post office he barely had the spirit to correct my grammar. One morning, about three months after he left us, the exchange was dead. No one paid much attention, thinking that he was taking longer than usual to sober up. His first customer of the day found him swinging from the central beam of the post office, fully dressed in suit and tie. He had been sober enough to arrange the noose efficiently and kick the chair he stood on well across the room. I could never go there again without eyeing the beam and wondering about his thoughts that night. What old sorrows had overwhelmed him? Or was he simply a victim of loneliness and depression? I wondered whether his inner dialogue that night was in the voice of a cultivated Englishman, or in that of a foul-mouthed drover. He came to be one of my symbols for our need for society, and of the folly of believing that we can manage our fate alone.
    I was used to worry about my father’s health and state of mind, but it was a shock in the spring of 1943 to learn that my mother must go to Sydney for a hysterectomy, surgery that, in the current state of Australian medicine, still required months of recuperation. She left for Sydney shortly before the boys arrived home from school for the Christmas holidays. I was sent for an anticipated month’s stay with friends who lived thirty miles away from us on a station with the poetic name Tooralee. My hosts had an only child, a daughter, then about five years old, and slow to speak for lack of the talkative child company my visit was to supply. My mother was, in fact, away for eight weeks. She hadcaught a cold the day before entering the hospital for her surgery, and that infection had progressed quickly to pneumonia, a dangerous infection in the period before antibiotics or sulfa drugs. When she returned, stepping off the silver-painted diesel train in Ivanhoe into a temperature of 108 degrees, she was startlingly pale and thin. My father began to order us to lift packages, to jump to do the household chores, and to work in our amateurish way at tending her garden. She refused all well-intentioned efforts to make her an invalid. “My surgeon says his stitches are very strong,” she said. “I can lift anything. I will have all my energy back in three months.” So she did; but we never again saw the rosy-cheeked, robust woman of our childhood. She remained painfully thin.
    As we entered the late summer of 1944, we had about half our usual stock of sheep, now seriously affected by inadequate nourishment. It was clear that they would not make it through the summer unless it rained, or we began to feed them hay or grain to supplement their diet. The question which tormented my parents was whether to let them die, or invest more in maintaining them. If they died, fifteen years of careful attention to the bloodlines was lost. Yet even if fed supplements they might die anyway, for the dry feed would not supply the basic nutrients in fresh grass and herbage.
    Now the nighttime conversations were anguished. Both of them had grown up fearing debt like the plague. It hurt their pride to mortgage the land, just like more feckless managers. Furthermore, the feeding would require more labor than my father and I could manage. In the end, it was resolved to borrow the money, buy the wheat, and hire the help. But these actions were taken with a heavy heart. My father was plagued by doubts about the wisdom of the decision. My mother, once settled on a course of action, was imperturbable. Their basic difference of temperament was that she lacked imagination and could not conceive of failure, while my father’s imagination now