Winning Story: The 2025 Ernestine Hill Memorial Short Story Award

Let This Place Speak 

Susan Temby

This is Catherine, Cat for short, talking to her father Ferg, Fergus Fraser. A clever man, witty, generous, self-educated. He died not long after this conversation. Let him speak. Let this place speak. Let Cat’s childhood speak as well. 

‘Where’d you come from Ferg?’ 

‘I came from here. You know that.’ 
‘Really? Here? No one came from here except a few Indigenous folk.’

‘They weren’t around when I got here.’

‘When was that?’

‘1918. I was ten.

‘Ha! You arrived when you were ten and you sent me away when I was ten.’
‘Yeah, well, you were a little ignoramus. You needed a school.’

‘Was anyone here when you came?’

‘Hardly anyone. Then the returned soldiers started coming. They were given just enough land to ruin their lives. What that vicious war started was well and truly finished off here.’

‘Holy shit.’

‘See they put roads in, just dirt tracks and then the people came. Some of them on bikes. There was a siding here. Someone wanted this area opened up. Not that they had a clue. Those poor buggers would get off the train and hop on their bikes and ride and ride until they found what they thought was a good block of land and that was it.

‘Didn’t they pay?’

‘Yeah, with their bodies, their souls, their kids and their wives. It was cruel, Cat. They had to clear a certain number of acres by a certain time or it would be taken away from them. Only the desperate were out here trying to do that.

‘Like you’

‘I was a kid. It was a big adventure. Your grandfather bought the place. He wasn’t a returned soldier.’

The maggies are back. They love lawn fresh mown. Mum, Dad and the spoilt teenager running along behind squawking, squawking. I want a worm, no not that one another one. I’m starving, I’m bored, I think I’m adopted. 

Awaken to their sweet dawn song and know real gratitude. They teach us delight. They teach us to fly.

And so these people she’d known all her life have become strangers. The auctioneer in his mole skins, blue shirt and Akubra sits baked brown and wrinkled, on the fence squinting at his iPad. He owns this dreaded day. He scans a long line of equipment. Big paddocks, big machines. Three million easy he thinks. Knows they’ll be lucky to get half that. The drought, the drought. Everything is about the meagreness, the meanness of rain. Few of these neighbours have enough in their pockets to pick up a bargain, except the ones who work for the Saudis or the Chinese. 

Once a show place, now down, now out. All sold up. Too much debt. New American chief executive flown in to boost the stupendous profits at the bank. Here to conquer the wild west so he can retire and die sumptuously on a hill with 360 degree views. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care that in three months it’ll start to rain and go on raining for ten years in a mirror reaction to ten years of drought. The water ski club, out of action for forty years, will reconvene on the salt lake, 

Every season has its own scent. The aroma of arid lands. There is none of that steamy pungency of humid coastal valleys. No smell of rotting silage. Out here it is clean, pure. New turned earth smells like heaven. Like a handful of warm cake. On an early spring morning the silken air shifts around politely, carrying with it the last gentle wafts of winter wattle. In summer the buttery smell of baked grass. At the start of winter the minty smell of the first green shoots.

In among the gimlets with the shiny cork screw branches and the shiny, shiny leaves, in there were the people of another time. They were invisible but they would come and be with a lone child. A small ghost. No colour in her skin. No tree saw to her birth. She just turned up readymade. Who was she? They came to find out and discovered a child playing, singing, dancing and they joined in. They’d come to play with her. They knew she knew. She was never lonely. Only later did she wonder at their acceptance. How to them it would have been so strange. They came to be with her under foreign trees that died in winter. And where were her mob, her aunties, her cousins?

At ten she went away. Sometimes she came back for a week or two but the tree people were never there. Mostly she didn’t think about them except when she found herself out there under those trees alone. Perhaps they didn’t come because she no longer played, no longer danced and sang.

Now it’s time to pick up and go. To move out entirely and never return. To let go of what was most beloved. Refugees. Like the first peoples here, forced out by people who thought they knew so much better. 

‘You were ten when you came here, where were you before that?’

‘In the city.’

‘At school?’

‘Yeah, sometimes.’

‘Started your life of crime early.’

‘Had to work for my dad.’

‘At ten years old?’

‘Probably started at seven.’

‘Doing what?’

‘He’d get the horses off the ship and I had to help drive them to our place and look after them. Some of them were a bit any old how after three weeks at sea.’ 

‘Where did you keep them?’

‘We had a few acres on the edge of the city. We’d feed them up, then I’d swim them across the river at the narrows and take them to market.’

‘As a little kid?’
‘Didn’t bother me. More fun than school’n
‘Bloody hell. It’s deep at the narrows.’
‘Telling me.’

The tall, wide salmon gum has been dead like that for decades. Died in its prime during one of the floods in the early sixties. Miraculously it comes to life at harvest time when there is spilled grain everywhere and the galahs know where. They come fifty, sixty at a time, and sit on the bare branches like pink and grey Christmas decorations. Always within days of the 25th. Joy to the world. They scream and squeal at the wonders of all the ready food and yet when they are on the ground feeding, there is no greed, no squabbling. In the tree they sit and wait a while, regroup in all their beauty. They know their beauty. They are their beauty. To see them like this is to become breathless. They might return every day for a week and then fly off to cooler places where the grain is about to ripen. Next year they’ll turn up again for Christmas. 

There used to be a bounty on fox tails. In the fifties during the Korean War the need for warm army uniforms took the value of wool to the dizzy heights of a pound a pound. Everyone bred up their sheep flocks and the foxes bred themselves up like rabbits. This was the Fox War, no uniforms required. One morning early she heard the truck drive in. Her dad and four others, three on the back still holding their rifles and on the tray of the truck a pile of dead foxes, twenty five, thirty. Just the dead, no prisoners taken. They stopped outside the house to show their catch, to elicit praise, the recognition they deserved. In one night they’d solved the dead lamb problem. 

‘Poor little foxes.’ said the child. 

‘Twelve and six a tail,’ said the boy neighbour with the red hair.

‘I thought that was emu beaks,’ she said.

‘Those too,’ he said.

It was something to look forward to, with horror. The child who played with her friends under the trees has turned up to help with the clearing out of the house. She has flown in from the other side of the country where she has lived all her adult life, to help deliver the last rites and the rubbish to the tip. She brings her daughter and small granddaughter who might like to play under the trees with the spirits. 

After the disembowelling of every cupboard and drawer, the last thing left in the house is a still life done decades before by her mother. They divvy up all her other works, charming renditions of the farm, but this one is more impersonal. Oranges, probably from the tree in the garden and a small jug of a famous English potter containing a handful of chrysanthemums also from her garden. This one would stay where it had always been, on the dining room wall. It would say that this was once the house of a hard working woman who loved this place and loved to paint. And yet when they are finally ready to leave, their cars bloated with the spoils, the relics of defeat, it seems like a betrayal. They go back and stand in front of it trying to keep sentiment at bay. The farmer himself is doing something else. He must be shown only bravery by the rest, no sorrow, no sadness, just courage in the face of defeat. He is at his own funeral, grieving his own death. 

Was it like that for the people of the gimlets? Vanquished. Forced to go, to hand over everything to the victor. The child would see them in the streets of the town many miles from the farm. They came in from where they lived in huts outside the town. She never spoke to them. They seemed not to see her. How would she know that they were smart enough not to engage with her kind?

‘You drove your pony and sulky two hundred miles on your own? Why didn’t you just catch the train?’

‘Not on my own. I had Jack with me.’

‘How old was Jack?’

‘Ten, like me. In the same class at school. The tear-aways.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘Took us two weeks. Camping where there was grass and water for the pony.’

‘Incredible.’

‘Kids worked back then. Your grandfather treated us like grownups. He didn’t really know about kids. Most blokes were like that. We arrived here and were put to work. Lived in tents. Then Jack had to go back to school and I was on my own when Dad went off to buy more horses.’

‘On your own at ten?’

‘Someone had to stay and look after the horses. I used to lie awake listening to the dingos howl. Gave me the creeps. The Italian clearing teams would invite me to their camp for spaghetti. Couldn’t understand a word. They were my friends.’

The big granite rock was a favourite place. On a warm evening they’d all be up there eating greasy chops burnt black and looking at the stars. Some lucky nights the swags would come out and all the mossy dents would become beds from where they could name the constellations and imagine the lives of those who lived up there. In the morning the child and her brother would run around looking for things. Flowers, feathers, smooth rocks, and they’d open up the gnamma holes and reach down to see if they could touch the water. The rock was a reservoir for the gimlet tree people, probably as far back as forever. To lift the thin stone cover off a gnamma hole was to touch an antique world. The wealth of a full, clean, natural tank of water in this parched land is more than any gold to be found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and far more ancient.

‘When did you build the house?’

‘Not till the Depression. Before that we lived in a tin shed with a dirt floor.’
‘Better than a tent. You made the house yourself.’

‘I had a friend who’d come from the city after being put off just before his apprenticeship finished. He was nearly a carpenter. But the main player was an Italian from Calabria. He taught us how to make mud bricks. We couldn’t afford any other kind. We had the time, no one was buying wool or wheat. We lived off what we grew and I’d make a few pounds winning races at athletics meetings.’

‘I didn’t know you could run.’

‘Beat the state champion once.’

‘Like that movie, Gallipoli.’

‘Except I didn’t have a coach. Bought the timber for the joists and beams with that prize money.’

‘What about the horses, couldn’t you sell those?’

‘No one was buying and if they were they’d have bought a car. No, your grandfather was out of business. He took off for the East to work for his brother. We were pretty much down to about sixteen draft horses, the team for seeding and harvest and a couple of riding horses.’

The child’s mother had a print of a painting that sat on the table in the hall. Anne Hathaway’s thatched cottage with a beautiful garden of flowering shrubs of various kinds and colours. The child loved this picture because here there was a garden just like it, on top of a low hill in sand plain country where the occasional tree gave way to low bushes and ground cover. In spring the flowers would bloom on these bushes. White, yellow, purple, pink and the deepest cornflower blue perfectly spaced as if someone had planted them with intention. It was a much larger garden than Anne Hathaway’s. It was a sensory gift here. Sight, scent and the sound of the whispering Tamma trees nearby. A great wonder of her small world.

Fergus wore himself out on the farm, but the fifties and sixties were good to him. In his day they knew little of conservation. After decades of ploughing and burning and ploughing again, the soil became hard and hydrophobic and the sun would craze the surface with fissures. Everyone had done the same, and the blinding red dust storms connected them to each other. The next generation began a new regime of care and regeneration. The sharp footed sheep were sent away. The stubble was not burnt but left to enrich the soil which became friable and receptive. The ploughing was reduced to direct drilling. Millions of trees were planted back and slowly the understory came back as well. But what use if the rain stayed away?

‘You met mum in hospital when you broke your neck. She was the only medically trained person in the whole town. There was no one to tell her how much sedation to give you so she had to guess. Nearly killed you.’

‘The doctor when he turned up a couple of days later said she probably saved my life. The overdose kept me still.’
‘Then you had to stay in hospital for months, in that tiny town seventy miles from home. What did you do all that time.’

‘Read books. They were a bit short on at first. There was only the Bible and Shakespeare.’

‘What the complete works?’

‘Read them cover to cover.’

‘More than I’ve done.’

‘And you’re the educated one.’

‘That’s not the whole story. You fell in love with Mum.’

‘Well, who wouldn’t? She was smart and kind. But she went to the Middle East with the army and I didn’t see her for two years. 

Early mornings in autumn, fog can obscure the animals and leave a charcoal sketch of trees and fence posts. A semi diaphanous scrim hides the scenery like a stage show. The mundane becomes mysterious. Only the bleating of the lambs and the calves calling to their mothers are evidence of what is there. The gradual reveal is tender and a little disappointing. Everything is as it was yesterday. And in autumn when the days are still warm and the first rains have come, there are mushrooms as big as a plate to fry up in butter for breakfast. You have to know which are the toadstools and which are the delicious mushrooms with the dusty pink gills, and the mouthwatering musty smell.

In years of at least average rainfall, there was a place any child would love to go. A grove of bright green, soft leaf bushes on the cool side of the rock, the south where the sun was less intense, and where there was often a gentle stream of water coming off the rock.

The child would tie her horse in the shade and find the way in through the undergrowth made by some animal; kangaroo, dingo, and sit watching the birds flit about at the speed of light, and listen to their song. A cool and complete refuge. If a snake came to drink she would sit still and watch it take the water and slither away. The weebill, the red capped robin, the grey fantail would go silent and disappear, but soon return twittering and whistling again. 

Best of all were the willie wag-tails that talked to each other and to her in the night, in the trees outside her bedroom where she lay unable to sleep. They would ask her over and over again; ‘What on earth are you doing?’ 

Once or twice there was a picnic to the caves that had the outline of hands painted on the walls. No one knew who painted them or when. But everyone knew it was long, long ago and that this was truly a faraway land. Perhaps it was a time when the land around the caves was lush and green all year, instead of just a few months in the middle of the year. Perhaps there were fresh water lakes and rivers with fish in them and lots of people whose hands were on the walls of the caves, going about their daily lives. Things we’ll never know that didn’t happen anymore, happened here. 

Enchantment was still everywhere around. After winter rains came profusion. On the uncultivated ground where wispy native grasses were allowed to grow, whole fields, whole hills, wild and wide, became pink overnight like a paddock of tiny flamingos and alongside, another paddock of gold, thick, shiny treasure. Everlastings, with a scent as heady as any French perfume. How far back into history did their DNA go? You could walk way out into the middle of the field and lie down on a bed of flowers. All the worker bees were out, native bees that didn’t sting. Around the edges among the sparse malley trees, spider orchids, donkey orchids and bacon and egg plants were waiting to be discovered.

‘After you built the house you were still in the middle of a depression.’
‘Went to the goldfields. A mate and I had a little mine, not that far from here.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Just enough to live on. After about eighteen months we got a better idea. We set up a butcher’s shop. An instant town had grown up and they needed food. We had paddocks full of sheep we couldn’t sell.’

‘How did you learn to do that?’

‘I just made it up. It’s pretty logical. If you’ve ever been to a butcher’s shop you can see what they do.’

‘Did you have to build a shop?’

‘Yeah out of poles we cut in the bush and hessian painted with white wash.’

‘Did you make money?’

‘Enough to keep the bank off my back. Saved the farm. Back from the brink. Not for the first time.’ 

‘How long did you do that?’

‘A few years. Couldn’t wait to get back to the farm.’

‘Wasn’t it hard on the farm? Freezing in winter, broiling in summer.’

‘Mornings in winter, the water in the taps would freeze. The grass would crunch under foot with frost. The team had to be harnessed in the dark. The crop had to go in at the right time. The first rains. If you missed that, you were done for another year. It doesn’t rain much out here but if you get your timing right you can survive in normal times. It was good. Always liked the work. When I could afford a tractor, on a frosty morning I’d make a small fire under the engine to warm it enough to get it started.’

‘But summer was worse, yeah?’

‘Not if you’re sensible. I wasn’t always sensible. Ended up in hospital once with heat stroke. Taught me a lesson. Cover every inch of your skin, wear a hat and drink a lot of water. And don’t do heavy physical labour in the heat of the day.’

‘The contradictions of this place can be seen on a shimmering summer’s day, actually seen. A mob of maybe twenty or thirty emus will be running through the wheat knocking it down before the harvester can get to it, knocking down fences and letting the sheep into the crop. But who wouldn’t want to see those emus running, running as if their tails were on fire? Or who wouldn’t want to share the new shoots of a winter crop with a family of western grey kangaroos, or to see a wedge-tail eagle on a thermal just waiting for you to let the chooks out? You have to take the good with the bad and sometimes the good is the bad.’

Fergus was saved by death from a crushing defeat on his home ground. 

Weather ten, farmers nil.