narratorAUSTRALIA Volume One

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  She sat on the veranda looking out over the moonlit garden smiling as a magpie began to carol high in the old eucalypt near the gate into the home paddock and a thud and rustle of leaves announced the arrival of a possum in a nearby tree. She looked down at the rough wooden box she held on her knee wondering if it was time to tell Jane its story. More than sixty years since ... surely not that long?

  The trees move uneasily as the first warm breath of a northerly wind stealthily entered the garden. She stood up and walked slowly, a little stiffly, to the kitchen and put the kettle on, reaching back through her memories to a time when, like her granddaughter now, she was sixteen. He was a jackaroo, eighteen with a smile, her mother used to say, that could set the sea on fire. They were mates, hesitating on the threshold of becoming much more than that.

  It was the custom to gather on the veranda for a cup of tea when work was over for the day. She remembered the day he broke her favourite cup and how, a few days later, he handed her a roughly made wooden box.

  ‘Not much good with tools,’ he admitted, displaying a blackened thumbnail.

  Inside the box was the yellowest, ugliest cup she had ever seen. She searched desperately for the right words to thank him.

  ‘It’s very yellow ...’ she ventured.

  ‘There, I knew you’d like it!’

  She kept a diary shyly confiding to its pages, what everyone else knew, that her future lay with him.