【荆棘鸟】第六章 16

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And drenching¹: the administration of medicine through huge syringes rammed² down the throat, to rid the sheep of intestinal³ parasites⁴.

For work with the sheep never, never ended; as one job finished it became time for another. They were mustered⁵ and graded, moved from one paddock to another, bred and unbred, shorn and crutched⁶, dipped and drenched⁷, slaughtered⁸ and shipped off to be sold. Drogheda carried about a thousand head of prime beef cattle as well as its sheep, but sheep were far more profitable, so in good times Drogheda carried about one sheep for every two acres of its land, or about 125,000 altogether. Being merinos, they were never sold for meat; at the end of a merino's wool-producing years it was shipped off to become skins, lanolin, tallow and glue, useful only to the tanneries and the knackeries.

Thus it was that gradually the classics of Bush literature took on meaning. Reading had become more important than ever to the Clearys, isolated⁹ from the world on Drogheda; their only contact with it was through the magic written word. But there was no lending library close, as there had been in Wahine, no weekly trip into town for mail and newspapers and a fresh stack of library books, as there had been in Wahine. Father Ralph filled the breach¹⁰ by plundering¹¹ the Gillanbone library, his own and the convent's shelves, and found to his astonishment¹² that before he was done he had organized a whole Bush circulating library via Bluey Williams and the mail truck. It was perpetually loaded with books-worn, thumbed volumes which traveled down the tracks between Drogheda and Bugela, Dibban-Dibban and Braichy Pwll, Cunnamutta and Each-Uisge, seized upon gratefully by minds starved for sustenance¹³ and escape. Treasured stories were always returned with great reluctance¹⁴, but Father Ralph and the nuns¹⁵ kept a careful record of what books stayed longest where, then Father Ralph would order copies through the Gilly news agency and blandly¹⁶ charge them to Mary Carson as donations to the Holy Cross Bush Bibliophilic¹⁷ Society. Those were the days when a book was lucky to contain a chaste¹⁸ kiss, when the senses were never titillated¹⁹ by erotic passages, so that the demarcation line between books meant for adults and those meant for older children was less strictly²⁰ drawn²¹, and there was no disgrace for a man of Paddy's age to love best the books his children also adored: Dot and the Kangaroo, the Billabong series about Jim and Norah and Wally, Mrs. Aeneas Gunn's immortal²² We of the Never-Never. 

 

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