Over the Blue Mountains by Mary Burchell Page B

warmly.
    “It’s more unusual here than you realize,” Carol assured her with a smile. “You didn’t know, did you, that when you went upstairs to bed last night you were doing something few Australians do?”
    “No. What was that?”
    “Just the sheer going upstairs,” Carol said, and laughed. “A two-story house is quite unusual here, you know. Nearly all domestic building is of the bungalow type. That’s because we have so much space in which to expand, of course. We build outward because it’s unnecessary to go in for the more complicated building upward. But Max and I were brought up in a two-story house, and somehow I’ve always liked going upstairs to bed. So when Henry and I came to build our own place, he agreed to let me have it this way.”
    “It’s very pleasant, anyway,” Juliet assured her.
    For once—though Juliet gathered that this was a rare concession—Isobel was let off the morning lessons that she did with her mother, and the two children were allowed to accompany their mother and the visitor around the station.
    Bakandi—for so the station was called, after the name of one of the native tribes that once inhabited that part of the country—was not unlike a big English farm in its nearby essentials. But in the tremendous sweep of its uncultivated extent it was like nothing else Juliet had ever seen.
    “Oh, there’s no question of cultivating an area of this size,” Carol explained, in answer to Juliet’s questions. “There’s a certain amount of what one calls ‘pasture improvement’ to be done, and, of course, you take precautions to see that your merinos and other first-class sheep are not allowed to wander too far to be supervised and kept in vigorous condition. But, beyond that, distances are so great that I imagine our problems are very different from those in a small sheep farm at home.”
    “Ye-es,” agreed Juliet, whose experience of sheep farms at home was extremely limited.
    In company with Carol, however, and the two pleased and excited children, she enjoyed inspecting the shearing sheds and the stockyards, and she paused to admire, at a distance, the pretty bungalow houses and cottages that housed the rest of the station community: the overseer, the boundary riders, the rouseabouts and the jackeroos.
    Delighted to find how much there was to tell this new visitor, Isobel—and even Peter, too, from time to time—offered odd bits of information, until Juliet laughed and declared she had never realized how much there was to know about sheep and sheep farming.
    “Oh, the whole place revolves around the creatures,” Carol declared with a good-humored shrug. “Food supplies, water supplies, salt always available to keep them healthy—there’s no end to their care. But, of course, it’s like anything else. If you work hard at it, the results are good. If you leave them largely to pick up their own living, so to speak, they go all poor and peaky on you, and before you know where you are, you’ve lost half of them.”
    “And the lambs are so sweet,” Isobel offered sentimental .
    Peter said “I’d like a lamb. Can I have a lamb, please, mommy?”
    Carol explained reasonably that it was rather too early for lambs yet, and Juliet said, “I’ll never get used to the seasons being all the wrong way around here!”
    They all laughed then, and turned homeward again, pausing only when Juliet stopped, fascinated, to listen to the strange laughing call of a kookaburra from a nearby clump of trees. Then there was a flash of brilliant color against the dull green of the gum trees, and the bird was gone.
    “You’ll hear and see plenty of them,” Carol promised her.
    Now that there was not so much left to show the visitor, the children ran on ahead and, as they strolled along together, Juliet and Carol reverted once more to the rough plan for the future, which they had discussed the previous evening.
    It had been Carol’s suggestion that Juliet should stay with her for