They are predicting a weather front to hit in two days so I can't afford to stop unless I have to." "No, just bring them this evening with the fuel and dinner. Do you need these parts straight away?" I looked across at the large belt folded on the passenger seat and another square steel contraption with pipes poking out of it. "I'm just in Gilgandra so I'm about forty minutes away. At least the GPS took care of the steering now. His eyes darting backwards and forwards between the myriad of dials and the crop in front of him while the grain ran into the bin behind his head. One hand on the joystick controlling the forty foot front scything the wheat heads from the straw. I imagined him sitting in the cabin of the harvester. "Hello," said a voice barely audible over the roar of the machine he was sitting in.
Music stopped coming through the sound system speakers, replaced by the shrill ring tone. I had to leave the highway on the other side of town and the mobile service was always dodgy on the other road. I pressed the phone button on the steering wheel and asked my phone to call my husband, Justin. The urban zone speed limit signs flashed past as I entered Gilgandra so I touched the brake to turnoff the cruise control and slowed down to fifty. Luckily for me I'd got my mother's French/Vietnamese looks and figure and my dad's olive skin. So I was a like many children of my generation in the multicultural melting pot of western Sydney.
The first marriage had not worked out but then she'd met my dad, a Lebanese truck driver. She'd been one of the thousands of young Vietnamese women who had escaped the uncertainty of life in her strife torn country as a "mail order bride" in the early nineteen eighties. My mum was a relatively recent migrant to the sunny shores of Australia. My family, like ninety percent of Australians, stubbornly clung to the coast. I was a city girl, born and raised six hours east, in Sydney. Add to that the volcanic soil and it was the perfect mix for farming prosperity. My husband would often marvel at his grandfather's good fortune to have drawn a block of land there in the soldier settlement scheme after World War One.Ī quirk of nature meant that the district east of the national park received on average twenty percent more rainfall than surrounding areas.
Our farm was just to the south east of the national park which covered the main area of the old mountain. Thirteen million years of rain, wind and ice had ravaged it till all that was left was its skeleton. They were all that were left of what had been a large volcano. In the distance a line of jagged hills marked my destination. The cruise control was set on one hundred and ten and the V8 diesel purred along barely raising a sweat. The outside temperature was thirty eight celsius but inside my Landcruiser the climate control kept it at a pleasant twenty three. The heat haze shimmered off the bitumen's black top as it stretched away out in front of me. Please leave a comment after reading to let me know what you think. The story started its life as a loving wives tale but then it morphed into non consent/reluctance with a little bit of light incest thrown in.Ī big thank you to Capt Obvious for his timely help editing. A ute is the Aussie equivalent of a pick up. This one is set in Australia and does contain some of the local version of English.
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