The Noon Lady of Towitta by Patricia Sumerling Read Free Book Online

animal fats and the blood and tallow that was deliberately poured onto the surface.
    Each room had the tiniest of windows. Only three feet high by about eighteen inches wide, each one made up of two panes of glass, one over the other. The windows were hinged at the frame halfway down, dividing the two panes which could revolve on a windy day like a windmill if not properly fastened.
    According to Mother, when building, our father had given no thought to the size the house should have been. It seemed to shrink with the arrival of each new baby and as we seven Schippan children grew up and crowded the place. He intended adding another bedroom to the house and buying Mother new pieces of furniture but our growing family and our poor financial state put paid to any good intentions. We shared the same poor state as most of our neighbours.
    A shortage of money due to ongoing drought conditions and a new baby every other year or so, meant there were only a few sticks of furniture. For a few years we four older children were crammed into the middle room, while Mother and Father slept in the kitchen-living-room area and the three smallest children, August, Will and Bertha, slept in the furthest room from the kitchen.
    The house heated up quickly and was a hot box in the summer but snug and warm in the winter. On the hottest summer nights the family moved outside to sleep under the stars despite being at the mercy of the buzzing, biting mosquitoes. It was after one hot summer night that ended in a sudden downpour, that the brothers took shelter in the small barn. From that night all four brothers slept there. For the rest of the family, it was a blessed relief. Mother and Father with Bertha claimed the farthest room as their bedroom while Pauline and I slept in the middle room.
    Towitta was a windy, bleak township with its howling, moaning and sighs that constantly brought to my mind old Wendish witches slinking about, clawing their way through the gaps between door and window crevices, bringing with them red dust. So deep was it at times that the women spent hours shovelling it outdoors. The contents of drawers and cupboards were often taken outside and shaken free of the curse of the red dust. Even in those rare periods when there wasn’t a breath of wind for weeks at a time, the dust still crept in.
    The dogged determination of local farmers around Towitta to clear the land of anything that didn’t resemble a wheat or barley stalk saw much of the dense mallee landscape vanish. I believed this was why there was so much dust. Local farmers were stubborn and refused to believe this, defiantly continuing to clear the land for crops. The mallee roots from the piles of dead trees were the perfect fuel during the winter. And Father built several stock paddocks with walls made entirely of mallee roots. So the wood had its uses, but the chronic dust problem made me realise how more pleasant it might have been had more of the old mallee scrub been left growing to anchor the soil, as windbreaks and for shade for the grazing stock.
    The years of living in such a lonely place sharpened my nose to the changing scents of the breezes throughout the year. In the summer the hint of eucalyptus would reach me as the wind blew down from the hilly wooded areas around Mount Pleasant. Towards the end of winter the scent of the canary yellow wattles wafted in. After I met Gustave, a waft of heady wattles took me back to our private times together. The smells of winter included farmyard smells of pigs and sheep, and sometimes wet ripe manure after a rare rain. On even rarer occasions the eerie fog that settled over the River Murray miles away, reached us cold and dank. The river swamps, our grandparents recalled, smelled like the bottom of a German village pond.
    At Towitta you could smell rain twenty minutes before it arrived for the air would have a strong spicy fragrance of damp earth mixed with flower smells. This always gave me time to run and