The View From Connor's Hill by Barry Heard Read Free Book Online

before smoko, I was about to pick up a fleece when I noticed Rover moving towards me. He was staggering, losing his sense of direction, but determined to get to me. Farm dogs normally never cross the woolshed floor. I quickly dropped the fleece. He reached my feet and tried to sit as he usually did, but this time he fell over. I reached down to pat him. He shook, his eyes fixed on mine, and then he went limp and died.
    The shearers turned off their machines. Someone turned off the petrol engine. The woolshed went quiet.
    I picked up my sweet dog, hoping he would lick my face and be Rover again. He was warm, soft, and beautiful. I looked up for something: a miracle, some hope. One of the shearers, Bill, had tears running down his cheeks. He used to sneak Rover biscuits at morning tea, while I pretended not to notice. Tom, another shearer, walked outside shaking his lowered head as he reached for his handkerchief.
    Time stopped.
    I put Rover on his favourite wool pack. Both Bill and I patted him with tender, loving strokes.
    â€˜What happened, Baz?’
    â€˜I don’t know. He’s only a young dog,’ I replied in my strongest tearful voice.
    â€˜I reckon the vet should see him, just in case it’s dangerous,’ the farm owner said.
    I carefully put Rover in the boot of the farmer’s car, and he drove off. It would be a long drive to Bairnsdale. Bill and I had put several blankets under my Rover to make it more comfortable for him. I watched the boot as the car disappeared in a cloud of dust down the long dirt driveway.
    The vet said it was ‘hard pads’ disease, caused by the constant paw trouble Rover had had from droving and mustering. Somehow, his infected paws had poisoned his blood, or something like that.
    Rover returned to me the next day. I brushed him, wrapped him in a warm blanket, and took him down to the creek where I had dug a hole the day before. I buried him with affection and dignity, and then raked the mound neatly. I cut a branch from a Weeping Willow tree, drove it in the ground, and hung a sign that simply said: ‘My good friend Rover.’
    TWENTY YEARS LATER , with a wife and three kids, I was driving up the same winding road I had driven cattle on with Rover. I was telling them about my precious companion, when I found myself saying, ‘Let’s visit the old fella.’
    I hadn’t been up that remote road since Rover had died. We parked just above the small stream. Staring at the creek with tears in my eyes, I was suddenly overcome with emotion. My family surrounded me. They thought the grieving was for Rover. But it was something else that had triggered my reaction: a magnificent Weeping Willow tree had grown from the small branch I had stuck in the ground all those years ago. It is still there today.
    Rover deserved that.

chapter two
    A kid in Melbourne
    WRITING ABOUT MY PRECIOUS DOG HAS, INEVITABLY, TAKEN me way ahead of myself. It’s time for me to take you back to the start, a long time before Rover, to the haziest of all my beginnings.
    I was born in Melbourne in 1945. My father died when I was barely eighteen months old. Sadly, I don’t remember him, the funeral, or the grief that surrounds such an event. Our family lived at the corner of 23 Smith Street and Little Victoria Street, Collingwood.
    Before his death, my immediate family consisted of Mum, Dad, my older brother Ian, and me, a bub. Under the same roof lived Nana Heard, my father’s mother, and her five adult children. It was the Heard family house, rented by Grandma Heard. Grandpa Heard had absconded, cleared out, shot through — whatever term you want to use. However he thought of it, he offered no further help to his family. Perhaps, after the experience of the Depression, he did what many dads did. During that tough time, within a family — a poor family, that is — many a husband not only left home to hunt for work, but also promised to send money home.