The Ellie Chronicles Read Free

hesitated between the old barn and the new feed sheds for the turkeys and geese, the ones Dad had built as part of our short-lived attempt to diversify, and I chose the feed sheds.
    I cut across the gully to get there and suddenly almost tripped over a body. It was lying face down. It wasn’t in uniform but I knew where he was from. Blood still oozed from under him.
    I jumped over it and ran up to the shed. Two other bodies lay in the long grass. I felt my throat block like two hands were closing around it to strangle me. Dad had gone down fighting. He was in the shed, his body in pieces, like Mum’s. There was blood everywhere. Another body was in there with him, almost lying on top of him. It was hard to tell what had happened but I think somehow Dad had got one of their rifles off them and done what damage he could before they killed him.
     

Chapter Two
     
     
    MY FAMILY HAD been cockies since before The Beatles even, back in horse and plough days. We had always been into cattle and sheep, but when the war ended and twenty million people had to be crammed into an area that used to hold six million, we lost a lot of land. My friend Fi’s mother was appointed to do the redistribution for the Wirrawee area and we didn’t come out of it all that well. That’s my opinion anyway.
    Dad decided to break with tradition and go into turkeys and geese. At first I thought it was a good idea but it turned out badly. No sooner had we started than the turkeys were hit by blackhead disease and we lost three-quarters of the poor buggers.
    Dad was convinced the disease had come from the other side of the border but who knows? The truth is it happened so quickly that I did wonder if the turkeys were infected before we got them. It was hard to say. Before the war the government had been really strict on agricultural stuff, and being an island made that easier. Anyone who brought in nasty diseases like fire blight was smeared with mustard and fed to sharks. But when the war ended, it suddenly became a whole different ball game, because here we were on one side of the border being strict about quarantine and there they were on the other side not giving a stuff.
    As we cremated a couple of thousand dead birds on a huge bonfire, an event that put me off cooked chicken for a long time – and I’ve never been keen on raw chicken – Dad realised that turkeys and geese weren’t his scene. I suppose the blackhead disease almost did us a good turn in that way.
    Equally it was obvious that three of the four families who’d gotten large bits of our farm in the land redistribution weren’t going to make a go of it. One lot had never been on the land before, another lot were lazy, and the third were on the grog. So Dad sat down with them and did a bit of negotiating. I was proud of him, because negotiating didn’t come naturally to him. But after nearly a week of bargaining he’d leased back three-quarters of the land that we’d lost, and even though I didn’t like the fact that we had to pay these people a lot of money just to get our own property back, I started to hope that maybe we could return to the way it had been in the old days.
    The other good thing was that we got rid of three of the families, because we’d had to give them housing. One of the rules with the new arrangements was that we’d had to provide their accommodation while they tried to get houses built and launch their farming operations.
    The ones left were the Sandersons, who were nice. They were quite a young couple with two kids. Unlike the others they’d already built their own house, in a paddock called Hillside, and moved into it about a fortnight earlier. Pretty fast going, considering how hard it was to get building materials, let alone stuff like electrical cables and poly pipe.
    But Mrs Mackenzie, Corrie’s mum, was still with us. No wonder it had seemed like a small township around my place for a while there. Corrie was my friend, who was killed in the