Start reading The Windmill in the Silver Gums by Léonie Kelsall

Read an extract from the latest Léonie Kelsall novel.

1

Indi

Indigo Jaensch rubbed her palms against her thighs, the denim tarry and stained almost black by the mix of lanolin and paddock dust that had accumulated over the past three days in the Kruegers’ shearing shed. ‘Unless I can get Dad to agree to put in some windbreaks, Mason won’t be the only one needing to take the wool off out of season.’ A few months back, one of the local farmers had called a contracting team to shear his sheep before he sent them to the meatworks.

She had raised her voice to be heard over the buzz of the pulley-driven clippers in the shearing stands where Jack Schenscher and Hamish and Lachlan MacKenzie were head down, bum up, taking wide swathes of wool off the sheep.

Matt Krueger, in the furthest stand, grimaced as he arched and drove his knuckles into his spine. ‘Why’s that, Indi?’ he yelled back.

‘If they’re right about global warming, we won’t be able to produce enough feed for the sheep. That’s pretty much what happened to Mason.’

It’s more a case of he didn’t have enough land to put in a feed crop or enough money to buy grain to pull his stock through another bad season,’ Hamish said.

‘Well, even if they’re wrong about climate change, our topsoil heads interstate every time the northerlies rip through and we get dumped with a few tons of Port Wakefield’s grit instead. So a windbreak is the only solution.’ She blew away a strand of blonde hair before it could stick to her face.

‘What do you reckon would work, Jack?’ While some of the eco-farmer’s ideas might be a bit out there—and others far too expensive for her minimal budget—his knowledge regarding trees was first rate.

‘She-oaks would be sweet, but they like to get them[1]selves established in a good wet year. The ones round here all date back to the seventy-four floods,’ Jack said, ‘so it wouldn’t be worth your time trying to put them in. And you want to avoid Aleppo pine and tamarisk. They used to use them for windbreaks, but they’re invasive. How about I come out to your place and have a look? Do some sucking on my teeth.’

She grinned at the visual. ‘Sure thing.’

‘Don’t reckon the double-dip did Mason much good, anyway,’ Hamish said, tugging the cable to power down his clippers. ‘Heard his wool was sub-standard, thanks to some rough handling from that contract gang. The price he’d’ve gotten would barely have covered their cost.’ Hamish had been in a brawl in the Settlers Bridge pub with contract shearers the previous year, so he tended to be a bit down on them. His assessment was fair, though; the early shearing had been the act of a desperate farmer drowning in red ink. Darin Mason had hoped to cut his losses by selling both the wool and the meat as separate commodities.

‘Darin should have sung out; enough of us would have mucked in to push his sheep through the sheds, even off season,’ Indi said, although she knew well enough why the farmer had kept quiet. Mason had only been in the district ten years or so, and didn’t have much more than a hobby farm; he wouldn’t have felt as though he fitted in with the generational farmers who held thousands of hectares.

‘You heard Elders Real Estate listed his property?’ Lachan asked as he kneed his sheep through the low cutout in the wall of the stone shed. The animal scrambled toward freedom.

Indi grimaced. There was a fifty-fifty chance Mason would try to slink away without fanfare or farewell. Either that, or there’d be a wake down at the pub that would run until Ant chucked them all out into the carpark rather than risk losing his licence for trading out of hours. ‘How many hectares does he run?’ she shouted above the strident calls of the sheep.

‘You and Pete looking to buy?’ Hamish asked.

Indi snorted. Short of a lotto win, her family would never be able to add to their property. ‘If wishes were horses, I’d never have to pay you to fix my tractor again.’ Hamish only ever charged her enough to cover the mechanic he employed in his workshop, though he and Lachlan farmed additional properties to pay their own bills. Plenty of the locals did the same, taking on share-farming contracts to provide labour and expertise managing someone else’s acreage for a split of the profits—or losses. ‘Told you, I’ve got enough trouble talking Dad into a windbreak, never mind buying land. Bit more share farming could be a different story, though.’ She shoved her sheep out into the pen.

‘Thought you guys would have your hands full,’ Hamish said, passing her his water bottle as she returned ‘You know how it goes: too much to handle, not enough to make a living.’ Except in a good year, but farmers tended to keep those pretty close to their chest. Nobody liked a bragger. And besides, a good year just meant a couple of new pieces of equipment and some decent grain for planting out in the hope of prolonging the win.

‘With Harry Haymaker on the prowl now, you’d be lucky to get a look-in on any share farming.’

‘I’m hearing you.’ Harry Haymaker was practically a local bogeyman. He ran a capital-intensive agribusiness and had earned the nickname years back due to his pathological hatred of livestock. Though he was from a neighbouring district, his real name had been buried in the dust that plumed from behind the broadacre machinery he invested in. For a long time, he’d been a joke, parading gargantuan machines in paddocks almost too tight for them to turn. But as the tough years dragged on and stock prices dropped, he’d built an empire, preying on the hobby farmers who discovered their tree-change dream was going to cost them thousands a year in fencing, vets and feed. Harry had the big machines, the funding, the hired labour and a reputation for signing contracts before the details even hit the pages of the stock journal. Then the fences would come down, his giant machines would move in, and he’d rape the land, never allowing a fallow year for the soil to rest.

Trouble was, he’d recently started trespassing into the Settlers Bridge district, where, traditionally, only locals took advantage of share-farming opportunities, so necessary to supplement their tight incomes.

Indi grabbed another ewe from the pen, digging both hands deep into the fleece. Dragging the animal to her stand, she flipped it, cursing under her breath as she revealed a belly full of burrs. As a kid, September school holidays had been her favourite because she’d work as a rousie in the shearing sheds. Two weeks of collecting the heavy fleeces, tossing them onto the sorting table and quickly skirting them to remove any ragged, stained or burred wool before the fleece went into a press, had cemented her love for the work, the smell, the camaraderie. Back then, she’d set her sights on becoming a shearer, pitting her wiriness against the brawn of the guys she’d grown up with as they fought for the title of gun shearer. She huffed. She’d be closer to the title today if she hadn’t picked this ewe.

‘No luck with a bare-bellied yoe?’ Hamish teased.

Lachlan, Jack and Matt immediately started bellowing the chorus to ‘Click Go the Shears’.

‘I’ll count myself lucky if you don’t join in,’ she lied; Ham had a great voice. But he also had a partner now, so he was another strike on her list of emergency possibilities if she turned thirty-five still single. It was a short list, and she kept pushing that age limit back; but then, she rarely had the luxury of time to worry about it. Only when Mum got in her ear about babies, and Dad muttered about succession.

Careful not to nick the sheep, she dug the comb of her shears into the wool, trying to skim the skin to maximise the fleece weight, although even without prickles, belly wool was generally too dirty to sell. Matt Krueger was lucky that he could afford to take a bit of a financial hit, though, given he had his vet gig to back up his farming income. And it didn’t hurt that his wife, Roni, had inherited a decent-sized property.

Indi deliberately turned her mind away from envy; things might be tight at her place, but at least she didn’t have crap in her history that made her go quiet from time to time like Roni did.

Extracted from The Windmill in the Silver Gums by Léonie Kelsall, out now.

---

The Windmill in the Silver Gums

by Léonie Kelsall

A page-turning new rural romance from the bestselling author of The Path Through the Coojong Trees.

FIND OUT MORE