“Our staying power, and that of the Mother Country, will be best assisted by keeping our production going, continuing our avocations and business, maintaining employment, and with it, our strength. I know that in spite of the emotions we are feeling, Australia is ready to see it through.

“May God, in His mercy and compassion, grant that the world may soon be delivered from this agony.”

There was a long silence in the drawing room, broken by the megaphonal tones of a short-wave Neville Chamberlain speaking to the British people; Fee and Meggie looked at their men.

“If we count Frank, there are six of us,” said Bob into the silence. “All of us except Frank are on the land, which means they won’t want to let us serve. Of our present stockmen, I reckon six will want to go and two will want to stay.”

“I want to go!” said Jack, eyes shining.

“And me,” said Hughie eagerly.

“And us,” said Jims on behalf of himself and the inarticulate Patsy.

But they all looked at Bob, who was the boss.

“We’ve got to be sensible,’ he said. “Wool is a staple of war, and not only for clothes. It’s used as packing in ammunition and explosives, for all sorts of funny things we don’t hear of, I’m sure. Plus we have beef cattle for food, and the old wethers and ewes go for hides, glue, tallow, lanolin—all war staples.

“So we can’t go off and leave Drogheda to run itself, no matter what we might want to do. With a war on it’s going to be mighty hard to replace the stockmen we’re bound to lose. The drought’s in its third year, we’re scrub-cutting, and the bunnies are driving us silly. For the moment our job’s here on Drogheda; not very exciting compared to getting into action, but just as necessary. We’ll be doing our best bit here.”

The male faces had fallen, the female ones lightened.

“What if it goes on longer than old Pig Iron Bob thinks it will?” asked Hughie, giving the Prime Minister his national nickname.

Bob thought hard, his weatherbeaten visage full of frowning lines. “If things get worse and it goes on for a long time, then I reckon as long as we’ve got two stockmen we can spare two Clearys, but only if Meggie’s willing to get back into proper harness and work the inside paddocks. It would be awfully hard and in good times we wouldn’t stand a chance, but in this drought I reckon five men and Meggie working seven days a week could run Drogheda. Yet that’s asking a lot of Meggie, with two little babies.”

“If it has to be done, Bob, it has to be done,” said Meggie. “Mrs. Smith won’t mind doing her bit by taking charge of Justine and Dane. When you give the word that I’m needed to keep Drogheda up to full production, I’ll start riding the inside paddocks.”

“Then that’s us, the two who can be spared,” said Jims, smiling.

“No, it’s Hughie and I,” said Jack quickly.

“By rights it ought to be Jims and Patsy,” Bob said slowly. “You’re the youngest and least experienced as stockmen, where as soldiers we’d all be equally inexperienced. But you’re only sixteen now, chaps.”

“By the time things get worse we’ll be seventeen,” offered Jims. “We’ll look older than we are, so we won’t have any trouble enlisting if we’ve got a letter from you witnessed by Harry Gough.”

“Well, right at the moment no one is going. Let’s see if we can’t bring Drogheda up to higher production, even with the drought and the bunnies.”

Meggie left the room quietly, went upstairs to the nursery. Dane and Justine were asleep, each in a white-painted cot. She passed her daughter by, and stood over her son, looking down at him for a long time.

“Thank God you’re only a baby,” she said.

 * * *

It was almost a year before the war intruded upon the little Drogheda universe, a year during which one by one the stockmen left, the rabbits continued to multiply, and Bob battled valiantly to keep the station books looking worthy of a wartime effort. But at the beginning of June 1940 came the news that the British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from the European mainland at Dunkirk; volunteers for the second Australian Imperial Force poured in thousands into the recruiting centers, Jims and Patsy among them.

Four years of riding the paddocks in all weathers had passed the twins’ faces and bodies beyond youth, to that ageless calm of creases at the outer corners of the eyes, lines down the nose to the mouth. They presented their letters and were accepted without comment. Bushmen were popular. They could usually shoot well, knew the value of obeying an order, and they were tough.

Jims and Patsy had enlisted in Dubbo, but camp was to be Ingleburn, outside Sydney, so everyone saw them off on the night mail. Cormac Carmichael, Eden’s youngest son, was on the same train for the same reason, going to the same camp as it turned out. So the two families packed their boys comfortably into a firstclass compartment and stood around awkwardly, aching to weep and kiss and have something warming to remember, but stifled by their peculiar British mistrust of demonstrativeness. The big C-36 steam locomotive howled mournfully, the stationmaster began blowing his whistle.

Meggie leaned over to peck her brothers on their cheeks selfconsciously, then did the same to Cormac, who looked just like his oldest brother, Connor; Bob, Jack and Hughie wrung three different young hands; Mrs. Smith, weeping, was the only one who did the kissing and cuddling everyone was dying to do. Eden Carmichael, his wife and aging but still handsome daughter with him, went through the same formalities. Then everyone was outside on the Gilly platform, the train was jerking against its buffers and creeping forward.

“Goodbye, goodbye!” everyone called, and waved big white handkerchiefs until the train was a smoky streak in the shimmering sunset distance.

Together as they had requested, Jims and Patsy were gazetted to the raw, half-trained Ninth Australian Division and shipped to Egypt at the beginning of 1941, just in time to become a part of the rout at Benghazi. The newly arrived General Erwin Rommel had put his formidable weight on the Axis end of the seesaw and begun the first reversal of direction in the great cycling rushes back and forth across North Africa. And, while the rest of the British forces retreated ignominiously ahead of the new Afrika Korps back to Egypt, the Ninth Australian Division was detailed to occupy and hold Tobruk, an outpost in Axis-held territory. The only thing which made the plan feasible was that it was still accessible by sea and could be supplied as long as British ships could move in the Mediterranean. The Rats of Tobruk holed up for eight months, and saw action after action as Rommel threw everything he had at them from time to time, without managing to dislodge them.

“Do youse know why youse is here?” asked Private Col Stuart, licking the paper on his cigarette and rolling it shut lazily.

Sergeant Bob Malloy shifted his Digger hat far enough upward to see his questioner from under its brim. “Shit, no,” he said, grinning; it was an oft-asked query.

“Well, it’s better than whiting gaiters in the bloody glasshouse,” said Private Jims Cleary, pulling his twin brother’s shorts down a little so he could rest his head comfortably on soft warm belly.

“Yair, but in the glasshouse youse don’t keep getting shot at,” objected Col, flicking his dead match at a sunbathing lizard.

“I know this much, mate,” said Bob, rearranging his hat to shade his eyes. “I’d rather get shot at than die of fuckin’ boredom.”

They were comfortably disposed in a dry, gravelly dugout just opposite the mines and barbed wire which cut off the southwest corner of the perimeter; on the other side Rommel hung doggedly on to his single piece of the Tobruk territory. A big .50-caliber Browning machine gun shared the hole with them, cases of ammunition neatly beside it, but no one seemed very energetic or interested in the possibility of attack. Their rifles were propped against one wall, bayonets glittering in the brilliant Tobruk sun. Flies buzzed everywhere, but all four were Australian bushmen, so Tobruk and North Africa held no surprises in the way of heat, dust or flies.

“Just as well youse is twins, Jims,” said Col, throwing pebbles at the lizard, which didn’t seem disposed to move. “Youse look like a pair of poofters, all tied up together.”

“You’re just jealous.” Jims grinned, stroking Patsy’s belly. “Patsy’s the best pillow in Tobruk.”

“Yair, all right for you, but what about poor Patsy? Go on, Harpo, say something!” Bob teased.

Patsy’s white teeth appeared in a smile, but as usual he remained silent. Everyone had tried to get him to talk, but no one had ever succeeded beyond an essential yes or no; in consequence nearly everyone called him Harpo, after the voiceless Marx brother.

“Hear the news?” asked Col suddenly.

“What?”

“The Seventh’s Matildas got plastered by the eighty-eights at Halfaya. Only gun in the desert big enough to wipe out a Matilda. Went through them big buggers of tanks like a dose of salts.”

“Oh, yeah, tell me another!” said Bob skeptically. “I’m a sergeant and I never heard a whisper, you’re a private and you know all about it. Well, mate, there’s just nothing Jerry’s got capable of wiping out a brigade of Matildas.”

“I was in Morshead’s tent on a message from the CO when I heard it come through on the wireless, and it is true,” Col maintained.

For a while no one spoke; it was necessary to every inhabitant of a beleaguered outpost like Tobruk that he believe implicitly his own side had sufficient military thrust to get him out. Col’s news wasn’t very welcome, more so because not one soldier in Tobruk held Rommel lightly. They had resisted his efforts to blow them out because they genuinely believed the Australian fighting man had no peer save a Gurkha, and if faith is nine-tenths of power, they had certainly proved themselves formidable.