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because if you don’t, that’s it, you’re gone. You won’t survive. And I’ll tell you what, Cookie, that’s why I come over here from New Zealand in the first place, because in Australia you can work twelve months of the year if you play it right. You feel safe.’
    The last two shearers, Christian T and Willie-boy, picked through the sandwich box for their favourite fillings. Willie-boy, compact, dynamically built like a fly-weight boxer, was a considerate diner. He angled his Velveeta cheese and green-pickle sandwich around to the light: ‘Not bad, not bad at all’. Then he leant over the day’s fruit selection, consisting of quartered oranges and chunks of rockmelon. ‘You’re spoiling us, Cookie. You really are.’ He tipped back his neck and swallowed a crescent moon of dripping melon.
    â€˜Have some more.’
    There was always plenty of rockmelon at Leopardwood Downs. Too much of it now. A glut. ‘Here it is. Melon,’ he beamed, the day it arrived.
    Bertram Junior only stared. ‘I don’t like rockmelon.’
    It arrived twice weekly on the mail truck following the order placed in Bourke. Carton stacked on carton of graded deckle-skinned rockmelon sat in the empty fireplace in the dining mess, hitting Bertram Junior between the eyes every time he walked in.
    Cooks were sacked for less than this.
    â€˜Gee, the rotten old cook, we had to sack him. He cut the tomatoes in hunks instead of slicing them. It wasn’t so bad. After he’d cried enough and started his car we felt sorry for him and reinstated him.’
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    He spent a lot of his time imagining what people were thinking. It was part of cooking — the incessant gauging of reactions and making of accommodations. But Bertram Junior always had the drop on him, just by the way he looked at him, slowly shaking his head.
    Rockmelons .
    Bertram Junior still wasn’t sure of him — who he was, what he was, where he was from, how he fitted, what use he was, or whether he had a future with the team.
    Our Cookie is right into being that fly on the wall. Look at the way he hangs around at smoko, trying to look dumb. He couldn’t be that dumb .

BURR ON BURR
    Louella poked her head round the corner of the shed and mournfully asked, ‘Hey, Cookie, y’got an apple?’ It was all she would eat until tea-time — all she ever ate, it seemed. Barbara stepped past her and they avoided each other’s eyes. Davo was in the act of consuming a triple-decker sandwich of cold mutton and chutney, curried egg, cheese and tomato. Old Jake came back from washing at the outside tank and downed a swiftly-mixed Milo, took a mug of tea to follow, collecting a clutch of biscuits and a trio of Fritz and mustard-pickle sandwiches, topping them with a chunk of rockmelon. With everything teetering in a pile he padded back to his corner at the far end of the shed, where he sank to the floor, knees tucked under his chin, bare toes knuckled up.
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    A shearing shed was a special kind of factory. It stood idle, empty, most of the year, cloaked in mysterious ruin. Swallows nested in the rafters, beetles swarmed in the wool bins, rats nested in the walls, owls glided through the gloom. Sheds could be moody, haunted places in their off-time.
    Like any factory the working shed had a clock, apattern of work-flow, individual and team production targets. It was an assembly line functioning by deleting the raw material. There was no massed surge of workers through the gates in the mornings. Workers across the country divided into smaller and smaller bands, each team complete in itself, down to the smallest team operating independently, taking their own cook with them into the camp-out. This was the size of team he was cooking for at Leopardwood Downs.
    There was a simple formula in the shed: keep the wool moving. Everyone knew it — shearers, classer, rouseabouts, presser, the owner and his