An extract from
COOLAMON GIRL
Coolamon was an in-between place, not quite flat and not quite hilly, a town plonked on the railway line between Junee and Narrandera with sheep, wheat and hay as its mainstays. It sat on the southwest tablelands between the Great Dividing Range and the Hay Plains, twenty-five miles north-west of Wagga Wagga, just outside the irrigated lushness of the more interesting Riverina with its orchards, rice farms and foreigners. Our town was named after the numerous water holes in the area that were called Coolamon Holes because they resembled the shallow bowl-like coolamons used by the Aboriginal people to carry food, water, and sometimes babies. Not that there were any Aboriginal people around to do that when I was growing up.
​
It was a small town under a big sky, a two-pub town with about one thousand people in the whole shire. It was famous, once, somewhere, for its extra wide main street that lemming-like flocks of sheep could be herded through on their way to the saleyards or abattoirs, well before the woollen beasts were squashed into long semi-trailers with slatted sides. The drab brown creatures blended into the paddocks around the town with hardly a tree for shelter. I thought a barren landscape was their natural environment, dry and summer-hot, dry and winter-cold, with plenty of space to be the sheep they wanted to be, but when I went to New Zealand, many adult years later, I was astonished to see crowds of plump, white sheep browsing in paddocks so green they could have been from one of my childhood Little Golden Book’s where chipmunks and bunnies frolicked without fear of bindi-eyes or cranky mothers.
​