THURSDAY 30 JUNE     PUNGALINA

John was upset when he went up to water the vegie garden this morning, to find that some feral cows had managed to break down the outer fence around the house block, at a point by the river side, come up to the back of the vegie garden, get their necks over the inner fence far enough to demolish most of the almost-ripe corn crop. He had lovingly nurtured that – had hoped to have it ready for the large group visit, but it wasn’t quite. He was really cross.

What was left of the corn after the cow attack

After his morning jobs, and trying to redeem the garden wreckage, John was mowing the camp lawns. It was amazing just how much the grass had grown while he was otherwise occupied.

I was working on the clean up in the kitchen tent.

O appeared and kind of hovered about for a while. Then he came and told me that he did not want to interrupt John, but that there had been a phone call from John’s daughter, S, to tell him that she’d given birth to another boy, on Monday. O then disappeared back to the house.

I went and told John, who was thrilled about his second grandson. He was not able to call S though, given that she was in Brussels and it would be too complicated to try that – and work out the costs – from here.

Days later, we heard from his other daughter, that she had phoned on the Tuesday and left a message about the new baby – one we never got. She said she had spoken to a man, but we never did find out if it was W or O who forgot to pass the message on. John was rather peeved about this.

O left in the night, to drive out to Redbank Mine to pick up our orders from the Mt Isa supply truck.