Ol’ Homer was surely a better man than I.
Working with, what — a burnt stick and a field of papyrus? — he managed to recount the epic stories of his day. Meanwhile, here I sit, all the technical wizardry of the twenty-first century at my fingertips and nothing more to relate than the quotidian details of one short summer on one cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere, yet the task feels insurmountable.
The crux of the problem, besides the sheer blinding blankness of the page upon which the story is supposed to unfold, lies with the events of the summer in question containing within them an irresolvable world of meaning and accomplishment, comedy and tragedy.
Now, I’m not aspiring to a comprehensive study of life on Bullo River Station. That task has been ably undertaken by Mrs. Sara Henderson, the unsinkable matron of Bullo, in an enjoyable series of books which brought her deserved renown in her native Australia. Rather, this is meant to be a purely subjective telling of an extraordinary summer spent by a green tumbleweed of a young man, blown across the globe into a world as remote as the deepest trenches of the wide Pacific which then separated him from the life he knew.
Because Bullo River flows through all I do even now, three decades after I left the vast confinement of that singular place, I may as well relate the events in the present tense. I am that man, and that summer is now.
Barking in Nutwood 