of acres; it had to be big because that dry land could carry only fifty or sixty sheep to the square mile. Our nearest neighbours were forty miles away, and the near- est townships were both desolate-looking gold-mining settlements: Mulligan's Find a hundred miles north of us, and Barribarri, ninety miles south.

It was a vast and lonely land, and of course we children did not go to school, but were taught by cor- respondence lessons from the State capital, Perth. Our lessons were supervised by Mother, but she found the work tough going, especially with me, because I seemed born to be a rebel: I seemed to think differently than anyone else, and my work, original and unconvention- al, worried her. It was a great relief to mother when someone else came along to supervise my studies.

It was tough country, but we had fun, and never hungered for the bright lights of civilization. Why should we? After all, in these outback and empty areas where the saltbush and spinifex stretched grey-green and silver-grey to the straight horizon, where it was a week's journey to inspect our fences, where the abori- gines still lived their primitive, cheerful, dirty, heal- thy, naked tribal lives, where the mail arrived twice a month, and where strangers came driving in clouds of red dust under the huge blue glare of the sky or at night under an icy blaze of stars in all this ancient wilderness we were civilization. The oil lamps, and later the battery-fed electric lamps, were to us as the lights of a city set on a hill; and our homestead, a long, low, rambling house of twenty-odd cool, dark rooms, was home, heaven, and the centre of the world.

And I was a quiet, rather timid, day-dreaming little boy, very quick at lessons, a voracious reader of anything I could find, a good friend and helper of our gentle Japanese cook, a ready helper about the house, but not very effective, even for a little boy, about the station. I kept trying to act like a manly lad, but deceived no one except, perhaps, myself.

Then Aunt Jemima came to stay with us. She was my father's only sister, and had been born on the sta- tion, but for some reason we children had heard very