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traps were laid about in the countryside for wild dogs and rabbits. Only Mathes and his Uncle Herman knew the truth.
    The boys involved stuck to their story of the injury having taken place in a creek bed. The boy’s leg had been seriously mutilated and needed emergency treatment from the local doctor. It took months for it to heal and the boy walked with a limp from that time onwards.
    This incident was a turning point in Mathes Schippan’s life. The church was not vandalised again and other boys kept well away from him, for the real story of how the boy was injured was known among the vandals and their friends. Mathes was eventually once again offered his voluntary job at the church. After the incident, he was given a new kind of respect that he had to live up to. It gave him a sense of being in charge. The boys of the township knew that while he was quiet and kept to himself, he was someone you didn’t fool around with. No one took advantage of him again. It was from this time that Mathes’ nightmares stopped.
    With this new-found confidence, Mathes learned when to throw his weight about and became a bully himself. This period coincided with him suddenly transforming from a puny boy to a big and brutish young man, like many lads who worked the land. With the little spare time he could find, he threw himself into farm work for a local farmer, removing any possibility of meeting other young men his age. He was unconcerned; it was this work that would eventually help him buy his own farm. And wasn’t that what every young man working on the land wanted for himself?
    When I finished this part of the story Sister Kathleen said, ‘You don’t realise how hard it can be for some boys growing up. You hear about boys bullying smaller ones, and after hearing your story I can’t help feeling some sympathy for your father.’
    â€˜That may be so. But when you see what he became, you won’t have any sympathy left for him.’
    â€˜Oh, Mary. Your father must have had something good about him when your mother married him. Maybe tomorrow or when I have a bit more time you can tell me about them – how they met and what the Towitta house looked like. I have to go now and organise the stripping of the beds in one of the main wards.’

4
    When Sister Kathleen left I thought about what I had been told about the time my mother and father married. Johanne was quiet and demure and lived in the same township. She was not known as a beauty, but she was more than a suitable wife for a farmer with prospects. She was of good farming stock, hardworking and had good childbearing hips. There was some muttering in the township because Johanne was more than six years older than Mathes – crueller tongues said it was more like ten. There were those who thought she was well past childbearing age. Mathes married my mother when she was three months short of her thirty-fifth birthday. Like me, she had been a domestic servant. But unlike me, she worked in her position for over ten years for a local doctor in Blumberg. What she may have lacked in looks, she made up for in bearing a brood of seven children.
    Some time before Johanne and Mathes were married, he moved down the hill to the drier lands on the Murray River Flats where he bought 150 acres of open flat land on a credit lease. It was 1888, fifteen long years, before he could say the farm was his. I was eleven years old when Father proudly announced he had freehold ownership. Their farm was over a mile from the little township of Towitta, named after the nearby reedy creek. It flowed in winter but its natural springs bubbled just below the surface and could be found in the heat of the summer when the creek was bone dry. The creek was like an oasis in the middle of the bleak red plains. It was full of giant river red gums and mallee trees that were home to flocks of green ring-neck parrots, galahs, magpies and other birds made homeless by the clearing