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of land to grow wheat and barley.
    When Mathes built the farmhouse, he said it was like the thatched house in Germany, only bigger. It couldn’t have been much bigger. Even with the extra room tacked onto the kitchen end, the place was still small. Father said he could remember the floor plan and the thick thatch of the house in Germany as though it was yesterday. The first thing he did when he moved onto his land was to knock up a small wooden paling barn while he lived in a tent. He then lived in the barn while building the farmhouse. When he finished the stone structure with its walls more than six inches thick, it was thatched to make a roof a foot thick. Although the house was long and narrow, measuring thirty feet in length when completed, it was barely eleven feet wide. The pantry and storeroom were built onto the house after August was born and when I was about six years old. You could only enter this attached room from outside the house. It was the same length as the kitchen, but narrower. The addition made the entire length of the house forty feet.
    Just before the roof was thatched, Mathes married Johanne in Eden Valley and took her back to live in the unroofed farmhouse. Their plans to start married life in the house were ruined when the heavens opened up on the first night and came down in a deluge. Johanne used to say that was an ill omen. Instead of living in the unroofed farmhouse, they had to be content to spend their first few weeks together camping in the barn while the thatching was undertaken between the rain showers by a German thatcher from Sedan.
    The farmhouse had no ceilings. It remained open to the rafters and the straw thatch. The rafters, cut from the native pine forest in the foothills, were, as Mathes kept reminding them, ‘of the finest native pine and perfectly straight’. Johanne often muttered how a house was not completed until its ceilings were installed. She never raised enough money from her meagre housekeeping allowance to make the temporary ceilings from calico that she hoped. Most people used calico or hessian cloth to catch the many insects and other creatures that flopped down from the rafters when you least expected it.
    The lack of a calico or hessian ceiling caused my sister, Pauline, and me many a fright in the middle of the night. With us already tense after a frightening story, the fall of a large insect, mouse, possum, bat – or even a rat – onto to us in bed periodically caused us to scream in fright.
    The front door into the kitchen, that rattled and banged when it was windy, was fastened at night by a large iron bolt but was rarely locked, even though most of us were worried to death at what could come in. When it rattled it took all of mine or Pauline’s bravado to climb out of bed and stuff old rags in the gaps to muffle the sounds. This was not before we argued as to whose turn it was to climb out of bed and do it.
    The house was white-washed by the brothers. They did this task each spring as soon as the eldest one was old enough to hold a paintbrush. Although the outside walls were built of stone, Mathes had built the house as one big room, adding the internal wattle and daub walls afterwards. The front door opened into the main room that was a third of the size of the main house and combined the kitchen and living room. Off it was mine and Pauline’s bedroom, which you had to walk through to reach our parents’ room. So there were three rooms in a row, and a small separate room alongside the kitchen that, as I said, was entered from outside and not part of the living area.
    Dominating the main room was the oversized whitewashed fireplace and chimney breast made from large stones collected from the paddocks and the nearby creek beds. Big, black iron pots hung down from chains and hooks that were attached inside the chimney. The floors were simply of rock-solid dirt that was buffed up to shine like glass from the continual spillage of