The Chief

As we oil and fuel up the tractor I see his hand on the pump. I hear his voice as George explains the role of a tractor's governor and it is his right hand I see on the steering wheel as I as corner the tractor at the end of each drill. I smile as I imagine him shouting 'lock hard, now, lock hard!' and gesturing to the left or right as I reverse the ute and trailer.

The almost acrid, but reassuringly familiar smell of the farm workshop; a mix of gear-oil, soil, hay and something else that I can't describe and suddenly I am five years old again, sitting on the workshop floor busily 'helping' him, separating nails from screws or by spinning the lever of the bench-vice as he manoeuvred some awkward piece of metal into place with his 'good arm'.

The grease-gun laying casually on the workshop bench launches another fleet of childhood memories, like trying in vain to recover a thick dark squiggle of dust-coated grease from the workshop bench. Gloriously messy and very important work for tiny hands and dirty fingernails.

A few days ago, I graduated from wellies to elastic-sided working boots. The same sort of boot that he wore every day of his working life. All weather boots that protected from the frost and mud of ploughing, the long dusty days of seed-sowing, the heat and chaff from of barley harvesting and the cold and wet of the sugar beet harvesting.

As I child, I learned the rhythm of his gait in those boots, with my little legs trying to keep up to him striding across the land, or through the haggard, or around the corner of the house as night fell. That same stride, just slower, that good old Toby waited on in later years.

I now recognise the residents of this house by their footsteps. I can even distinguish between the dogs as they race along the veranda at night in hot pursuit of a rogue possum or bandicoot.

Today, on the third anniversary of his death, I heard the echo of the chief's footsteps as I walked along in my working boots. Daddy's boots are too big for me to fill, but for a brief moment 12,000 miles away from where he walked and worked the land, I was following in his footsteps.