Lake Otway

LAKEOTWAYWASdying. Where it had existed to dance before the sun and be courted by the ravishing moon there would be nothing but drab flats of iron-hard clay. And then the dead might rise to shout accusations echoed by the encircling sand dunes.

The out-station crowned a low bluff on the southern shore, and from it a single telephone line spanned fifty miles of virgin country to base on the great homestead where lived the Boss ofPorchester Station, which comprised eight hundred thousand acres and was populated by sixty thousand sheep in the care of some twenty wage plugs, including Overseer Richard Martyr.

There wasn’t much of Richard Martyr. He was short, dapper, wiry, every movement a hint of leashed strength. His face and arms were the colour of oldcedarwood, making startlingly conspicuous his light-grey eyes. Always the dandy, this morning he wore well-washed jodhpurs, a white silk shirt and kangaroo-hide riding-boots with silver spurs. Why not? He was Number Two onPorchester Station, and this out-station at Lake Otway was his headquarters.

Martyr stood on the wide veranda overlooking the Lake, the Lake born three years before on the bed of a dustbowl, the Lake which had lived and danced and sung for three years and now was about to die. The real heat of summer was just round the corner, and the sun would inevitably murder Lake Otway.

Short fingers beating a tattoo on the veranda railing, Martyr gazed moodily over the great expanse of water shimmering like a cloth of diamonds. It was a full three miles across to the distant shore-line of box timber and, beyond it, the salmon-tinted dunes footing the far-flung uplands. To the left of the bluff, the shore-line curved within a mile; to the right it limned miniature headlands and tiny bays for four miles before curving at the outlet creek, where could be seen the motionless fans of a windmill and the iron roof of a hut named Johnson’s Well. When Lake Otway was dead, that windmill would be pumping water for stock, and perhaps a man or two would be living at the hut six hundred rolling miles from the sea.