Barney and the Secret of the French Spies

sheep. Mr Johnson had bought me my first sheep, and Mr Marsden had chosen the ram for me. I headed back to my house. My house. They were two such grand words. My house! Ten years earlier I’d been a convict brat with only the rags on my back. I never dreamed I’d have a grand farm and a proper house. It was a good house too. Just a small cottage so far, as we’d also had to build huts on the range for the new shepherds last year, and a cottage for Bill now he was my official ‘overseer’, as well as a bunkhouse for my convict workmen. But the previous year’s wool sale had made me enough money to pay a stonemason to build me stone walls and a proper wide fireplace and chimney, with good wooden shutters at the windows, connected to the wattle-and- daub hut I’d started with. The cottage only had two rooms, with the original hut now the kitchen, but it was sturdy enough to keep out snakes and o’possums, as well as any convicts who might want to steal or hurt what was mine. It needed to be too, because New South Wales was a gaol without walls — you were only put in chains if you committed another crime after you were sent here. And the soldiers were mostly as bad, and as dangerous,

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