On their stools my brothers farted and muttered and gradually woke, their rowdy movements frightening the cows. Dad once said I was the best milker of us three, the only compliment he ever gave me. I just loved the cows, their clumsy movements and wide wet noses, whiskers beaded with dew. Slow-blinking eyes with long lashes, mouths always chewing, tongues rough and surprisingly dry. A dairy cow is a gentle beast, a predictable thing, a creature who can stand in a paddock all her life with the sun on her back, munching grass, raising her tail to release wet, black, damper-sized stools. From when I was six I woke every single day before dawn to milk, coming back to the house for breakfast as the birds were chattering in the trees, the whipbirds calling like slingshots, slow tension and release, the black cockatoos hinges that needed oiling.

Mum had fed the poddy calves who still called for their mothers, then fed the dogs and let them off their chains, and they would run to meet us, tails wagging low, pink tongues out the sides of their mouths. Blackie always stayed at my heels; I had rescued her when my dad was going to drown her in the dam because she was a runt pup, so she thought she would always be safe with me. She was the smallest and ribbiest of the kelpies, but clever and cunning. She could round up the cows with the strongest and fastest because she knew whose heels to nip. I saved her scraps from the Sunday roast, crusts of bread, a stale biscuit. Her tongue on my hand was wet and warm. Her eyes were gold-flecked green lined with black, as though she had painted them like a film star.

We kicked off our boots again on the verandah—it was Jack’s job to clean them—and went into the kitchen, where Mum had bowls of porridge ready for us, slabs of bread thick with butter. The dogs panted behind the flyscreen, and beyond them the sun broke up the fog which collected overnight in the valley, until only little patches remained in the coldest corners of shade. Dew sparkled on the spider webs and blades of grass glowed as the sun lit them from behind.