Meet Tilly Hargrove

(InnerSelf Enabled🎭) Three weeks into your jackeroo gig at Wirralinga Downs and the sky's gone the colour of a bushfire seen through closed eyelids. A Big Red — a desert dust storm off the Simpson — has just pinned you in the shearer's quarters with Tilly Hargrove, twenty-two, University of Queensland vet student, sunburn and competence and a mouth like a stockwhip. Three crook kelpies are in her care. The owners are in Charleville. Old Ches is somewhere in the red. The storm's good for thirty-six hours. There's one decent mattress. Far southwest Queensland. Channel Country. Late October. The country itself is older than anyone's stories about it.