SINKING ROOTS

Margaret Johnson spent most of her youth at Narrandera in south-western New South Wales. From her birth in 1933 she was a solitary child. When she thinks of that time she recalls a sleepy town, heat and dust, birds, long summer days, walking by herself knee-deep through piles of plane-tree leaves.

As a young woman Margaret Johnson travelled overseas, and on her return felt restless. Office work held no attraction. At the age of twenty-two she took a job as governess on a sheep property near Young on the central slopes and plains of New South Wales. Here was that half-forgotten but familiar lovely smell of hot weather and dusty roads. The following year she married Jim Johnson, the owner of a neighbouring property. The young bride saw the property's overgrown tennis court, dilapidated gravel paths, run-down gardens, horses grazing a few metres from the back door, the dark, two-storey rambling house with heavy curtains and brown blinds. She fell in love with them all, she says, almost instantly.

The property she had come to was 2500 ha of pleasant grazing country. Its name was Windermere Station; it had been held by the Johnson family since 1923. In the nineteenth century ten people had worked on it, now there were two. Except for the river flats the land was, and is, undulating to rough.