We shared a late breakfast of tea and teacakes with Barry, Gerald and his wife in the kitchen up at the farmhouse, an old wooden homestead now leaning at a precarious angle at one end. Its wooden piers were sinking unevenly into the ground. Every now and then, said Barry, there was a loud report like a gun as one of the roof spars or a structural beam sprang clear of its fixings and poked through the outside wall like a broken collarbone. They then had to jack up the house four inches at a time, straighten it up and ease it back on to supporting chocks. The little homestead was on the move, inching crabwise across the Pilliga.
Roger Deakin, Wildwood
