LOTHIAN

Lothian Children’s Books

This edition published in Australia and New Zealand in 2002
by Hachette Australia Pty Limited

Level 17, 207 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000

www.hachette.com.au

Copyright © Colin Thiele 2002

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be stored or reproduced by any process without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

978 0 7344 0325 4

978 0 7344 1423 6 (ebook edition)

Cover and interior illustrations by Robert Ingpen

Front cover art by Sandra Nobes

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

One

‘You won’t be going to school this year,’ Mitch’s mother said. ‘You’ll be doing your lessons at home.’

The news was so unexpected that Mitch gulped. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because they’ve cancelled the school bus.’

‘Who has?’

‘The Government. The other children who used the bus last year have all moved away. You’re the only one left. Nobody is going to run a bus all that way just for one person. So you’ll work at home.’

‘All the year?’

‘This year and next year. After that we’ll have to send you to high school in the city.’

All kinds of ideas were racing about in Mitch’s head. His life had always been so simple and well arranged but now everything had suddenly exploded. He had expected to start the year at school in Room 4 with Old Swamp. That was what everyone called Mr Marshland. Mitch thought it was a good nickname.

A new idea crossed his mind and he smiled slyly. ‘I won’t have to get up so early any more, will I — if I don’t have to catch the bus? I’ll be able to sleep in.’

His mother was curt. ‘Indeed you won’t.’

Mitch was starting to like the idea of staying at home every day. ‘I’ll be able to do my schoolwork whenever I like. Go fishing if I want. I won’t have a teacher watching me all the time.’

His mother fixed him with a stern stare. ‘I’ll be watching you all the time. There’ll be no fishing until every last bit of your schoolwork is finished for the day. I’ll see to that.’

Mitch hung his head. What his mother said was true, all right. She would probably be tougher than any teacher he had ever had. He looked at her questioningly. ‘How will I know what I have to do?’

‘You’ll get everything you need from Distance Education. They’ll send you the lessons and mark your work. And every now and then a teacher will come down to see how you’re getting on. She’ll explain the hard bits and show me how I can help you.’

Mitch began to see that life without schoolrooms and classmates was not going to be free and easy after all.

Two

Mitch’s full name was Mitchell but nobody ever used it. He was Mitch to everyone — the bus driver, the school secretary, the teachers, even his own family. It was the same with his father whose name was Foster but who was always called Fos. Those who knew his full name — Foster Bird — thought it was incredibly apt because he was a ranger at the Coorong National Park in South Australia and one of his jobs was to foster the life of the birds and other wildlife there. He was a strong, active man, very firm and thorough, and always neatly dressed in his ranger’s uniform. Mitch’s mother was Meg, short for Margaret. She was kind but as sharp as a tack. If Mitch tried to argue with her he usually lost the argument.

They lived in a house on the high ground overlooking the long stretch of the Coorong lagoon — a hundred kilometres of it stretching far away to left and right. When they looked out at it from one room or another, the different views framed by the windows were like the loveliest paintings Mitch could ever imagine. And they changed from hour to hour according to the time of the day.

Just below them the ragged shore ran away into the distance. The lagoon, a little more than a kilometre wide just there, stretched straight ahead, and beyond it the jumbled crests of the sandhills rose up on the peninsula that separated the Coorong from the open sea. A wild place it was, with long rollers sweeping in from the far south and thundering onto the beach with a never-ending roar.

Sometimes in the early morning when Mitch stood watching from the window of his room, the water in the Coorong was so calm that it lay before him like a huge mirror. At other times, when the breeze blew like a gentle breath and rucked up tiny wavelets, the mirror turned into ripple glass, brightened by sunlight or dulled by passing clouds. And when fierce winds blasted the peninsula in the distance the sand was whipped from the top of the sandhills until it trailed away in thin streams like golden smoke.

Mitch was happy to look out at the scene forever. Often it was made even more magical by great flocks of waterbirds that lived on the Coorong or came to visit it from distant places. Although he didn’t especially think about it, Mitch knew he was lucky to be living in a place like that.