The cat was called Brian. He arrived one day at a house where I was staying in Adelaide. He didn’t go away. He didn’t object to being transported to a lonely farmhouse near Sandalwood, in the mallee of South Australia.
Brian gave us a surprise by becoming pregnant. The name stuck. She disappeared towards the end of her pregnancy and I only found her when I went to bed and found it soaked and full of a proud-looking Brian with five kittens. This picture is from a stay in Adelaide. Brian and her kittens were put into the garage. Brian found fault with this arrangement and discovered that she could get herself and one kitten through this tiny gap in the window. She got her way and the kittens stayed in the house where she had put them.
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The kittens went to nice homes and Brian came back to Sandalwood. We had a kilometre-long driveway and there weren’t any other houses for miles. There was a big sand dune nearby. It can be seen behind the barn at the far left of the picture below.
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This was a great house. We kept chickens (Meryl, Beryl, Cheryl, Keryl and Doris except that they were all white leghorns that I couldn’t distinguish from each other so they were all called Doris) and ducks (Khaki Campbells – the only names I can remember were Jemima Puddleduck and l’Orange) The house had walls 18 inches thick and an absolutely massive fireplace in the living room where I did most of the cooking in winter. Brian contributed to some of this cooking. She was grateful for our part in bringing up her kittens and would bring a rabbit home almost every day. There was something of a rabbit plague in South Australia at the time. If it was a large rabbit, Brian would kill it. If a small one, she would feel confident about bringing it home alive. Ther it would be, cowering in the bedroom until I could be bothered to get up and kill it. If we didn’t notice the big ones in time, Brian would gorge herself until all that we would find would be a stomach on the floor. Just a stomach full of grass.
My house mate had a 22 rifle with an excellent sight – just the thing to shoot our dinner. The sand hill was the safest place to do our shooting because nobody was ever about. Brian always came with us. We would go one side of the hill with the gun and Brian would disappear to the other side. I don’t think she liked the sound of the gun. We would come back as soon as we had our rabbit. Brian was invariably back before us, rabbit at her feet and a massively proud expression.
An excellent cat.
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