Jean left Alice Springs on Monday morning with regret, and flew all day in a “Dragonfly” aircraft; and it was a very instructive day for her. The machine did not go directly to Cloncurry, but flew to and fro across the wastes of Central Australia, depositing small bags of mail at cattle stations and picking up cattlemen and travelers to drop them off after a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles. They landed eight or ten times in the course of the day, at places like Ammaroo and Hatches Creek and many other stations; at each place they would get out of the plane and drink a cup of tea and have a talk with the station manager or owner, and get back into the plane and go on their way. By the end of the day Jean Paget knew exactly what a cattle station looked like, and she was beginning to have a very good idea of what went on there.
They got to Cloncurry in the evening, a fairly extensive town on a railway that ran eastward to the sea at Townsville. Here she was in Queensland, and she heard for the first time the slow deliberate speech of the Queens lander that reminded her at once of her friend Joe Harman. She was driven into town in a very old open car and deposited at the Post Office Hotel; she got a bedroom but tea was over, and she had to go down the wide, dusty main street to a cafe for her evening meal. Cloncurry, she found, had none of the clean attractiveness of Alice Springs; it was a town which smelt of cattle, with wide streets through which to drive them down to the stockyard, many hotels, and a few shops. All the houses were of wood with red-painted iron roofs; the hotels had two floors, but very few of the other houses had more than one.
She had to spend a day here, because the air service to Normanton and Willstown ran weekly on a Wednesday. She went out after breakfast while the air was still cool and walked in one direction up the huge main street for half a mile till she came to the end of the town, then came back and walked down it a quarter of a mile till she came to the other end. Then she went and had a look at the railway station, and, having seen the airfield, with that she had seen all there was to see in Cloncurry. She looked in at a shop that sold toys and newspapers, but they were sold out of all reading matter except a few books about dressmaking; as the day was starting to warm up she went back to the hotel. She managed to borrow a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly from the manageress of the hotel and took it to her room, and took off most of her clothes and lay down on her bed to seat it out during the heat of the day. Most of the other citizens of Cloncurry seemed to be doing the same thing.
She felt like moving again shortly before tea and had a shower, and went out to the café for an ice. Weighed down by the heavy meal of roast beef and plum pudding that the Queenslanders call “tea” she sat in a folding chair for a little outside in the cool of the evening, and went to bed again at about eight o’clock. She was called before daybreak, and was out at the airfield with the first light.
1. When Jean had to leave Alice Springs, she ______.
2. How did Jean get some idea of Australian cattle stations?
3. Jean’s main complaint about Cloncurry, in comparison with Alice Springs, was ______.
4. For her evening meal on the second day Jean had ______.
5. Jean left Cloncurry ______.
