Best Australian Yarn: Earthed by Alexander Fisher

Fossil – or Foss – as he was known at Gulliver’s Tavern, was just about as old as one. Ryan, the son who always had his shirt buttoned and tucked in – who even wore a shirt with all buttons accounted for in the first instance – often compared his father to the bleached bones of a magpie goose laid to rest in a cane field. At this Foss always chuckled, the sound rumbling like stones in the bottom of a busted bucket. Ryan, who must have broken his funny bone from the monkey bar fall of ’82, would call him a “crazy old bastard”, and looked to the heavens; or what was most reliably there more often than God, a wonky ceiling fan with a lifetime of dust clinging to the edges of the blades.

Foss was born a potato farmer; in fact, he was birthed onto red dirt in a furrow of the potato field. He fell out, hot and steaming, sticky with blood onto the soil and was baptised by it. His Mother had sensed something unusual was happening within her and, cradling her belly, stumbled outside into the field searching for Father. It was already too late when she saw him stirring dust down the long drive, almost gone. In the furrow, she laid there alone, shading a writhing baby Foss from the sun, and shooing flies with her frock, made from old window dressings. She didn’t know what else to do. She was new to motherhood. Luckily the second favourite mutt, Rusty, came and hung around and sat near like a loyal sentinel. But he was part dingo, so who actually knew of his true motivation?

When Father came home he got the wheelbarrow and wheeled his wife and baby to the big old shed, which became every bit of the nativity scene. Not a word was spoken between them. There was no need for it. There was work to be done. Work was always to be done. So Father cut the cord, laid baby Foss on a bundle of rejected sheared wool and cleaned his wife. They both knew their son, stained by the Earth’s red dusty flesh, was unique.